Restlessness saves the group from the dull referentiality of smart students: a snippet of a folk song leads toward a glockenspiel duet, and a droning recorded message from a minimart carries as much weight as a shard of oral history about Coney Island.
Whelan is back on the circuit, a combative trade union official, fiercely loyal, a gut partisan who is never dull company, street-smart.
We can't tell whether Chris is smart or dull, funny or boring, creative or stodgy.
Of course, physicists could reply that they are smart, not dull.
An individual can be smart and dull at the same time simply because one side of his or her brain is more developed than the other.
But with his boyish, clean-cut looks, the smart, if dull, grey suits and a gap-tooth smile, he has a reputation for charm with his earnest talk of "serving my country and my convictions".
First: Why are some people so smart and so dull at the same time, so capable of mastering certain mental activities and so incapable of mastering others?
Why? Meta-cinema is one thing, but after the gloriously gory and smart opening came dull family melodrama, pretentious introspection, three scenes featuring vomit and a stuffed dinosaur toy used as a foreshadowing device.
We cheer on smart servants outwitting dull employers, from Jonathan Swift's "Directions to the Footman" to – some three centuries, two volumes, 1,400 pages and 90 stories (one per author) later – Fatou in the Willesden (Brondesbury, actually) of Zadie Smith's "The Embassy of Cambodia".
