Word: cleverer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thursday, February 20 HE'S YOUR DOG, CHARLIE BROWN (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Charlie's clever canine will never go homeless. Repeat...
...Fellini. In the final analysis, it is his resolute humanity that breathes so wonderfully from this new film, a simple sincerity in dealing with the difficulty and complexity of being human. He brings to bear in Shame an intelligence that is in no way contrived or self-indulgently clever, for he has the confidence of an honest...
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...