Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...people standing on a fake-looking set barking jokes at each other. On Sports Night, the camera moves; people move. Like all sitcoms, it is shot before an audience, but with its sets and editing, it manages to stretch the genre's visual limitations. Forgoing the march-time comic pace of the typical sitcom, the show's dialogue includes a mix of throwaway lines, banter, long speeches and TV-techno talk, which provide a particular touch of ER-like authenticity...
...content, it is of course nothing new for a series to combine comic and serious elements. What makes Sports Night different is the kind of issues it takes up, which are more sinewy than the usual interpersonal mush (although the show has that too). Characters are confronted with challenges to their professional and personal integrity, as when Dana had to decide how the show should handle an interview with a star athlete who had committed an assault on one of its producers. (That episode ran without a laugh track, something the producers have wanted all along but the network agreed...
...mass extermination, but that brutal reality is never vividly presented. Indeed, the prisoners don't seem to see much of their jailers, who, when they do turn up, act as if they've drifted into this film from a Hogan's Heroes rerun--barking incomprehensible orders to cover their comic ineptitude...
...also fair to say that Benigni--whose self-love, if not his comic skills, could charitably be described as Chaplinesque, or perhaps more accurately as Robin Williamsish--devotes much of his film to peacetime passages overestablishing Guido's childlike yet shrewd, cheeky yet romantic character as a wise innocent, an idealized Everyman. His pursuit of his principessa, who is engaged to a local Fascist leader (and is sweetly played by Benigni's wife Nicoletta Braschi), and his casually farcical assaults on decorum and authority are, if you have a taste for simpleton comedy, inoffensive...
...efficiency, but without any formal teaching, taught themselves to speak their native tongue. And then in schools, they are forced to memorize and regurgitate and are certified by the rigid, demeaning, coercive, boring pseudo-academic institutions they attend. A few schools, by using only interesting material like newspapers, games, comic books, art, music and talk, have shown us how to stop schooling and start educating. They've eliminated formal assessment, stopped quizzing and pushed basic skills. ROBERT E. KAY Philadelphia...