Word: vapid
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...taking his last swings in a test match against Australia. He quits because his son, an arty young man who fancies himself a lyric poet, is mortified to tell Oxford classmates that his father is "in sport." After creaking through a whole series of domestic traumas, including a rather vapid romance between the cricketer and a barmaid, the story reaches its denouement with a testimonial to sports as the great leveler...
...first curtain soon batters that hope. The cast strides back and forth about the stage, tearing into marriage and cold pills--the two whipping boys of the plot. Actually, this discussion is inoffensive, the kind of vapid pleasantries you would expect to hear from likeable people bantering between themselves. It is nothing for 1,000 people to be eavesdropping on. When the hero's lady love absents herself saying she'll be gone an hour and will count the minutes, the hero rejoins, "There should be sixty." And so it goes...
...negative odor that puts it above Spades." There are people who love a country, and they find it stricken, and there is a girl whose love is wider than a country. It is good that the authoress loves the country of which she writes, but there is a vapid, too-plaintive air that distracts the sympathy of the reader. "If you were born in Israel, you were a sabra, tough and tan on the outside, sweating in the sun, your heart and lungs and everything crying out as you kissed the dust and the salty dirt and asked...
...only two of O'Neill's plays on stage, my judgment is incomplete, but originals seem rather dull. Although they contain plenty of action, bombast and strained dialogue shoot through the short dramas. The motion picture, however, centers attention on the action and minimizes the number of boring or vapid lines. As result, The Long Voyage Home, while still spotty, flows along with grace and often force...
...Rules of the Game is an amusing tragedy of manners. Never rude or strained, the picture flays the social excesses of the French aristocracy, exposing lives of vapid insincerity and vicious lack of purpose. Director and co-scenarist Jean Renoir is too subtle to stage a Gallicorgy after the style exemplified by Quo Vadis?. He prefers to draw out indignation, letting the characters condemn themselves by treating infidelity, indelicacy and even brutality as daily steps toward a Good Life whose only end is to escape boredom. Not that decadence is portrayed as innately vile. Rather, its syrupy charm cloys, smothering...