Word: deadpan
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...rarely hits the road. Sofia Coppola has a witty touch with dialogue that sounds improvised yet reveals, glancingly, her characters' dislocation. She's a real mood weaver, with a gift for goosing placid actors (like Johansson, who looks eerily like the young James Spader) and mining a comic's deadpan depths. Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn...
...When Lewis died last week at the age of 95, the world remembered him for the seamless polish of his prose, the quiet subversion of his deadpan wit and, perhaps, for the fortitude, stoicism and sense of curiosity that had once been Britain's best contribution to the world-at-large. Yet those of us in Asia owe him a particular debt for his two post-war books, A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth, which caught Vietnam, Laos and Burma as they will never be seen again. Even more than in his novels, in his study of the Mafia...
Houellebecq is that eminent specimen of literary animal, the deadpan desperado. (Think William Burroughs, but more readable.) The narrator of Platform, also named Michel, works for the French Ministry of Culture. A nobody-in-particular who has made his peace with that, Michel has a gift for loathing so nasty-funny he could be British and a faith in the groin as the fountain of all contentments. Even masturbation he surrounds with a beatific glow. "I gently emptied my testicles...
...public servant. Though hardly by choice, Aoshima and his colleagues spend more time tracking down stolen receipts for their expense reports, angling for better-subsidized lunches and ferrying their bosses to golf tournaments than catching crooks. Yet the Bayside movies aren't farces; they walk a tightrope between deadpan humor and serious drama. Aoshima and his gang are at root a virtuous bunch, constantly questioning the dubious policies of their superiors while putting themselves at personal and professional risk to seek justice. They weigh choices and debate the differences between the good of the individual and of the group, loyalty...
...whines and squeals like no normal instruments would. They’re headbangers made for robots. “People, You Can Confuse” is brilliantly oppressive, sounding like circuits in cardiac arrest—the album’s delirious peak. Nicola’s deadpan singing is the crux’s of Adult.’s paradox, at once a riveting call to arms and a signifier of times long passed. —Ryan...