Word: offbeats
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...Register contains a lot of the bright, breezy writing of the sort found in the Wall Street Journal, which is not surprising since both Gartner and Executive Editor James Gannon are Journal alumni. Reporters are encouraged to write imaginatively about offbeat and humorous subjects. After two weeks in Cedar Rapids, for example, the new Register bureau chief filed a delightful yarn about how the city's street plan made it impossible to go north. This kind of creative license adds to the esprit de corps in the newsroom. Says Managing Editor David Witke: "For many of the people...
...influences. One hopes so. The operas brought to Washington are all great works; but they are also cultural totems, safe and certified, and this reflects a basic conservatism in the company's outlook. It would have been refreshing if one production had been set aside for something offbeat, to show what the company can do in a more unusual direction. The great Viennese tradition, after all, is made up of a succession of creative figures who transformed it even as they were perpetuating it. Mahler once burst out to his recalcitrant colleagues: "What you theater people call your tradition...
...heir to such past camp masters as the '50s Hollywood director Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession) and the '60s Warhol disciple Paul Morrissey (Flesh). But unlike his predecessors, Fassbinder does not recognize the limits of the form. Camp is fine for movies that want to trade exclusively in offbeat humor and florid emotions. In Maria Braun, Fassbinder makes the serious mistake of try ing to convey ideas...
Both the honk and those extrasensory ears belong to James Brooks, and if he breaks up at his own jokes, he has a good excuse: Brooks is one of the funniest writers in television history. His offbeat humor animated The MTM Show, a TV icon; it is the moving force behind a hit from last season, Taxi; and it is now making The Associates into perhaps the brightest, if not the highest rated, sitcom of the new season. Movie audiences can also sample his wit in his first film, Starting Over, which stars Jill Clayburgh, Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen...
...urge to call up the Secretary of the Treasury and tell him, "I just tried out two of your dimes on Times Square, and they worked like a dream. It looks like another great day for the coinage!" He hears a radio news broadcast and has another offbeat response: "The newscaster spoke with a barking sort of hilarity, as though life were a comical steeplechase, with unconventional steeds and hazards and vehicles involved. He made me feel that even I was a contestant - in a bathtub drawn by three aardvarks, perhaps...