Word: tritely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...symbolism draws attention to itself through the play's title, but it becomes something of a joke by being pat and trite, like a Victorian maxim. The upstanding Lord Windemere bestows the fan on his chaste wife as a gift, but when jealousy leads her to rendezvous with Lord Darlington late at night, she leaves it lying on his table. She explicitly forgets it, and virtue, in his chambers...
...Scott Wolf does an excellent Tom Cruise imitation. And Jeff Bridges is a perfect father figure. Too perfect. The script sinks any hopes the characters had of being deep or moving. Todd Robinson, the screen writer, is living proof anyone can get a job in Hollywood. The script is trite ("Oh, the power of the wind!") and too ambitious ("Today I finally understand Homer: the journey's the thing...
...Amanda be more than a grab bag of weaknesses? Poor trite thing: she's bored by Lenny's name games and love play. She insists on adopting a child, then all but ignores him. ("I'm the boss," Lenny insists to Max. "Mommy's only the decision maker.") And she cheats on Lenny before he can on her. Her dalliance is a betrayal; his is a quest. Once again Allen's take on marriage is biased and bleak; he sees it as a prison for two, where the condemned may finally rise to a level of reciprocal pity. They achieve...
...interesting because that sort of style of comedy seems very trite now. The reason it seems trite is because Coward invented it all those years ago. Or not invented it, but perfected it, molded it, crafted it, honed it, if you will. So, this is an archetypal piece in terms of stage comedy and farce...
...this rather trite dichotomy does give scope for the film's most redeeming quality: the cinematography. Director of photography Jonathan Cornick captures straight-laced Puritanism in idyllic shots awash with scullers, clapboard and steeples straight from an Eakins canvas. Dramatic cliffs and dense forests redolent of Bierstadt represent America's noble savagery. Happily, such arresting backdrops tend to distract the audience from the action...