Word: glib
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...difficult to ascertain what the subject of the film really is, or the reason it was made. The Maysles brothers have al ways been inveterate seekers after the phantom of documentary "truth." This quest has been hampered by the peculiar insularity of their vision and by its glib spontaneity. In Grey Gardens they do not mean to be cruel to the Beales, al though they are. The movie has some slender justification as a piece of psychological reporting, about the ways two people rely on each other and torture each other. But all we see - perhaps all anyone could ever...
...bell, warning that they were slippery." The Auctioneer becomes less a tale of suspense than a parable of politics. The open questions it poses are as old as society itself: What is the nature of power? What makes people cede control over their own destinies to the glib, the avaricious, the contemptuous...
Oldenburg's humor comes from his awareness and appreciation of the human element that supports his art. So his drawings can be hilarious, but they are never glib, or snide. A sketch such as Fagends in Hyde Park is funny because of the innocence and incongruity of the vision; the wit in seeing the bristles of a typewriter eraser as broccoli lies in yoking two seemingly disconnected things...
...With glib elliptical logic, the agit-prop actually suggests that the man can become the machine...
...right away it's clear that Salisbury has bitten off a mouthful, and he says so himself. Even the landscape--even what he sees from his airplane window--seems too big and varied to be understood in a few glib paragraphs, and so all Salisbury offers is his own personal view of America, an account of one person's journey to the burning heart of the American dream. "I have not tasted all the strata of our 215,000,000 lives," he says...