Word: ad-lib
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...unlike most performers, he has enough fresh material to make each of the appearances included in the movie seem as if he was giving a new speech every night. His jolly, intimate style sells every zinger to audiences who would have bought his line anyway. He's also an ad-lib adept. When one clutch of Catholic protesters recites the Our Father and Hail, Mary aloud during a rally, Moore asks them, "You're not gonna do the whole rosary, are ya?" and then the more pertinent, "What did Jesus bomb?" The movie leaves little doubt that if Kerry...
...Pack's idea, such as it was, was to do a movie in a friendly town (Vegas, Chicago) or familiar genre (caper, Western, gangster movie) and apply to it a bit of the ad-lib roguery they brought to their nightclub gigs. The slapdash nature of the script, performances and production was meant to reflect the informal, what-the-hell, let's-pretend-we're-having-a-ball impulse that led to their making. These were movies that loosened the tuxedo tie and the tongue to provide an intoxicated if not intoxicating diversion. They were loosy-goosy for the time...
...sure, Short also trots out his expected gallery of TV characters - the nerdy Ed Grimley, the old-codger songwriter Irving Cohen - and an ad-lib segment in which Short's most tiresome character, Jiminy Glick, does an interview with a surprise guest from the audience (Channing Frye of the New York Knicks the night I was there) nearly brings the show to a stop. For that matter, the whole self-referential, show-about-doing-a-show conceit (see The Drowsy Chaperone and off-Broadway's [Title of Show]) is in danger of becoming a clich?...
...goon" line is not just a clever ad-lib on John's part. It shows that Champagne is attentive to the arcana of the Beatles' biography. In their youth they were fans of BBC Radio's The Goon Show, whose stars, including Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, all recorded comedy albums produced by George Martin. It was his connection to the Goons, not his work on jazz albums, that first endeared Martin to John and the others. Another number in the show, "Eleanor Rigby," which takes place in the wreckage of postwar Liverpool, has a cratered, post-nuclear look reminiscent...
...created. Few Hollywood directors have such a distinct signature--or, rather, two of them. One part of Soderbergh's brain makes can't-miss caper films and weepie dramas (Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) with the town's priciest talent. Another part is indelibly indie: he will shoot an ad-lib HBO series about lobbyists (K Street), or remake a mystical Russian sci-fi art film (Solaris). Not everything works, but it's more than cool that he tries...