Word: antic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters - to return to the gaiety of Moscow - is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with antic energy and force. Serban adroitly manages a welter of themes: aimless ambition, futile romance, grotesque distortions of honor, loneliness in a crowd. The play becomes the raucous comedy that Chekhov always insisted it was and hurtles exuberantly toward a triumph of optimism over experience. Among a solid cast, including Jeremy...
...voice. The disembodied sound has a life of its own, like Gogol's nose, appearing on the moon, at the circus and even at school, where it spouts wisdom like "Alaska is the President of Brazil." David Lord Porter's whimsical prose and David Macaulay's antic drawings combine to sustain an air of credible lunacy to the indisputable punch line: "Be careful what you throw away. You might want it back...
...conveys solidity without stolidity, commonsensicality without priggishness. It is the sort of self-effacing work that often, unfairly, gets overlooked in the movies. That is especially so when paired with a performance like Matt Dillon's as Tex. He's the kind of youngster who blends the antic and the stormy and makes it come out pure lopsided charm. No one has more accurately captured the mercurial quality of adolescence than he has, with anger, rebelliousness, gallantry, goofiness all tumbled together to create a confused, wholly believable vulnerability. When an assistant principal suspends him for loading the typing...
Monsignor Quixote, Greene's 22nd novel, is his most surprising, an intoxicating mix of all the previous themes, antic, religious and somber. His heroes have tumbled, almost unchanged, from Cervantes' 17th century classic. A Vatican prelate, whose Mercedes is miraculously "repaired" by Padre Quixote (who simply fills the empty gas tank) grants a boon: "There are more sinners among the bourgeois than among peasants ... go forth like your ancestor Don Quixote on the highroads of the world...
...device of shamming insanity has a long tradition going back at least as far as Oceanus' advice to Aeschylus' Prometheus: "To simulate madness is the secret of the wise," Walken's "antic disposition" is correctly a disguise. He appears barefoot, wearing a muddied monk's gown with cowl. He takes things pretty fat, however, In the Nunnery Scene, where he not only berates Ophelia but even knocks her down and slaps her. Later he shinnies up a pole to give a speech...