Word: vapidly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...cocktail party is an unlikely place to look for spirituality. Yet Eliot's Cock tall Party was a veritable Communion of Saints. His apparently vapid men and flighty women all proved to be in quest of a kind of ideal love. Those with a low spiritual potential learned resignation to their far-from-ideal human loves, while Celia, who was more gifted, saved her life by losing it. In finding saints at cocktail parties Eliot is perfectly in line with primitive Christianity which teaches that the truly good man will not be recognized by any visible piety. Christ...
Here's a ready and vapid cure...
Clash by Night (Wald-Krasna; RKO Radio) is a vapid variation on the old triangle. Based on Clifford Odets' 1941 play about a Staten Island husband who kills his wife's lover, the picture adds a sunshiny ending, a Pacific-coast fishing-town setting, and some fishy dramatics...
Thomas refused to go through the ordeal of answering audience questions. Why? Because, he said, they always follow the same vapid pattern: "Are the young English poets really psychological?", or "I always carry Kierkegaard in my pocket. What do you carry...