Word: knockabout
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There's a good, crystallizing movie to be made out of that thought. But The Cable Guy is not it, mostly because its pathology is more schizophrenic than paranoid, knockabout one minute, knockover the next. In a way, that suits Jim Carrey's comic genius, with its eerie blend of sublime self-confidence and anarchical menace. To see him, as the eponymous electronics installer, engage in passionate foreplay with a wall, seeking its perfect cable G-spot, then drill into it in rapacious fury, is to be transported to a realm of exquisitely mixed light and dark. Like Matthew Broderick...
Joseph Keaton Jr. was born to a knockabout vaudeville family and quickly put on the stage. The lad toured with his family until 1917, when he entered films as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. In 1920, Keaton left Arbuckle to make his own movies. The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all-intuitively. His body, honed by vaudeville pratfalls, was a splendid contraption. And as a director, Keaton was born fully mature. He was just 25 then, and as eager to mine...
Schwarzenegger gives a soberly befuddled performance as a man pleasantly surprised, and ultimately transformed, by the play of alien hormones to which he's host. Giddiness (and most of the film's knockabout comedy) is left to Emma Thompson as a bright, klutzy fellow scientist, and she is a lovely reminder of our screwball yesteryears. Like all concerned with Junior, she refuses to let it rest lazily on its concept. The result is a high-energy farce that is more endearing and, yes, more believable than it has any right...
...strike audiences as a climax, so applause, although sustained, is painfully slow in coming. While Anne Pitoniak's Du is a tonic blend of folksy approachability and rigid religion, Julie Boyd's Keely seems far better educated and statelier than the beer-loving bar veteran and blue-collar knockabout sketched in the text...
...BOTTOM LINE: The tragedy of AIDS may have met its match in a heartfelt, knockabout comedy of manners...