Word: comically
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Here the Jellicle cats, a flighty, exuberant lot full of larky midnight madness, have assembled for their annual ball. Choreographer Gillian Lynne has superbly schooled her topflight troupe in clawing, stretching, rubbing and comic feline posturing, yet no single dancer convincingly turns into a cat. Lynne is a fluent choreographer, but uninventive. She relies on three main modes-jazz, ballet and acrobatics-which in reiteration become anticlimactic. When a huge boot clunks down in the middle of the chorus in the first big dance number, the touch is deliciously clever but later seems like a prophetic critique...
...time, and it is hard to escape the feeling that there is more here than any real adolescent may ever have to deal with. But that is an afterthought. While the picture is running, its casual naturalism, its refusal to force any single incident to its dramatic or comic limits, its accuracy of tone, texture and pitch keep one persuaded and involved. For a studio that has been trying to regain its grip on contemporary reality, for audiences that must by this time be jaded by the noisy and moronic farcicality of adolescent life as most movies portray...
...earlier films (Barrier, Hands Up, The Shout), Skolimowski has sometimes been too ready to sacrifice social feeling for a quicksilver cinematic intelligence. Moonlighting has its share of incongruous images (a flowerpot Nowak discovers in a toilet bowl) and gorgeous ones (a sweetly comic Degas overtone as one of the laborers reposes in a bathtub), but every shot is there to serve, heighten, reveal. The mundane and the surreal are one: Nowak sees images of his beloved, perhaps unfaithful wife Anna in a store window, on TV, naked in a cellar apartment. She is the vision-memory of all the hopes...
...slave, Xica wields her effervescent sensuality to the hilt, thus ascending to the most prominent social position in the land. Xica's fairy-tale-like climb does not go unnoticed by her fellow slaves or the Portuguese officials in Brazil. And these characters react in stereotypical--and unrelentingly comic--fashion to Xica's rise with their expressions of jealously and desire...
Paced at a Wolfman's shamble and photographed in colors as cheerful and sexless as the Blands, Eating Raoul could be read as Bartel's comic revenge on Hollywood: like his protagonist, he profits by axing the System. But perhaps this is too heavy a weight for 87 minutes of soufflé-light surrealism to support. The film is best seen as a canny survivor's notice of current determination and future availability. It would be pleasant to think that what Bartel did for love could be redeemed for money, and a chance next time to make...