Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bogdanovich's movies (like What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon) are so smugly derivative of other, older directors that they seem virtually selfless. In his various media appearances, he comes on either as an unwired stand-up comic or an eager foil for Cybill Shepherd, his well-publicized but untalented girl friend. One has to go back to Targets, Bogdanovich's exciting first feature, to remember that he was a director of talent and promise...
...schizophrenic selves of one person made for a rich interplay. Melvoin has consciously chosen to differentiate very clearly the two main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious and without a hint of self-parody. Stoppard had meant the pair to be anonymous, not-too-bright...
...cast, in its entirety, consists of Joe Masiell, who sounds, as convention demands, as if he were chanting from the bottom of a rain barrel; Mort Schuman, who comes on tousled and puppyish and is presumably available for comic relief; and Elly Stone. Miss Stone is what Variety might call a diminutive thrush. She is at pains to assure us, however, that she is mighty of spirit. In every song she gives it all she's got. In her case, this amounts to two wide eyes, a loud voice and a battery of emotional gestures that range from wringing...
Beckett completed this terse comic novel (in French) in 1946, then shelved it, perhaps because it retained too much luggage from traditional fiction: plot, ambulatory characters, glimmers of recognizable settings and human haunts. In Waiting for Godot, which he wrote soon after, Beckett said good riddance to such trappings and began the task that has occupied him ever since: willfully writing himself into a corner where there is only room enough for the mind to contemplate itself. He is the king of solipsists...
...doubters, Friedman's first album, Sold American (1973) proved that he was both authentically country and authentically Jewish. It amply demonstrated his ludicrous comic talents, in addition to his considerable musical abilities. Humor is almost impossible to find in country music, and musical talent comparable to Friedman's is only slightly less rare. Those characteristics immediately distinguished Friedman from the general run of country artists, and his first album raised him a notch higher still. Sold American was a unique montage, mixing outrageous humorous songs with serious, sensitive ballads, plus a number. "Ride 'Em Jewboy," that despite its flippant title...