Travolta plays Shapiro as an Easter Island head of fatuousness, with Spock eyebrows and pursed lips, trailing famous names like bread crumbs.
This kind of burbling fatuousness does not aid the cause of getting to the truths of war, and Burns should know better.
Still, deliberate simplicity is as hazardous as the grand style, and Vonnegut occasionally skids into fatuousness — in his apology, for example, and when he addresses his publisher by name, and in this passage: The news of the day, meanwhile, was being written in a ribbon of lights on a building to Billy's back.
In the early books, one was carried along by De Vries's unstoppable gags, his gift for spotting cant, fatuousness, and snobbery, and his grandly silly dialogue.
George Will's fatuousness, for example.
Listening to a horrible sonnet drives him to distraction, and the flattery and fatuousness of the world make him despair.
"We Killed" would have lost nothing by weeding out gushy overstatements, like "the first time I saw Janeane, I was like, 'Oh my God.' " In a book with too much flab and fatuousness, the single silliest comment is about a house in Los Angeles shared by Jack Black, Laura Kightlinger and many friends passing through.
"It strikes me as a kind of publicity stunt for a prize that in recent years has demonstrated its fatuousness and political complexion with one political laureate after the next punctuated now and then by a VS Naipaul just to lend a patina of credibility".
However fatuous we all were in the 1970s, he has managed to show that the 21st century can take fatuousness to a new level.
But fun turns to fatuousness as the past rears its messy head, leaving the movie to wrestle clumsily with estranged sons, schizophrenic twins, and a frankly inexplicable Anne Heche.
It is about longing and the fatuousness of substitutes, perhaps of art itself.
