Word: contortions
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THIS PLOT PROVIDES the framework for the usual action--Popeye slugging his way through run-ins with Bluto and other assorted ruffians. The fight scenes underscore the limitations of the premise. Clever camera and stunt work not-withstanding, human beings simply cannot contort themselves the way cartoon figures can. Robin Williams can only cock his wrist a couple of times for the famous twister punch. As a result, the slapstick gains in immediacy but loses the necessary hyperbole...
...Wise Blood belongs to Huston and his star, Brad Dourif as Haze. Dourif was the stuttering Billy Bibbitt of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; he looks like a crazed Don Knotts. His eyes contort wildly, glaring unnervingly, distracting from his rigid nose and hard, flat mouth. Dourif's Haze is grotesque, a little man possessed by a shady demon. He believes in his Church Without Christ not with his soul--which is undeniably Christian--but with his body. It shakes with evangelical passion, with barely controlled violent passion capable of murder. And in an ultimate renouncement of Jesus...
...appearance, wrote scribes of the era, was "cadaverous," and there was something so supernatural about 19th century Violin Virtuoso Nicolo Paganini "that one looked for a glimpse of a cloven hoof or an angel's wing." Onstage, the maestro would often contort his body into bizarre stances. His tours de force, like playing a pizzicato accompaniment with his left hand while bowing with his right, prompted audiences to whisper that Paganini was in league with the devil. But alas, he was merely mortal, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The violinist, writes...
Talking to Diane Keaton is a bit like playing a record with an unmarked speed: it takes time to get synchronized. At the beginning she will hem and haw, whistle and giggle, mumble and fumble, shrug her shoulders and contort her face. She will start a sentence the way she might climb a tree, worried that the branches will crack or that she will climb too high and not be able to get back down. Gradually, as she gains confidence, the mumbles turn into words, the words into full-and even funny -sentences. "Diane is always totally surprised when people...
...made up their own myths as they went along. Grey, the weazy sycophant behind Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, certainly found his modern counter-parts in the New York film critics crowd, a bunch that seems to want to "Altmanify" the world, and did their damndest to verbally contort this pleasant but rambling work into a masterpiece...