Word: tastelessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diphthong, Roueche captures the look and feeling of the gray ice-choked sea, the pleasant bite of whisky and the new taste of muktuk, or whale fat: "The blubber looked like a block of cheese-pale pink cheese with a thick black rind. It was very tender and almost tasteless. The only flavor was a very faint sweetness...
...loosely constructed set of stereotypes and caricatures to fill up the screen. There are the bad old cops trying to bust the dope smokers, but the police are incredible bumblers who wind up arresting a group of nuns in a station wagon at the border and then telling tasteless priest-nun jokes. There are the druggies, who ingest anything not nailed down. One woman snorts a whole plateful of Ajax and loves it. There is the half-crazy Vietnam veteran who suddenly has a psychotic fit and attacks the Viet Cong hiding in his house. There is the huge Chicano...
Perverse? No, the picture is downright subversive, a brutal comic assault on that most basic of institutions, the family. The attack is every bit as relentless, unfair and "tasteless" as Altman's devastation of the military was in M*A*S*H. Although the family is certainly undergoing change and questioning, the director does not have a national mood of disgust (which Viet Nam provided for the earlier picture) to support him. All he has is his own disarming skill as a moviemaker to keep audiences in an accepting mood...
...comparable tone of Harvard Yard sneering surfaces whenever Schlesinger seems to feel that Kennedy was threatened. The effect is often tasteless. Staging a counterattack on one of Bobby's anti-Viet Nam War speeches, the Johnson White House "exhumed," as Schlesinger has it, James A. Farley, a distinguished elder of the Democratic Party. Throughout, R.F.K.'s opponents are made to look asinine or worse. Hubert Humphrey "chirruped." On the hustings in 1968, Kennedy is consistently praised for his ability to rouse mass audiences to a pitch of righteous frenzy; Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, "pounded the podium and shouted about...
...fairness, though, Viva Italia! does have a couple of good scenes among the tasteless dreck that compounds the greater part of this 90-minute exercise in self-discipline (it took a lot of selfdiscipline to remain in my seat). Alberto Sordi comes up with a truly funny bit as the sybaritic driver of a Rolls-Royce, who encounters an accident victim lying in the road. Although this idly rich fellow is on his way to a family dinner, he is willing to take the poor victim to the hospital. Unfortunately, no hospital will take the dude, and while Sordi prattles...