Word: deadpan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...speaking of Leonard, Inherent Vice is like nothing so much as an Elmore Leonard novel with metaphysical aims. It has the same deadpan dialogue, the same lowlife panache, the same Venice Beach-to-Vegas locales that Leonard has touched down in. But the earthbound author of Get Shorty doesn't go in for Pynchon's lyrical riffs about the immemorial forces that pull the world's secret levers and keep the dispossessed of all kinds - the poor, the nonwhite, the nonconforming - from coming into their...
...Like the 2001 astronauts, Sam has a chatty computer, named Gerty, which comes equipped with a metallic arm, as in the arcade claw games, three expressions (smiley-face, frowny-ace and deadpan) and the would-be soothing voice of Kevin Spacey. Like Socrates or a rabbi or a shrink, Gerty annoyingly answers questions with questions. (Sam, agitated: "Am I a f---in' clone?" Gerty, trying to deflect the issue: "Are you hungry?") Unlike HAL-9000 from the Kubrick movie, however, this computer is not totally the slave of his programmers. Sometimes it will aid Sam as he rises from impotence...
...Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman) The 60-year history of occupied Palestine as seen by Suleiman and his parents. Sounds glum, eh? Not so: its vignettes are absurd, poignant and subversively funny in a film that's a deadpan delight...
...Every Pixar production involves some 300 artists, but the actors come first; they have to, because the dialogue is recorded to guide the animators. Asner, 79, who used his slow burn brilliantly on the great Mary Tyler Moore '70s sitcom, had the gruffness and deadpan comic timing to bring Carl to vocal life. As Docter recalls, "When we first met Ed and showed him a small sculpture we'd made of Carl, he said [growling], 'I don't look anything like that.' And we thought, O.K., this is gonna be perfect." Docter and Peterson then tailored the dialogue...
...made room for Mendoza managed to ignore two men who are surely among the most daring, original and accomplished filmmakers in the competition, or anywhere else: Spain's Pedro Almodóvar, with his Penélope Cruz romantic drama Broken Embraces, and Palestine's Elia Suleiman, whose endearing, deadpan The Time That Remains tells, in sour or poignant vignettes, the history of his family and his sundered country. Resnais, whose Wild Grass shows the legendary 86-year-old director at the top of his puckishly anarchic form, won a Life Achievement Award - which is Palme-speak for Thanks...