Word: scripted
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Speed Reading. During recreation hours, members of the student crew-who range in age from 21 to 28, have about the same physical and psychological qualifications required for astronauts-go to extreme lengths to avoid boredom. They have practiced script-lettering and speed reading (one has progressed from 350 words to 4,400 words per minute), passed questionnaires and notes in bottles to the experiment team outside, and performed trumpet and harmonica duets...
...close, Hope's script had him intone the news that "rioting and indifference" are equal sins; he was also made to congratulate the industry on coming to grips with contemporary problems' and abandoning the old cliches. In doing so, he reminded audiences that, as the old bromides go, there are always new ones to take their place. The evening offered many reminders that this was the end of the Academy Awards' fourth decade. Having reached supposedly mature middle age, the Academy might do itself and everyone else a favor by abandoning its annual orgy of puffery...
This 99-minute bash was filmed with a great effort at spontaneity; Sellers and Producer-Director Blake Edwards worked with a minimal script and checked each scene with instant playback on video tape. The result of the ad-lib approach, however, is not a swinging riot of originals but a parade of old reliables. A drunken waiter weaves around with his tray of drinks, the toy arrow with a suction cup on its end finds its way to someone's' forehead as inevitably as the foaming detergent finds its way into the swimming pool...
Director Peter Schandorff's production of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist exercise in British suburbia fails to get laughs that are usually pretty hard to avoid with this play. His actors, apparently unaware of much of the script's more subtle humor, work against the lines with an indiscriminate cuteness. Two of the funniest sequences, the exchange of coincidences between a married couple not sure they are married and the fireman's ridiculous tale of "the Headcold," fall dead. In the latter case, the actor actually reads the speech, stifling the spontaneity that is the crux of the joke. Most...
...only human in the film is HAL 9000, the super-computer that runs the ship and exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and Poole. The script development is, again, linear: the accepted relationship of man using machine is presented initially, then discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two (HAL, for example, asks Bowman to show him some sketches, then comments on them). This equilibrium where men and machine perversely share characteristics shatters only when HAL mistakenly detects a fault in the communications system. The HAL computers cannot make mistakes and a confirmation of the error...