Word: comic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Director Marc Webb (a vide-auteur making his first feature) gives every scene a bang for comic or emotional effect; as he cuts away you can hear the rim shot. The songs that spray-paint the sound track, as well as the myriad movie references, are mostly antique (1960s to '80s); Webb wants old people to like this young-lovers film. Wants everyone...
...That's sex in a very PG, Potter fashion. The "snogging" engaged in by the 16-year-olds has a chaste, comic choreography, as if kissing were a minuet of locked lips. When Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his pal Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) talk furtively about the girls they're mad for, it's to acknowledge vaguely that they have "nice skin." And when our hero's notoriety makes the Hogwarts girls just wild about Harry, his friend-girl Hermione (Emma Watson) can't suppress a little sulfur puff of rancor. "She's only interested in you," Hermione snits about...
...find sources for Baron Cohen's comic method in a lot of places. He's a great fan of Peter Sellers, and one Sellers role in particular hovers over everything Baron Cohen does - Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman...
...performance of some kind, even if they didn't always get the joke. Baron Cohen takes his act out into the wider world, all for the fun of proving what fools these mortals be. That includes the mortals called Ali G, Borat and Brüno - Baron Cohen's comic characters are as dumb and deplorable as the people they mock. Ali G is a self-deluding white guy who yearns to be a black rapper. Borat is a rube and an anti-Semite. This is why the inevitable debate over whether the new film is a critique of homophobia...
...movie's main problem was that many found it an unnecessary addition to the canon, with the primary plot strenuously exerting itself to achieve familiar challenges and triumphs. Only the unrelated, subsidiary scenes with Scrat the squirrel and his foxy new inamorata Scratte showed any comic pizazz. (These scenes were created by a different story team.) With the speed of Road Runner, the karma of Wile E. Coyote and, this time, the romantic obsession of Pepé Le Pew, Scrat is a walking, stalking lexicon of characters created by the immortal Chuck Jones. Blue Sky, the Ice Age studio, should...