Word: stand-up
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...imitation is the highest form of flattery. But Allen is accomplished, and succeeds at wearing the multifarious hats of director and writer much better than Brickman. His collaborator has the jokes, the ideas and the talents to be a major movie-maker. But right now, Brickman is a stand-up comedian with an audience that laughs at every third joke...
Sellers answers questions with physical enactments and stand-up impressions, Burton found. "He thinks with his body and voice as well as his mind." When asked to explain the process by which he created the anonymous voice of Chance the gardener for the film Being There, the actor "began to transform himself into a computer," Burton says. "He pretended he was a machine reading a tape of several voices and rejecting one after another until the right voice registered." Over the course of the interviews, Sellers managed to imitate human voices as well, ranging from Lord Snowdon's uncle...
...repeatedly whack it over the head. (Such is the sad fate of many who work in musical comedy.) So every half-baked idea in the movie is reinforced ten times, from the futility of sex to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of dying (which appear in the stand-up comic's monologue and are illustrated in Gideon's hospital stay...
...third level is Fantasy, expressed in over-blown production numbers. At one point in the movie, Gideon watches from his hospital bed as a pretentious television critic tears apart The Stand-up, rating it half-a-balloon out of a possible four. Among her criticisms: "Razzle-dazzle obliterates story." Well, in All That Jazz, Fosse has integrated the razzle-dazzle into the movie's themes with solemn thoroughness. It's a clever idea to present a choreographer's nightmares as gaudy, Dantesque versions of Busby Berkeley, but the movie has four of these sequences and they're not short. (They...
...beforehand is White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson, or "Sudden Sam," as he is sometimes called because his taped reports come in so close to deadline. Today, for instance, Donaldson is so busy tracking down news of a possible hostage settlement with Iran that he does not finish taping his stand-up report from the White House lawn until two minutes before air time. Still, Donaldson has discussed his reports and has gone through a kind of verbal editing earlier...