Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...characters except for Charlie are one-dimensional stereotypic caricatures. Clayburgh plays a dippy finance. Although her portrayal of Josephine is appropriately vacuous, she fails to seize a firm grasp on her character. Nothing seen on the screen can explain Charlie's attraction to her. A little awkward on film, Clayburgh's acting techniques seem rough and not as refined as in her later performances...
Examine one fairly new item: airhead. It means, of course, a brainless person, someone given to stupid behavior and opinions. But it is a vacuous, dispiriting little effort. The word has no invective force or metaphorical charm. When slang settles for the drearily literal (airhead equals empty head), it is too tired to keep up with the good stuff...
...modern day issues. Apparently seeing the potential listening public among the growing ranks of the unemployed. Joel begins The Nylon Curtain with "Allentown," an upbeat ode to those who are out of work in the Pennsylvanian factory town. Joel sprinkles insincere comments about broken American promises in between the vacuous refrain "And we're living here in Allentown." "Iron and coke and chromium steel," Joel chirps cheerily...
...fired a revolver full of explosive bullets at President Ronald Reagan to prove his love for Movie Actress Jodie Foster, had been acquitted of attempted assassination. The young drifter who shot his way onto history's center stage stood silently at the defense table, closed his vacuous eyes, and tilted back his head...
...industrial world, the idea of excellence acquired in the past 20 years a sinister and even vaguely fascistic reputation. It was the Best and the Brightest, after all, who brought us Viet Nam. For a long time, many of the world's young fell into a dreamy, vacuous inertia, a canned wisdom of the East persuading them - destructively - that mere being would suffice, was even superior to action. "Let It Be," crooned Paul McCartney. Scientific excellence seemed apocalyptically suspect - the route to pollution and nuclear destruction. Striving became suspect. A leveling contempt for "elitism" helped to divert much...