Word: blathers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Theater. One can understand what impelled Adapter Neumann's strenuous and occasionally imaginative effort, since the book was, essentially, Waiting for Godot in its earliest and distinctly embryonic state. The two title characters (Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond) are as close as barstool buddies, and they stumble and blather about in a bleak inscape of metaphysical despair. Despite intermittent japery, they are triste, petulant atheists who resent the fact that they haven't found God in their Christmas stockings...
...sashes, brochures, luggage-strewn hotel lobbies, stackable ball room chairs, green baize tabletops, insulated plastic water pitchers, WELCOME banners, note-festooned message boards, firm handshakes, hearty guffaws, setups in the hospitality suite and dark circles under the eyes. The diagnosis: an insatiable urge to meet and greet, gather and blather with one's suppliers, customers, lodge members, old friends, perfect strangers, peers, inferiors and superiors. The cure: none yet discovered...
Such virtues, however, come smothered in blather and blarney. Donleavy has always been among the most mannered of writers, and his habits increasingly seem designed as distractions. He constructs paragraphs as if the Irish government had imposed a tax on verbs. Words...
...disciples when their monotheism threatened the economic health of Mecca, which in the 7th century A.D. was in the graven-image business-attracting pilgrims to the shrines of some 300 local gods. The tortures, exiles and triumphs of the Prophet's followers are accompanied by much pacifistic blather-at least in the version for infidels. The intent is to counteract the Western belief that Islam is a faith that comes bearing only a sword. Whatever one thinks of all this, it sure slows the picture down...
...like some prominent and embarassing tattoo his association with the hyper, dim-witted character of Ed in The Honeymooners. But here, like in Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto, he sheds that goofball image for a gritty grand-fatherliness. Tomlin is Tomlin, meanwhile: sensitive, talkative and--with all her blather about vibrations and kharmas--very, very funny. Yet what makes their two characters engaging and moving is the way they work together. If not a natural team, they both have become real pros and know how to make the audience believe in the kind of wacky bond that Tracy...