Word: clowns
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Robert Benchley once divided the world into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who do not. Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, Satyricori) is firmly in the first category. In his new film, The Clowns, Fellini separates mankind into two classic species of fool: Pierrot and Auguste. Pierrot is the familiar circus clown in floppy white and conical hat, elegant and haughty. The clown Auguste is an eternal tramp, crumpled, drunken and rebellious...
PEOPLE in period costumes drift onto the stage. They start playing games, tag and such. A few laughs. Young, happy smiles. Meaningful interaction; instant commune. What, this pseudo-Grotowskian exercise crap, this is HARPO? But wait, that clown drooling into the bucket, the increasingly precise blocking pattern, the scene titles, then the impeccable cockney accents; this is pure Larry Senclick, the master of the rococo basics, Harvard's exponent of technical theatricality, a man who has an amazing talent for layering upon any script a tremendous variety of gimmicks, jokes, and cheap bits, and proceeding to hit them so hard...
Some big lights of the movies were hiding under bushels. For Jerry Lewis it was a bushel of clown makeup, which disguised his identity as he brought down the house at Paris' Cirque d'Hiver benefit for old and ailing showfolk. And when Ringmaster Maria Callas announced who the clown really was, the house came down all over again. For Jerry is an important personage in France, an actor whose films are seriously studied. Lewis says he is even thinking of moving to Paris-"a good place to come if you're feeling low." For Bette Davis...
Precision and Balance. Chance's resemblance to Voltaire's Candide ("We must cultivate our garden") and even to Buster Keaton's deadpan clown is fairly obvious. Despite the implausibility of the plot, the precision and balance of Kosinski's laconic prose, and his ability to animate a character who actually has no character at all, make Being There much more than the heavyhanded satiric fairy tale it might appear to be. More than an antihero, Chance is a non-character-the ultimate spectator-who reflects Kosinski's concern about the future of free will...
...Groove Tube's saving-grace exception to this kind of tired and often insulting joke is a brilliantly conceived and brilliantly performed take-off on kiddie-shows, "Ko-Ko the clown," Ko-Ko squeals and prances his way through the usual Saturday morning routines until "Make-Believe Time," when he tells the boys and girls to make sure that all the "big people" are out of the room. When Make Believe Time finally gets started, Ko-Ko takes off his rubber nose, lights a cigarette, matter-of-factly announces "We have a request from Ricky Allen of Maplewood, New Jersey...