Word: comically
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film that has more going for it than its star. Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting) and Screenwriter Allan Burns (cocreator of TV's original Mary Tyler Moore Show) have constructed a romantic comedy that, for all its contrivances, offers an indecent amount of emotional and comic satisfaction...
...Lane's level by the end. The adults are just as good. Arthur Hill plays the same understanding stepfather he did in The Champ, but here he has the chance to bring the character to life. Sally Kellerman, as Lane's snotty mom, has her first comic field day since...
...rich variety of grays painstakingly rendered by Cinematographer Gordon Willis), it announces at once that it intends to be different from the general run of movies. Still, the picture induces howls of laughter in the opening reels, raising expectations that we are again simply going to see the superb comic character whom Allen has been developing since the early '60s. After a while, however, the raucousness dies down. The movie never ceases to be funny, but it starts to be something more. In the end, by administering a series of steadily intensifying shocks of recognition, silence in the theater...
...became a Moonie. She works for the William Morris Agency now." In that throwaway speech he has captured the archetypal odyssey of our time. Wistful questings, the dopey cons with which our society too often responds, the inevitable end in materialism?they are all there in that ingeniously compressed comic moment...
Allen will be in his new film, which begins shooting in September. He hopes the movie will go "deeper in both comic and serious directions" than Manhattan. "I want to make a film that is stylized and very offbeat. I want to try being funny without jokes, to rely less on dialogue and try to tell the story in images more." Once again, audiences will see some emulation of Ingmar Bergman, his favorite director. "Bergman amazes me in part because he tells intellectual stories, and they move forward for endless amounts of time with no dialogue...