Word: deadpan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...changes of character do justice to the often excellent acting. Only Page Leong (Nina and Masha) really seems comfortable with the constant transitions, managing to define and distinguish her two roles without overacting. Shishir Kurup solves this conundrum by hamming up Sorin so that he can play Taper/Trigorin with deadpan nonchalance. Christopher Liam Moore, on the other hand, makes little distinction at all between Cam/Konstantin and Simon/Medviedenko. As with other aspects of the play, enormous promise, here in the form of fine acting, is ultimately undermined by taking dramatic conceits like these schizoid duos...
...impressive since it is his first appearance in a Harvard production. Padraic O'Reilly, coming off of a less-than-impressive performance as the Professor in Ionesco's "The Lesson" at the Ex earlier this year, does an excellent job as Sebastian, the lead role. He has a great, deadpan sense of humor, and his serious voice, reminiscent of Jim Dial from the TV show "Murphy Brown," makes him perfect for his role as the idolized older brother...
...when MST3K made its network debut, so did the Kids in the Hall, the Toronto quintet noted for their daft, deadpan playlets about modern domesticity--and for their fondness for women's frocks. From these five young men (David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson) now comes the inevitable feature film, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. This movie, borrowing the plot of the 1951 Alec Guinness comedy The Man in the White Suit; is about a "happy drug" that makes everyone miserable. Bad news for the Kids: the movie (directed by Kevin Makin) will have...
...thick with pieties about American virtue and the maintenance thereof, it is useful to be reminded that America's private life has always been a lot more entertaining than its public life. The instrument of our deliverance from this year's cant and hypocrisy is a deadpan, dead-on movie called Flirting with Disaster. In it an earnest young fellow named Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller), who has been raised by adoptive parents, sets out to find his birth parents. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the former are, respectively, a screeching bundle of nerves (Mary Tyler Moore...
...doing hysteria in a narrow range, and Buscemi scores as a sick goofus whom one witness IDs as "funny-lookin'--more than most people even." There's enough gore to make this a Mystery Violence Theater. After some superb mannerist films, the Coens are back in the deadpan realist territory of Blood Simple, but without the cinematic elan. Fargo is all attitude and low aptitude. Its function is to italicize the Coens' giddy contempt toward people who talk and think Minnesotan. Which is, y'know, kind of a bad deal...