Word: vapidness
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...instance, after Ella and Jim's wedding the two families, white and black, line up on either side of the church steps. The tableau is striking, but the terrible anxiety of the moment is lost for two reasons: a vapid accordion intrudes, and Anne Gerety as Ella substitutes a sort of open-mouthed gawk for a dramatic gesture...
...music lead the two instruments into the tense conversation the form requires. The piano simply accompanies the clarinet, as in a coloratura song, and the clarinet does little more than produce the kind of music an inspired Greek might dream up to charm a belly dancer. It is vapid, threadbare stuff-good fun for Benny Goodman, but hardly sport for Bernstein...
...Broadway before getting around to the name-brand tranquilizers of the Broadway showshops. But he had better not go much beyond a half-dozen, for the major consequence of off-Broadway's startling ten-year growth has been to dilute its quality in a flood of vanity productions, vapid revivals and Art subverted by Commerce. Off-Broadway entrenched itself as an artistic rebuke to Broadway; increasingly, it is becoming a shoddy sibling rival...
...would have been fragile, intricate music for a quartet had been made fragmentary, timid music for an orchestra. In his scoring, Lewis seemed barely able to tell his strings from his brass: the violins and cellos were misused in pursuit of inconsequential filigree, while the basses took long and vapid solo runs. Lewis had gone perilously far in the quest to make jazz more respectable without making it more substantive...
...have had it with aristocracies. Corrupt, sleek, lascivious queer or cruel, Italian, French or Spanish, they all amount to the same thing on the screen: vacuity writ large. But the most banal set of all lives in Argentina. Its members are as vapid, unsophisticated and coarse a covey of brightly feathered birds as I have seen in film. Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (director of End of Innocence) records their antics in Summerskin, a cheap and pretentious story in the worst possible taste...