Word: antics
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...last person who might be expected to try is Brooks, who began his career cooking up outrageous interludes for Sid Caesar, consorted with Carl Reiner in the creation of the splendidly garrulous 2,000 Year Old Man (2,013 on his last birthday), and made a group of antic movies (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein) that needed dialogue for life's blood. Brooks' favorite weapon was the non sequitur (mankind's greatest invention, according to the 2,000 Year Old Man, was Saran Wrap). He also excelled at illogical logic and brassy, daffy asides, like the hermit...
Starving Actors. McGuane apparently hoped to bring off an antic, melancholy character study about Key West drifters and grifters. It turns out hopelessly muddled. Characters cut up, act cute, come on strong ("That's not the wind-it's souls in purgatory"), then have a good laugh on themselves. No body seems to have any connection to anyone else. They all stumble along in the drenching sun, not bothering about much of anything. The general drift-and one needs a memory of the novel even for this-is that a man makes his bones not by cheating death...
...Antic Hell. Imagine the two codgers' surprise when Joan of Arc (Nancy Snyder) arrives in blazing armor with sword and pennant at the ready. She tells them that her mission is to recruit two of every species, including them, for a spaceship trip to heaven. After that, all antic hell breaks loose. Instant magic occurs: appearances and disappearances, deaths, resurrections, changes of identity, autokinetic kitchen utensils and finally Joan's celestial levitation. Director Marshall W. Mason moves all the UFOs and the splendid cast at a rocketing pace. The words are manic-puns, syllogisms, answer-and-question games...
...similarly novel footage: home movies of F.D.R. horsing around with his family during a swimming party; the Hindenburg, with a swastika painted on its tail, floating peacefully between the skyscrapers of Manhattan; Los Angeles, dawdling about growing, still a transposed prairie town set down in the middle of an antic oasis. There are also, intercut with fact, many of the best and balmiest fictions of the time: James Cagney, ever brash and streetwise, pushing mugs around; King Kong poking his head up through the el tracks...
...those belonging to the pastoral life of Bohemia, it is the Autolycus of Fred Gwynne that stands high above the rest, His rubbery face and his antic movements are a joy and though he is a liar and a thief (like his protonym in Greek mythology), one can't help loving the rascal, Gwynne has a way of taking lines that are obscure on the page and making them seem perfectly natural. He can also put over Shakespeare's puns--as when, in a colloquy about a three-voice song,he turns a ballad scroll into a phallus while assuring...