Word: flatly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...style precludes that. Even when he gets a potentially funny idea, he puts it in his title, warning you, and then decapitates any rising titter by tacking some flat line at a moment when a curious twist or jab might have released a legitimate laugh. Martin bypasses the sublime, hurtles through the ridiculous and lands with a splat in the pitiful...
What does one do, faced with an entire volume of such curiously written items? You might ask what Martin or anyone else finds funny about them. There's a flat-footed doggedness to the way Martin takes tired jokes and tries to recycle them. Unfortunately, he has lost the ability to write a punch-line, and in Cruel Shoes he frequently gets around that simply by reprinting the title of the piece at the end--but this time, in italics. Witness "The Children Called Him Big Nose...
Though Brook has brought more new ideas to the stage than any other contemporary director, his film-making skills remain primitive; even his adaptations of his own brilliant theater productions (King Lear, Marat/Sade) have been flat. Here he is hobbled by lapses in continuity, fake-looking studio sets and a multinational cast. The scenery, much of it shot in Afghanistan, is breathtaking, but the photography is routine. What is needed is some sort of theatricality-if not the forthright vulgarity of DeMille, then at least the romanticism of David Lean. With its incongruous mix of radical content and stodgy style...
...former high school science teacher, Leuze has been trying to launch a career with small opera companies in the New York area. "It usually blows someone's mind to hear me in full voice on the street," he says. Once, as he was approaching the climactic A-flat in the prologue to I Pagliacci, a bus stopped between him and his audience. Without missing a beat, he stepped into the bus, blasted out the Aflat, then hopped back onto the sidewalk as the startled driver and passengers rolled away...
...well, carried by caprice along informal circuits of such cities as Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans and Key West. A folk quartet called the Nee Ningy Band has also covered Africa and Western and Eastern Europe during its ten-year career. Consisting of fiddle, harmonica, bodhran (a flat goatskin drum) and penny whistle, the group takes its name from the sound the fiddle makes-nee ningy, nee ningy, nee ningy. Its members carry camping equipment, often stay in local homes. Says Violinist Rachel Maloney: "You learn to live with the insecurity, just as you learn to live with security...