Word: contortionings
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Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like, Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV- influenced musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert Graves as the young artist...
...romance, conventional boy meets girl. In hopes of matching Webber's profits, today's producers imitate his preference for way-out concepts, the loopier the better. Part of the reason such masters as Lerner and Loewe made it look so easy is that they did not feel compelled to contort themselves and their stories. Maybe they knew something worth rediscovering...
There Belushi blossomed into an archangel of the grotesque. His face-round and blandly menacing in repose, like a middle-level Mafioso's-could contort into semblances of slashing samurai, killer bees, Joe Cocker or Marlon Brando. Belushi's body, stolid as a '53 Studebaker, could erupt in spasms of grace. As one of the Blues Brothers, the blue-eyed soul group that brought Belushi a platinum record and a big-budget movie, this slab in a black suit would suddenly turn a series of split-second cartwheels, like a hippo Baryshnikov. Belushi was the ideal comic...
...leather and chains, gauze and spangles, disco Spandex and Southern belle white, they hang from the ceiling and leer out of doorways. Their cigarette smoke makes haze of the atmosphere; their singing and screaming and chanting and ranting produce an unholy, stupefying, din. They are painted like puppets; they contort and disport to uncanny visual effect...
Then there's Benjamin Pierce, another scanner, who has managed to keep his sanity by expressing his scanner-related anxiety in his sculpture. The scenes at Pierce's exhibition and in his private studio are the film's most powerful moments. Expressionist figures contort and silently scream, communication more about the life of a scanner than the rest of the movie. Cronenberg understands that kind of horror. He can translate the internal and intangible into something real and terrifying...