Word: trites
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...trite grotesqueness, though, Alice cannot be tossed off as another American Psycho, the famously godawful Bret Easton Ellis novel to which it has been likened. Ellis' treatment of sadism has a dopey campiness that Homes is incapable of. She takes her crazed protagonist very seriously, describing his every abhorrent desire in mind-boggling detail that amounts to a twisted, writerly artfulness all its own. And as in her last book, In a Country of Mothers, the story of a psychoanalyst's debilitating obsession with a young patient, Homes shows a knack for intertwining two characters' pathologies. In Alice...
Thank heaven no one has let McCauley's publisher in on this nearly accurate bit of cynicism. There aren't any filthy facts here, no trite wrap-ups--just funny, sustaining fiction. The only resemblance between McCauley's writing and rehab is that you can just check in. Such are the author's fluency and humor ("Nothing is more intimate than the right kind of insult") that the reader can ramble along, smelling the roses...
...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...