Word: tritely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scene-stealer is Hoffman, who follows up on his fine work in Happiness and Boogie Nights. With his undulating voice and quick reversals of emotion, he nicely portrays Rusty's painful limbo between lonely man and gaudy transvestite. Reading in between his frequently trite lines, Hoffman exposes Rusty's inner vulnerability. De Niro, too, raises his Walt above mere caricature. His subtle expressions reveal the pain of an independent man losing his mobility while his cautious moves towards Rusty make the burgeoning friendship relatively believable...
...Marrying Van Tassel after nursing Katrina's real mother until her death, Lady Van Tassel yields a new twist to the plot. Richardson, for most of the movie, gives a fair, airy performance, but her final scene is beyond awful. Her monologue summing up the plot may be intentionally trite, but regardless, its a poor anticlimax. It destroys all the magic built up in the suspenseful buildup towards the conclusion. Aside from this last disaster Richardson is tolerable, providing a cool presence in the earlier scenes and wearing noticeably patterned floor-sweeping dresses that always seems about to burst...
Last month during the debate in New Hampshire between Democratic presidential frontrunners Al Gore '69 and Bill Bradley, an audience member posed the question: What qualities do you consider most important in a leader? The answers Gore and Bradley gave were trite and forgettable, but the significance of the query hung heavy in the air. In a post-Watergate, post-Lewinsky world, what universal attributes, if any, can we expect to be intrinsic to the leader of our country? Honesty? Morality? Intelligence...
...Oscillating between razor-sharp and nauseatingly trite (see above), director Eric Simonson's adapted script is too inconsistent to be praised. Besides containing about twelve too many characters (with not an interesting female role in the bunch), the script lacks the moral ambiguity that would have made The Last Hurrah a more intellectually engaging production. The press material for the play asks the seminal question "Is Skeffington a compassionate champion of the poor, an unscrupulous back-room deal maker, or both?" and it is clear early on in one's evening that the answer will not be hard to figure...
...However, because we are used to blood and gore as our guides to human character, Grand Illusion appears to be only a dated and trite war movie with French subtitles...