Word: tasteless
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...What more auspicious moment for commencing a beautiful relationship than immediately after Jeanne has seen her family loaded onto a deportation bus, her apartment looted by anti-semitic neighbors, and the streets thronged with police rounding up all Jews? Furthermore, the couple's growing intimacy is treated with tasteless, cliche sentimentality. Dramatic love scenes in dark hallways, passionate signs and sweeping camera movements substitute for emotional insight; the lovers' frantic attempt to escape the police and their eventual parting gradually overshadow the deportation, as the film degenerates into melodrama...
...used Los Angeles, and particularly the tawdry glamour of Hollywood, as a perfect metaphor for the screaming end of many poor dreams of glory. West wrote with fury, but without rancor or condescension. "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible the results are," runs the novel's most famous passage. "But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." By that standard, John Schlesinger's film is nothing less than a tragedy...
...dead. Husband II murders him, and little Tommy sees the whole thing. Then director Russell positions us at Tommy's innocent head while father and mother yell "You didn't hear it, you didn't see it" over and over and louder and louder into each ear. Russell's tasteless hand-held camera is thrusting and jabbing, commanding us to feel the child's trauma. So of course we feel very little, which perhaps makes sense because Tommy is struck deaf, dumb and blind by the experience and soon reappears grown up as Roger Daltrey, blank-eyed and looking like...
That is perhaps why typical American enjoyments, like hamburgers, cokes, hot dogs, peanut butter and the like, contrive to be tasteless...
...punch lines can be seen coming a mile away. Good and bad gags are pushed indiscriminately. He is often tasteless-certainly he has a four-year-old's overestimation of the comic possibilities in the word doodoo. But when he is good he is splendid, and he is the only commercial American film maker today (with the occasional exception of Woody Allen) working in the low-comedy, slapstick tradition of Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers...