Word: knockabout
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some respects, the comedy of musical beds and drugs and knockabout buffoonery seems almost made for MTV. The scene of two young men playing mixed doubles with their interchangeable girlfriends would not seem strange to the kids in Bret Easton Ellis novels, who fall into bed with anyone at all, scarcely stopping to ascertain identity, or even sex. Titania's sudden passion for ass-headed Bottom seems almost natural in the age of Ecstasy, when someone who takes a tab of MDMA is liable to open her heart to the first person she sees. And Pyramus and Thisbe, wooing each...
With this film, Itami is less a knockabout ironist, more a sly cinematic Dostoyevsky. The clues to this secret identity lie in his sudden alternations of mood between quiet and noisy desperation, his fascination with the moral force of the holy fool -- the part the director's graceful wife Miyamoto is essentially playing -- and, above all, his allusions to Crime and Punishment. As in the great novel, it is a tenacious detective's patience that forces the final confession a criminal requires for his soul's peace. But the entertaining dexterity with which Itami plays this potentially heavy hand...
Murdoch loves success but disdains mere respectability. Having grown up in Australia's rough-and-tumble journalism, he feels more at home editing a "knockabout" paper (his description) like the New York Post. A canny student of popular prejudices, he plays to resentments and, like press barons of old, prides himself on an intuitive understanding of mass taste. He doesn't aspire to educate or elevate the public, being content to entertain and satisfy...
...long and digressive, but as staged by Marshall W. Mason and a splendid young cast, it wins laughter in even its unnerving moments. If the narrative is indebted to the mainstream past, the tone has a more avant-garde echo of Sam Shepard -- a border skirmish between knockabout farce and knockdown violence. Yet Playwright Lanford Wilson manages to integrate well-crafted gags, mostly for the surviving gay roommate (Lou Liberatore). He describes his friend's gaudy casket as looking "like a giant Spode soup tureen." He says to the choreographer (Joan Allen) about her boyfriend (Jonathan Hogan...
...farce needs, irresistible nuttiness. She is simply a whiner. Director Edwards (The Party, S.O.B.) is a great farceur, and he has plenty of classic comic conventions to play with: elegant cars and parties to crash, a decorous wedding to subvert. But glum Nadia defeats him. A film promising knockout knockabout comedy finally seems merely knocked...