Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Strokests often excrutiatingly funny, but the playwright's intentions remain obscure. Leslie Glass writes dialogue as absurd as a cross between lonesco and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," but the one-liners and hilarious situations lead nowhere. As a satire on the American family, the play never succeeds on the level of Albee's American Dream although the relentless reinforcement of American stereotypes leads us to expect as much. But for black comedy Strokes can't be beaten...
...idea sounds prima facie absurd, which is exactly what the government would have us believe about the latest theory advanced for explaining the phenomenon of yellow rain. The government says the stuff is caused by Soviet chemical warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan which, if true, is an egregious violation of international norms and several existing treaties...
...Xuncaxes (Enrique's and Rosa's family) and their neighbors speak of "El Norte" in almost mystical tones. Yet what they actually chat about is quite mundane--flushable toilets, electricity, and cars: Good Housekeeping magazine is their window on the promised land. What makes their prosaic vision doubly absurd is the peaceful beauty of their own surroundings: the vivid, innocent colors of the Indians' clothing and buildings; the quivering flowers and butterflies which bespeak a continual breeze; the soothing strum of a villager's harp; and the background warbling of exotic birds...
...affair on a video monitor. As Max watches the professor propositioning Maggie to have sex with his new robot he is also watching a video-tape of the robot creation scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, while listening to an old blues tune called "Searchin' for My Love." This absurd overlapping of technology past and future with Max's discovery of the timeless facts of life lies at the core of the film's humor...
...life. And yet it draws the profile as it had not been drawn before. Not even the most hard-bitten viewer can contemplate this oeuvre without a degree of awe-a sensation not always identical with aesthetic pleasure. No doubt about it, Picasso painted many bad and some flatly absurd pictures at the end of his life. But the good ones are so good, and in such a weird way, that they utterly transfix the eye, while the drawings (and some of the vast outflow of etchings) possess an assurance, a sensuous ferocity that no other living artist could approach...