Word: clever
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Last fall, the show drew crowds with two people together in the Bic or the Square or Joe's Bar--a single theme, clever dialogue, and an intellectual's slap-stick. Borrowing heavily now from the Mort Sahl throw-away lines and the California humor of the Fireside Theater, the new sketches weave in third and fourth parts for stage interlopers, creating a more expansive humor. Dropping in an outsider's irrelevancies make a situation comedy less staged...
Second, Cassavetes affronts us with something that is cleverly planned to look spontaneous, but is not spontaneous at all. Throughout the movie, we feel like voyeurs, guilty, but we are are not voyeurs. In Faces, this kind of phoniness becomes obvious after a while, and we are ambivalent about what we are watching. All we can say at first is, "Why, isn't that Cassavetes clever! It looks so real!" But the reasons it looks so real are its technical sloppiness, its planned spontaneity (which might work if we could not see through it eventually), and its mundane subject...
...surface, Stoppard has devised an astoundingly clever theatrical trick. We see only the few scraps of Hamlet that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern see. Since they see so little, Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia and the rest become merely bit parts in Stoppard's play. We see a mammoth tragedy from the worst possible vantage point, and what little of Shakespeare remains in the play seems ridiculous and funny in this context...
GYORGY LIGETH LUX AETERNA (Deutsche Grammophon). Moviegoers may be familiar with Ligeti's score from its use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it accompanies the discovery of the monolith on the moon. The music is not conceived stereophonically but, like a clever piece of audible op art, achieves that effect from its dense-textured 16-part counterpoint, which seems to shimmer around its source in concentric waves. As an exercise in the deceptive qualities of pure sound, it is an awesome tour de force...
...Chance has called this process "equilibration"-defined by Fox as "the ability to control and to time responses, to understand the consequences of one's actions." The foolish peripheral male obeyed only his hormones, invaded the dominant male's harem and was either killed or ostracized. The clever male restrained this impulse and intelligently awaited a fruitful opportunity to topple, replace or succeed the Sultan...