Word: limber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LARGELY NEW YORK. Lanky, limber Bill Irwin, silent in this 70-minute Broadway sketchbook, owes much to Jacques Tati and Marcel Marceau, but gags about man's obsessive relations with machines still work in a Walkman world...
LARGELY NEW YORK. Lanky, limber Bill Irwin, silent in this 70-minute Broadway sketchbook, owes much to Jacques Tati and Marcel Marceau, but gags about man's obsessive relations with machines still work in a Walkman world...
Performance artist. New vaudevillian. Silent clown. However you label limber-jointed Bill Irwin, he is one of the most winsome presences in the American theater. In the sketchbook Largely New York, which opened on Broadway last week, he wears a top hat and spectacles, carries a white cane and resembles an elongated Jiminy Cricket. All around him are people he might befriend, if only he could break through their obsessive isolation with entertainment machines -- a Walkman, a boom box, a video camera, a TV monitor. Irwin himself carries a remote control, purportedly hooked up to the tiers of curtains onstage...
...churning world of dynamism, machine worship, speed and conflict. As the machines dated, so did some of the paintings. A work like Severini's Plastic Synthesis of the Idea "War," 1915 -- his response to the general mobilization of the French army, painted in Paris -- seems, with its antique gun limber and biplane wings, almost as nostalgic an image as a battle piece by Paolo Uccello. But others have not dated. In particular, the spiking and whorling of translucent mechanical forms in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, can be seen as one of the great pictorial images of our century...
...always apply to this movie. Every framed frame is beguiling, as befits a pioneering project made by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) and ace Animator Richard Williams. But not all the gags -- even those quoted from such Bugs Bunny classics as Falling Hare and Rabbit Seasoning -- have the limber wit of the cartoons that inspired them. Nor do the human actors add much. Hoskins, in a role for which Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray were considered, lacks their effortless star quality. He's more like an armor-plated Yosemite Sam, gruff and explodable. Only Christopher Lloyd, as the evil...