Word: comicly
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Atkinson has muscles in his face most people aren't aware of. Every tweak, every twitch is expertly crafted with supremely labile comic expressiveness; he could conduct a symphony with his eyebrows. Watching that face react to preposterously inextricable situations that the rest of his body has created is a delight. Atkinson moves with an awkwardness that can only be described as graceful--an uncoordinated elan, a lithe clutziness. These qualities still exist in the movie, fortunately, but they have been dumbed down. There is more bathroom humor than there ever was in the TV show, and Bean must share...
...character of Bean is supposed to support. It's like having an hour-and-a-half long "Seinfeld" episode about something and expecting viewers to care sincerely about the daily pitfalls of the characters--pitfalls which are so endearing because they are everyday and unimportant. Bean takes Atkinson's comic mastery and confines it in a standard, sappy, Hollywood package, one with family values, emotional growth and other such sickening artifices. The film raises the appealing dumbness of Mr. Bean to an unwelcome and unintentional plateau of movie-dumbness with swirling layers of metadumbness that make for a confused...
...talents: the ability to play a number of extremely different characters, and the ability to make each of them as delightfully absurd as possible. The script itself a tight-laced tango of double entendred and hysterically ironic scenarios, could only be mastered by a group of actor with impeccable comic timing and greaversatility. Particularly notable are Jame A. Carmichael '01 as the dry Lt. Co-Korn; Michael P. Davidson '00 as the stereotypical Italian brother; Mattias Frey '01 as the timid Major Major Matthew E. Johnson '99 as the boomin Col. Cathcart; Ollie M. Lewis '00 as the dying Clevinger...
Yossarian himself is rarely given the opportunity to participate in the deft comic timing that is going on all around him, which only adds more humor to his plight. As Yossarian, Leach remains stoic and earnest, but inevitably boring compared to his neurotic comrades. Watching him grow increasingly frustrated at their madness gives the audience fodder for amusement rather than a plea for sympathy. Leach portrays the perfect Yossarian--a man who has as many cyclical complexes as those around him, but whose personality grows pale in comparison to the army-green circus going on around...
...mesmerized eyes. A potato warrior, two kitchen knives tied to its back, plunges down a ramp and a lazy tire hops aboard a tiny wheeled cart, only to glide a little further before hitting its target. The elaborate set-up is at once a marvel of makeshift precision and comic redundancy (just imagine a wheel riding a cart!), and these moments of transcendent anthropomorphism simultaneously account for the film's humor and its morbid undercurrent. Eventually the series will break down or burn out, and the redundancy of individual steps will seem an absurd observation in the context...