It's easy for a writer to step out boldly only to tip into triteness or ersatz profundity.
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More Japanese touches — origami birds, a paper parasol for the Madwoman — risk triteness but keep blossoming into beauty.
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The metaphor of dedicated public servants tasked with taping together the president's shredded paper is too perfect; its triteness is cringeworthy.
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But the longer you stick with Swiss Army Man, the more its commendable audaciousness starts to succumb to the story's underlying triteness.
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Smartly directed by Jeremy Sims, this sweet-hearted film mostly manages to avoid triteness even as it casually packs an emotional punch.
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She's humiliated by the sheer triteness of the feelings that come to govern her: lust, jealousy, above all vulnerability, raw and excruciatingly real.
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The potential triteness of all this is partially offset by the hipness of the music, an original score by the jazz drummer Ali Jackson.
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The treacle trap was especially hard to avoid considering that "Matilda" and "Groundhog Day" deal with children and redemption — subjects that have been known to trigger maudlin triteness.
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The triteness of the setup — a conference, a hotel — made me reflexively defensive; I was sparing my husband what would have been a wholly needless pang of jealousy or discomfort.
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Triteness may be the point, however, in a screenplay (by the director, Nick Simon, and two others) so clogged with clichés that their combined whole must surely be intended as greater than their sum.
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A wide-open goal post for accusations of triteness and affectation, Marc Webb's "The Only Living Boy in New York" dares us to score the second we hear Jeff Bridges's cynical, omniscient voice-over.
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"Always Be My Maybe" feels a lot like a movie propped up by a stunt, a high-gloss romantic comedy so mired in triteness and unconvincing emotions that its main recommendation is the appealing diversity of its cast.
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It was all very, you know ..." She begins to laugh, a boisterous, asthmatic-sounding, from-the-gut guffaw that signals she's aware of the triteness, the irony or maybe just the sheer unlikeliness of what she's about to say: "... idyllic.
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Yet there's this: Nearly every item in the store, from clothing to shoes to jewelry to accessories, feels like the product of a fresh mind, a creator at work hoping to make something just slightly different from what peers are coming up with, without edging into triteness.
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From such an oily grave, Cotadi hopes, an olive tree plantation may spring up, to benefit of his descendants.Deligiorgis edition, p.44–53. See also Sandqvist, p.20–21, 230 Like "Algazy & Grummer", "Cotadi and Dragomir" can be read as alluding to the triteness of business life.
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S. T. Joshi judges it "unlikely that 'From Beyond' … will ever be regarded as one of Lovecraft's better tales", due to "its slipshod style, melodramatic excess and general triteness of plot".Joshi, p. 18. Joshi also considers Crawford Tillinghast's references to the pineal gland to be a joke at the expense of René Descartes, who proposed that this gland was the point of mediation between the material body and the immaterial soul.Joshi, pp. 18–19.
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By executing his engravings in such a painterly manner, Bonasone excelled as a reproductive engraver. His engravings resembled the masterpieces to a superb degree without the common problem of triteness. The prints during this period may lead viewers to conclude that the draftsmanship of Bonasone was limited by that of the art pieces he was referring to. He seems to inherit the excellences of Michelangelo, Raphael or Parmigianio but also the defects of the archaic works.
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A. O. Scott of The New York Times notes that there were "patches of thinness and predictability", and that "the first half seems to acknowledge its own triteness". However, he compliments the pacing of the scenes and the actors who "inhabit their roles like second-hand suits". Mark Holcomb, writing for IndieWire, took issue with the "odd, unsuccessful mix of theatrical whimsy and social realism", and a dance scene which he describes as a "cringe-inducing '80s-style music video routine".
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The film received mostly favorable reviews, although several were lukewarm. Photoplay called the film a "... sophisticated story interesting from start to finish", while Motion Picture Magazine said the movie was "sophisticated" and "entertaining", praising both the direction and acting. Silver Screen, however, stating that only Lowell's performance saved the film from "utter triteness". Mordaunt Hall, of The New York Times, gave the film a somewhat positive review, praising both Lowell and Coleman, as well as several other players, but merely calling Dunne's performance "competent".
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Wendy Lee Nentwig of Crosswalk.com praised the band's musical and lyrical growth since their debut effort, as well as the "passionate intensity and emotion" of lead singer Bart Millard's vocals. Marcia Bartenhagen of CCM Magazine praised the band's vocals and progression in songwriting and musical style, but felt the album "occasionally sways to the triteness so often found on AC/pop projects". Tim Harms of Baptist Press called Spoken For a major improvement over Almost There and said it "feels more coherent and flows smoother and it flourishes in vertical lyrics".
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This kind of prescience is, however, the exception rather than the rule. Historically, A&R; executives have tended to sign new artists that fit into recent trends and who resemble acts that are currently successful. For example, Columbia Records' A&R; man in the 1950s, Mitch Miller, favored traditional pop singers like Guy Mitchell and Patti Page, and rejected early rock-'n'-rollers Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. This "trend following" mindset has generated several waves of narrowly defined genres, leading to a perception of triteness, including teen pop (1998–2001), alternative rock (1993–1996), glam metal (1986–1991) and disco (1976–1978).
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" Robin Wood praised the film's newsreel footage-like style in adding to the realism and compared the scene of peasants being rounded up in the Po Valley to the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. TV Guide called it "perhaps Rossellini's greatest achievement", "a wartime portrait full of humor, pathos, romance, tension, and warmth", and "a film unlike any other the world had seen". "PAISAN highlights the power of the neorealist style better than almost any other film." The Chicago Reader's Dave Kehr observed that "The episodes all seem to have an anecdotal triteness ... but each acquires a wholly unexpected naturalness and depth of feeling from Rossellini's refusal to hype the anecdotes with conventional dramatic rhetoric.
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This has deterred some of opera's most distinguished exponents; Maria Callas, though she recorded the part, never performed it on stage. The musicologist Hugh Macdonald observes that "French opera never produced another femme as fatale as Carmen", though she may have influenced some of Massenet's heroines. Macdonald suggests that outside the French repertoire, Richard Strauss's Salome and Alban Berg's Lulu "may be seen as distant degenerate descendants of Bizet's temptress". Bizet was reportedly contemptuous of the music that he wrote for Escamillo: "Well, they asked for ordure, and they've got it", he is said to have remarked about the toreador's song—but, as Dean comments, "the triteness lies in the character, not in the music".
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Simon Leng views it as "a great pop record", adding: "'You' has the same surging spirit as [Motown classics] "Dancing in the Street" and "Heat Wave" and, as the lyrics are full of boy-meets-girl triteness, the groove is what carries it." Ian Inglis identifies the song's strengths as its lyrical simplicity, a "soaring, galloping melody ... [that] encapsulates the joy of reciprocated love and the liberation of rock 'n' roll at its most exuberant", and the quality of the musicianship on the recording, particularly Jim Horn's contribution. Inglis concludes: "Even the slight unease [Harrison] has in striving to maintain some of the higher notes cannot detract from what is, quite simply, a near-perfect pop song." Two years after Harrison's death from cancer in November 2001,Tillery, pp. 147–48.
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Carla Meyer of SF Gate praised the performances of Cavanah and the monkeys and wrote that "By the last third, "Hanuman" has become a pretty predictable good-versus- evil story. But the picture's great beauty, and the obvious care that it took to make it, override the triteness". Dennis Harvey of Variety similarly wrote that " Fougea’s deft orchestration of two trained and 50 wild monkeys — who make antic, appealing camera subjects — nicely suspends disbelief, while his brisk pacing makes the somewhat formulaic script go down easily". On the contrary, Jesper Vestergard of CinemaZone criticized the film and wrote that "The film's expression never manages to land a place where it can satisfy neither children nor adults, and the magical element of history with the monkey god never comes to its own".
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" Phyl Garland of Stereo Review said "The music is delightfully earthy in its appeal, an aural collage of rich vocal and instrumental textures underscored by highly danceable rhythms that never surrender to triteness. Though the very name of this group partakes of astro-logical symbolism, and though the lyrics of their songs often hint of galactic mysteries, the nine men who compose Earth, Wind & Fire play a kind of music that might be called neo-progressive soul, for it is a full light-year beyond what most groups are doing these days, soaring to celestial heights while sending out waves of mundane thrills." John Rockwell of The New York Times proclaimed "All 'n All shows Maurice White and his cohorts pushing their music ever more in a febrile jazz‐rock direction. There are parallels, here, to white rock groups like Queen and Yes, but the very sophistication and single‐mindedness of Earth, Wind and Fire's vision sets it apart from the bulk of rock‐and‐roll.
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They also observed as a critique that Robert R. Shafer performance got on one's nerves, but that might have been the intent for his character. After their overall positive review, wherein they addressed storyline and pacing, and made note that the film's fight scenes could have been better choreographed, they concluded that the film "was a glossy, steamily sexy, clipped paced, competently acted and ingeniously written mish-mash of horror, action and Sci-Fi". Conversely, DVD Reviews wrote that Disturbance had the potential to be either a "small gem" or a "schlocky retread", and offered that while its "Arresting visuals and a better-than- average cast" helped to raise this film "above most of the trash that sits at the bottom of the bargain bin at the local video store", the film "too often becomes immersed in triteness to stand its own ground", and that despite the film's originalities, it was "pretty standard stuff" that offers too many genre clichés. In further criticism, they felt that the film's action was substandard, the fight choreography weak, and certain scenes were "ruined by pretentious visual manipulation".
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