Word: banter
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...holds the picture together. Under Supermom's omnicompetence, there lurks the spirit of the larky girl who indeed ran the Gauntlet when she was old enough to know better and young enough not to give a damn. You can see that spunky, heedless young woman in her affectionate banter with her kids, in the sexiness of her response to Wade's come-ons, in the exultation with which she confronts the river's perils. This is smart and subtle acting and a gift that is above and beyond this movie's routine call to duty...
Rather than fill the obvious niche that E.T. has left open -- covering real news -- Extra has done the seemingly impossible: it has made Entertainment Tonight look like journalism. The new show has a pair of hosts, Arthel Neville + and Dave Nemeth, who giggle and banter even more shamelessly than E.T.'s anchors, and the show seems to work harder to hype even less. For a two-part interview with Sharon Stone, Extra devoted more time to teasing the story (countless shots of the infamous leg-crossing scene from Basic Instinct) than to Stone's perky but paltry "revelations." The show...
...robots, Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Trace Beaulieu) -- sit in front of a movie screen and, as First Spaceship to Venus or Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster or I Accuse My Parents unspools, they crack wise. That's about it, plus a sketch or two and some edgy banter with the mad scientists, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Beaulieu again) and TV's Frank (Frank Conniff), who supposedly have stranded Mike and the 'bots on the Satellite of Love deep in space and who send these cheesy movies as experiments to monitor Mike's mind...
...film has its share of scabrous banter -- recombinant four-letter words galore -- but the conceit of Clerks is that foul-mouthed Jersey louts have elaborate vocabularies and pensive personalities. When Randal isn't shocking the frail with a list of porn-movie titles, he is offering such bartender wisdom to Dante as this: "That seems to be the leitmotiv of your life, ever backing down." Insults cascade into insights; obscenity snowballs into philosophy. Keeping the mind alert and the tongue sharp -- for the eloquent jerks in Clerks, that's more than a defense mechanism. It's a vocation...
That's one problem with both of the NC-17 movies: their action and dialogue are natural, recreational, an expression of the characters' personalities. The sex is presented as play in The Advocate, the language as banter in Clerks. If they had been used in a threatening or violent fashion -- as a tool of melodrama, the way they are in most R-rated Hollywood pictures -- the board might have shrugged them...