A sheer and ungainly fact in the room with you, the work transposes features of banal reality — chiefly the look and feel of concrete, the ur-material of Los Angeles — into qualities to savor.
This was generous enough for a banal picture that looks like an enlarged picture postcard handled in the Pointillist style.
The Comme des Garçons headquarters, which occupy several floors of a banal office building, look like design studios everywhere, and may even be drabber.
When you see all the moments on one side or the other, or moving, it looks banal, it drains away the magic of the moment".
Her simple, final wish looks banal out of context, but after watching her family — and her murderer — for years, it's devastatingly pure.
The difficulty is compounded with lyrical-seeming songs, if only because one part of their achievement is in language, a language that, once separated from the melody, can look banal.
Gunshots are exceedingly rare in Iranian movies, and the two that are fired in the opening moments reverberate with particular force, even though the crime they aggravate looks banal and amateurish.
Ellis agrees that "that sequence does seem kind of cursory" – but only, he goes on, because Clay is so numbly affectless that even rape and torture would look banal to him.
"The proposal," he writes, "looks banal and inelegant". .
It is made of very short sentences, stacked one below another on the page, looking simultaneously as banal as a shopping list and as beautiful as a poem: Nors describes it as "a novel in headlines".
