Word: insipidly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course not everything works. Several obvious jokes are beaten laboriously into submission, particularly in the articles on a fat chef, a "liberated" inflatable lady and the Shah in hell. A promising spoof of those insipid People interviews ends drearily when the same joke--the interviewer not recognizing his subject's newsworthy statements--dies from repetition. The parody also slips up in the celebrity department. Probably because it concentrates on the briefly famous folks in People, it never captures the unique flavor of People's celebrity profiles; the parody doesn't look at the amusing laundry list--current success, difficult childhood...
...fact, shredding the sound track may not be such a bad idea. Except for a handful of faltering scenes--an insipid look on a wife bidding her husband farewell when he leaves for Turkey, a near descent into bathos after the first battle scene and a few half-hearted scenes of soldiers at liberty in the market in Egypt--the sounds that accompany Boyd's overwhelming images are the film's only flaw. Even the zipping and buzzing muzak noises would not be so awful except that Weir repeatedly splices between them Albinoni's dirge-like Adagio in G minor...
...insipid but reptilian nephew, Oscar's son Leo (Dennis Christopher), raids the bank vault and thwarts his uncle. As Horace cradles the all but empty bank box, Regina goads him into a heart spasm and icily denies him the lifesaving pills that are just beyond his reach. After a few more calculated turns of Lillian Hellman's plot screws, Regina proves to be more fearsome than any little...
MICHAEL CIMINO GOT LUCKY. Back in 1978, Vietnam was just becoming hot movie material, Cimino, the spunky young director with one movie under his belt (the insipid Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), sold the British recording company EMI the idea for a terrific film--a gut-wrenching Vietnam drama. The Deer Hunter. A hot idea, Vietnam laced with contemporary American pop romanticism. The Vietnam War the way Bruce Springsteen would probably sing about it. Workin' class guys, they go and they fight for their country, 'cause their country ain't so great, you know--it's real bad sometimes--but they...
...characters who people Truffaut's film all attempt to carry on in the theater within this muffled and surreal atmosphere. The Theatre Montmartre, despite its trouble with censors and with its owner underground because he is a Jew, is rehearsing a production of an insipid Norwegian melodrama entitled "The Disappearance." The play has to be inspidid to please the censors and a certain Daxiat, a collaborating theater critic who speaks the language of civility and art but whose reviews are rabid diatribes, poison pen letters under the guise of apolitical culture. As the troupe carries on rehearsals of the play...