Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Allen deactivating the fuses of an audience's most fiendishly paranoiac fantasies. But there's much more of the awareness that the world's crazy, not him. His savvy comes from the city rat's instinct for survival. He knows that the witty things he says are idiotic and absurd, but he also knows that they are a defense mechanism. In 2173 he can roll sophisticated eyes at the lifestyle of the futuristic zombies that surround him, no matter how much they intimidate him. He's more cynical than they are, which becomes a heroic trait, a kind of defiance...
...with the straights who surround him. Allen is always lost in a sea of normal people, and, like the best comic actors, makes them appear ridiculous by his very presence. He doesn't even have to try to do this here, because the absurd futuristic lifestyle doesn the work for him. Even the handsome musclebound machos are no threat. They seem doubly stupid, because Allen by definition is the only bright person in the movie...
...evening consists of a fiendishly clever talkfest. Some of it is bantering class raillery, some of it Shavian disquisition-as when Mrs. Rogers delivers a monologue on the advantages of a strictly segregated society-and some of it prime non sequiturish zaniness out of the theater of the absurd. When Eugene goes into a huff, for in stance, and threatens to leave the apartment, Mrs. Rogers tells him that he must not go: "The time is 3 in the morning . . . streets are filled with Australians...
...salad recipe. The playing out of these situations takes us through a beauty contest for cows, the trauma of a lost barometer, a Firesign Theatre-type game show called "Justify Your Existence" and a Kafkaesque IQ test. The show does have a plot, however disguised it is in these absurd digressions...
...President or because their idle minds have been overwhelmed by one of his sentiment-laden speeches. For the man who used law-and-order as the pillar of his first campaign to now become the symbol of lawlessness is inexcusable hypocrisy, and to retain faith in him is absurd...