Richard Shiff says in the current Tate catalogue that Riley's work "can be laborious to write about".
Laborious to read about, too: descriptions of her technical minutiae, and of the formal topographies of her paintings, accurate though they may be, can be as indigestible as the prose of a car-repair manual.
I haven't got the patience for the rich, laborious detail about the creatures and their machines, or for the rules about the heroes' special powers.
That story about the pig's head is a case in point, as is a rather laborious chapter about the 18-year-old Cameron's odd encounter with the KGB while travelling the Trans-Siberian Express. Trans-Siberian Express
This, I suspect, is because of the film's laborious backstory about her painful girlhood in Australia, coupled with Disney's own intense insistence that Travers and her creation are "family", leaves no room for Travers's actual family.
It turns out that Lee and his collaborators have made an earnest and laborious picture about parent-child relationships (both Bruce and Betty struggle against their parents), thereby reducing fantasy to rational spectacle.
When Russia or Canada loses like the Americans did in international play, there's a national crisis, followed by a long, laborious conversation about the State of Hockey and what can be done to solve whatever problems seem to exist.
I can and will give lengthy and laborious lectures about traffic, clothing, and this new salad dressing I'm trying, I'll talk about all the least offensive jokes I saw on Facebook and I will refuse to curse in the company of people I don't know all that well.
Aside from a midpoint raid on Frank's home, staged with Bird's signature sugar-rush sense of giddiness, most of the action beats feel obligatory, as though Lindelof and Bird were on a warpath towards their true object of desire: constant, nudging, laborious affirmations about the necessity of optimism.
After a laborious build-up about plucky young things building a teleportation machine, the revelation of the quartet's transformations feels incongruously macabre, with the faintest overtones of David Cronenberg.
