Word: trite
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Adapting Russell Hoban's novel, Playwright Harold Pinter creates his own kind of suspense by setting up one trite movie situation after another, then making us wonder how he is going to avoid cliche resolutions. It is the same with his characters. They come to life as familiar figures, but they take on what one suspects will be an infinite life in memory because of their awkward singularity. Jackson and Kingsley are great somber comedians under John Irvin's quietly assured, tactfully ironic direction. Amazing how the unspoken can resonate, astonishing how much can be implied with a small, deft...
...REER OF ORGANIZED groups, the Democrats should now be less afraid to aggressively assert their program rather than being wishy-washy and obsessively middle-of-the-road. They have to stop thinking in terms of left and right, and, trite as it sounds, have the courage of their convictions. They have to start taking risks, because they have nothing to lose...
...most serious of causes can be funny, and the Committee took no offense at the satire implicit in the SASC's "Hey, hey, ho, ho, blood on your portfolio" antics. We admit that some of our slogans, such as "Derek Bok, Derek Bok, Let the woolly mammoth walk," were trite, and could stand some mockery. Now, however, the fun has gone too far. Victoria G.T. Bassetti's editorial in the Oct. 28 Crimson, far from being humorous, is seriously offensive. Parodies of mammoth slogans are funny, but the antiapartheid enthusiasts evidentally do not know when to stop. Extinction...
...Award-winning performance by Ingrid Bergman, a wonderfully oily turn by Charles Boyer, and Angela Lansbury as a teenager in an early role. Bergman is haunting as a naive young maid who is duped by primo sleazebag Boyer, who wants to steal her family jewels. The ending is so trite and stylized that one half expects a knight in shining armor to stride up the stairs of Bergman's London townhouse. But this is mere Kabuki '40s style, so just lap up Bergman, who hits some real highs during her (and our) two-hour angst-holiday in hell...
Surely, this movie, which manages to make the miraculous seem trite and the spiritual seem silly, deserves the full wrath of the Creator whose name it bandies about so much. No doubt, but that this Creator will be destroyed in the box office, that most merciless repository of Man's (Hollywood Man's) Judgment on earth...