It provides an antidote to facile, feel-good stories about the "Good War," stories that scholars such as Michael C.C. Adams and Kenneth D. Rose have long refuted but that live on in museum exhibits, blockbuster films, best-selling books and war memorials.
In 1964, the results — which today impress me as more facile than felt — made him the first American to win the top prize at the Venice Biennale, and, at thirty-nine, the youngest artist.
He works in a shorthand that can sometimes feel facile rather than profound.
The device can feel facile, though, when Giordana's unfulfilled brother learns to fly or her cousin, who flees commitment himself, suddenly has Cupid's touch.
I simply felt the original ending didn't work -- it felt facile.
The movie feels facile and blunt spirited.
Karen's facile, albeit strongly felt, sentiment is reinforced by her even more telling use of the word "family" in an unreservedly positive way.
But a collaboration with the artist Alessandro Gaggio, creating high jewellery pieces in white terracotta wound up, unfortunately, resembling bone; elsewhere the willy-nilly mix of "tribal" elements felt facile, shallow, and uninformed.
So why does the overall impression of this program feel more facile than the sum of its parts?
I don't imagine that even David Cameron, Zen master of the facile soundbite, would have felt quite so tempted to comment on something less easy to compartmentalise, as the prime minister did on the clip of the Chelsea supporters, describing it as "very, very serious".
The works of this first period are all more or less tinged by the influence of Rossetti; but they are already differentiated from the elder master's style by their more facile though less intensely felt elaboration of imaginative detail.
