Word: carsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...which the U.S., Britain and West Germany are helping the white South African minority to retain political power with tactical nuclear weapons. To add injury to insult, Castle learns that the man who helped his wife escape from her country, a Communist agent and a close friend named Carson, has recently died in a South African prison, officially of pneumonia. (But understanding how Pretoria operates, Castle knows otherwise.) Castle may be cowardly, apolitical and jealous only of his own happiness, but this is finally too much...
...Greene's other novels, it is not any overwhelming personal sense of justice that prompts Castle to spill the "Uncle Remus" plans to the Russians. ("I don't know what justice means," Castle snaps at one point.) It is rather his lingering sense of gratitude toward his dead friend Carson, along with the requisite twinge of guilt, and his feeling that out of his love for Sarah he should help save her people from suffering. A Greene character would never make such a courageous gesture out of ideological conviction; although this is perhaps just as well, given all the harm...
...with mirrors, through an intriguing process called "joke-cloning." They assemble in the dank, tomb-like basement of Harvard's newly-egalitarian Hasty Pudding Club, and, armed only with a dog-eared copy of "Boy's Life" and two pirated video-cassettes of outlawed Johnny Carson monologues, set to work. Reviving a centuries-old tradition, they begin plucking young, impressionable lads from off the street and from the upstairs billiards room, and decking them out in wigs, cute tights and mirrors. They begin to parcel out the puns--"One to a customer, for starters"--and an amazing chain reaction begins...
...spiffily gotten-up, lively and reasonably humorous piece of light, if overlong, entertainment. Its authors did an admirable job of adapting their considerable skills to what impressed me as a surprisingly rigid and depressingly self-limiting format: Harvard may be a many-splendored place, but as Johnny Carson quickly learned about Southern California, it's only good for--tops--100 intrinsically funny words (like "Hot Breakfast," "Burbank," "Mather House," "Oxnard" and "premed") which can therefore be thrown right at audiences without the benefit of a joke-vehicle (i.e.--story-cum-punchline) and still elicit Big Laffs. Given that constraint...
...Robin Cook, who wrote the fast, enjoyable book on which the movie is based, goes on Johnny Carson, and instead of saying, "I wrote Coma to make some money and to have a bit of fun with people's fears about hospitals," he says, "I wrote Coma because I felt people should be made aware of the urgent need for organ donors, and of the emerging black market for body parts." Yeah, sure...