Word: comically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...director with the Colgate smile; Sy Joelmersbagger, a tweedy history professor from Yale; and Sir Flute Parsons, an over-the-hill British screenwriter with a fondness for money and American boys. Wood gives each one his brief theatrical moment and tries to build an act out of a few comic situations (like Joe's constant run-ins with his assistant, Wesley) that can't last very long. He captures the movie jargon well ("be my file, Wes"; "we have to conceptualize a film here") but carries each joke just too far; the action, lacking any internal coherence, degenerates into...
...essentially British, and I'm not sure the Brattle St. crowd is any better prepared for this than for Lulu. The best written part of the play, it seems to me, is Sir Flute's second-act monologue (which resembles Tom Stoppard's New-Found Land in a lower comic vein); here Wood seems to be speaking for himself, evoking the romantic America of Paramount and MGM: "You said all that pretentious rights-of-man nonsense, and then you went out and did it." With our hands on our guns and our heads in the sky, one might add. Wood...
...overstuffed musical orchestration. All the rest, from story (nice Jewish boy brings down paternal wrath by forsaking tradition and trying to make it big in show biz) to score (love songs, fun songs, even marching songs), is stubbornly vintage. Diamond even pops up in blackface for a fast comic turn; about the only act of Jolson's that he doesn't try is going down on one knee...
...gestures, her bearing and her voice leads us into the vernal garden of childhood and the willing sus pension of disbelief. She turns two scenes into acting marvels. In one she mimics Humpty Dumpty about to fall off the wall but retaining full possession of a frog-horned comic baritone voice, and in the other she conducts the dialogue between Alice and the White Queen, taking both parts in a way that would have enchanted Oscar Wilde. Why isn't she performing Wilde, or Congreve or Shakespeare or Shaw, instead of gracing this cacophonous chicken coop of a musical...
They are promoting the buttons with radio spots and a comic strip ad in Spanish and English that shows youngsters debating dating strategy. In case a boy doesn't get the message, one wag suggests that the coed can always remove the pin and make her point in another...