Word: vapid
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While the world's statesmen hotly debated its fate in the U.N., the Congo sprawled in the equator's heat, torpid and listless. The riotous chaos and killing had mostly stopped. In its place was a vapid, restless calm...
...exuberantly witty folklike figurations. Although its technical demands were tremendous ("If Shostakovich had written two more bars for the cadenza," said Rostropovich, "I could not have played them"), the acrobatics were not merely contrived, as has been true of so much of Shostakovich's recent work, notably his vapid, bombastic Eleventh Symphony. The concerto, wrote the Sunday Times, presented "a real conflict and a final solution...
Tall Story (Mansfield Productions; Warner), as a hit comedy (TIME, Feb. 9, 1959) written for Broadway by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, was constructed on the principle of the basketball. A variety of vapid college humors were compressed into an airtight container of cynical wit laced up with some penetrating moral strictures. Joshua Logan, who produced and directed this film version of the play, has managed with singular skill to peel off the wit and the penetrating remarks. What is left is rather difficult to describe, but it sure doesn't have much bounce...
...Moravia heroine, she is certain to be vapid, gross, pettily cruel and, when she stops to think about it, unhappy. Her lover is probably an idle young aristocrat, just bright enough to be deeply and passionately bored. Naturally, they despise each other. Moravia has created these characters dozens of times, and he must have felt bewildered when he was accused of an obsession with sex. He is obsessed all right, but it is with the enormous capacity of men and women for misery and meanness; sex, promising union but bringing solitude, merely offers the most dramatic view of the human...
...played by the Lowell Dramatic Group, Ghosts is almost vapid. The actors appear to observe the characters from the outside, often reciting lines as if they were participating in a first or second rehearsal. Each has a few good moments, each delivers occasional lines with gratifying conviction, but none is capable of sustaining the intensity which Ghosts requires...