Word: vapidly
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...year-old director's point of view has soured over the years, and certain feelings can be inferred from his new film. Chaplin can neither take comfort in the security of old age or have faith in youth. The society girl with whom Brando dances is self-centered and vapid, a Marxist parody of upper class Capitalism. Her continual references to the beliefs of her father imply that she has been corrupted by Chaplin's low generation. In a parallel scene, old Miss Gaulswallow (Margaret Rutherford) is shown as equally useless, having partially retreated into a senile second childhood...
...narrow-mindedness of Antonioni's conception would be more tolerable were it not for his continual use of sledgehammer symbolism. The visual venom with which he passes judgment on the vapid fashion models, the glassy-eyed crowd watching the Yardbirds, and the tennis players, frequently reaches laughable proportions (two people playing tennis without a ball equals two people living in a world of illusion, get it?). This defect in Blow-Up, mostly the fault of the screenplay, greatly reduces the total effect of the film. Blow-Up, when all is said and done, is a small film dealing with large...
...elements of Gielgud's Ivanov interfere with the general tone of the production--the two younger women and the problem of Ivanov's age. Miss Leigh and Miss Hilary try hard in extremely vapid roles. Chekhov was always weak at creating women who were neither old nor eccentric, and at this early stage of his career he was terrible. Miss Leigh might have played Ivanov's genteel, tubercular wife as a little more ill and a little less sweet, but simply coughing louder could not have added depth to a structurally shallow role. Miss Hilary is given two types...
...incident. Carl Jung warned against abandoning the traditional view of death "as the fulfillment of life's meaning and its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation." Psychologist Rollo May feels that the repression of death "is what makes modern life banal, empty and vapid. We run away from death by making a cult of automatic progress, or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death when they are really sidestepping it with the old eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-you-die-middle-aged men and women who want...
...Cherry," begins "I cannot describe to you very well the boarding school," deserves a nod of agreement and a sigh. Lee Grove, a young man distressed by what old men think, rates a prize for non-sequiturs and bad puns. Kevin Lewis, who has written two poems about vapid lives, could be accused of writing method poetry...