Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Still, the friendly man from Grand Rapids has not let the White House go to his head. He would never experiment-as Richard Nixon briefly did -with dressing up the guards in comic-opera uniforms in the hope of evoking grandeur in the European manner...
...things as they really are, events as they really occurred, in all their beauty, in all their terror, in all their pathos. In this sense, Idi Amin Dada is documentary at its worst, a combination of cheap shots, superficial political commentary, and cultural racism, which results in a meaningless comic portrait of a genocidal dictator. A Swiss director, Barbet Schroeder, took a crew to Uganda in 1974, after having received express permission to do a film portrait of the Ugandan President, who had assumed power in a coup d'etat...
...blend of energy, delicacy and a Toscanini-like instinct for the dramatic jugular. Even better, perhaps, was his mercurial handling two nights later of Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella). This work is chamber music for the opera house and easily the high point of the composer's comic style. Abbado has that style in his bones...
...direction contemporary American movies have taken. Despite the functional presence of actors, the cars are the true heroes. Romantic interludes are represented by automobiles pulling up alongside each other at midnight on a long stretch of highway. Car crashes must do double duty: they serve as both spectacle and comic relief. This film, as mechanical as a lube job, gives the distinct impression that it could have done without characters completely. A good thing that people are still required to get cars started and keep them on the road. Otherwise, Rolls-Royce and Ferrari would have been battling for billing...
...addition, Bourjaily does not always sense when his powers of invention are flagging. Some of the interpolated tales are simply dull. Others are tricked out with bad mannerisms. One limps along in rhymed couplets. Another makes extensive-and pointless-use of comic-strip balloons filled with dialogue. A young black performer talks and thinks in a free-associating patois lifted and badly fumbled from Finnegans Wake...