Word: antics
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There is a vital difference between black humor and antic violence. Dark comedy requires a point of view, plus a consistent thread of absurdity that allows the audience to suspend belief. Writer-Cartoonist Jules Feiffer does not lack a point of view, but in his first screenplay, Little Murders, the thread of absurdity snaps so often that the film becomes little more than a succession of insane horrors...
...Hardly, Watson. My Private Life is directed by one Billy Wilder, a Vi ennese. From such a man one has the right to expect either gothica, like Sun set Boulevard, or antic farce, such as Some Like It Hot. Instead, we are presented with what future critics will call "Some Like It Tepid," a listless ac count of ourselves v. the Kaiser's agents. Moreover, it portrays me as inept. A lady twists me 'round her finger." "Mmmmm...
...familiar and beloved Alice is here, looking like a slightly tattered Tenniel illustration, and the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts, and the Cheshire Cat-all the fond friends of generations of children. But in this Alice, the prattling antic chums from childhood cast shadows that are dark, deep and unsettling. The shadows invade the characters and dye them in the colors of Freud, and Jung, and Kafka, and Dali, and Antonin Artaud, who conceived the Theater of Cruelty. Innocence has been lost, assuredly, but a revelation has been gained as the audience is taken on a journey through...
...footlight lecture seems to be Vonnegut's forte, and the jawbone is his only weapon. Fortunately, it seems to be the funniest bone in his body. His sense of the absurdity of existence is quite antic and acute, though prevailingly collegiate, as epitomized in his title which features an innocent and irrelevant mite, Wanda June (Ariane Munker), who has been translated into heaven by a homicidal ice cream truck. In the role of the anti-hero hero, Kevin McCarthy is splendid. McCarthy has always been an actor with thought behind an ingratiating personality and imperishable good looks, and that...
...Kora in Hell" contains much literary criticism. "Spring and All" is partly inverse-and often in prose-poetry. The Great American Novel was one of the first of the anti-novels. Perversely antic, it mixes all sorts of oddments, including furniture-store ads and letters to the Board of Public Utility Commissioners of the State of New Jersey. It has everything except a plot, though Williams claimed a narrative line "in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love with a Mack truck." The Descent of Winter is the most multiform of the experiments, including poetry...