Word: trite
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Schmoeller's direction is often trite and at best haphazard, including one scene in which the camera backs away from someone walking in the other direction. Apparently unsure of his ability to convey the proper atmosphere, he also sends to overemphasize. After Jamie's biggest scare, Brandon comes over to her house to comfort her. While she sits in the hot tub, her troubles oozing away. Brandon fixes a snack in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Derek lurks in the bushes, watching all. When Brandon finishes slicing some cheese with a knife better suited to slicing through jungle, he rams the instrument...
...short stories told to him by friends, colleagues and garrulous strangers, tales of grieving women and domineering men, icy wives and bewildered husbands, doomed love, inexplicable marriages, and acrimonious separations. None of them has the immediacy of the author's angst and the ultimate drab effect is of trite case studies masquerading as literature...
...competing forces of the insurgent left and the military right. As easy, perhaps, as to invoke the response of the implacable American liberal and to call American aid to El Salvador emblematic of "another Vietnam" a military embroilment in a national conflict the United States has no purpose pushing. Trite perhaps, for the troubles of the Salvadoran people might bear little or no similarity to those that plagued millions in Vietnam. But until we can hear their voices, telling us who is right and who is wrong in El Salvador, no other response seems quite as sane...
...ROOKIE AUTHOR has chosen a suitable topic and manages to avoid the condemnations that would have made the book altogether trite. There is no easy solution for the inefficiency of American democracy; after seeing it up close, Fromson admits that. He pinpoints the underlying force propelling government: the self-interest of those the government employs. And he understands that on the one hand, self-interest can disguise itself as noble loyalty to a leader or an ideology, and that on the other, decent, hard-working folk will settle for compromise rather than risk a costly defeat at the hands...
White's device is nothing new. Find a detail, use it to say something. It is careful writing, and even when the subject is the author, the viewpoint is detached. If it succeeds, it does so quietly, but if it fails it sounds trite and silly. There is one notable White failure in this book that illustrates the point--to bring the horror of nuclear war home he seizes on the instructions given schoolchildren for what to do in case of attack. The sketch ends with a line of girls, including White's granddaughter, walking with handkerchiefs over their mouths...