Word: deadpan
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Soderbergh wryly acknowledges the film’s origins and then manages, as he so frequently does, to transcend its limitations. While prepping his team for the heist, Danny explains precisely why he would attempt such an impossible mission. His reasons are succinct, his delivery is deadpan and his air is undeniably macho. Pitt bursts the bubble when he asks, “You’ve been rehearsing that, haven’t you?” Clooney responds: “A little, did I rush? I felt like I rushed.” With any other director...
Anderson’s deadpan artistry helps this tale of literate, elitest characters make their way through their upper-class milieu. Recalling Rushmore’s opening yearbook sequence, Anderson starts the film off with an expanded, hilarious prologue introducing the young geniuses and documenting their rise to fame and the insane treatment they were afforded by their father. The look of the pages at each chapter title gives the feel of a highly stylized story, a fantastic aspect that is further accentuated by Alec Baldwin’s tart narration as he guides viewers chapter by chapter through...
Some of Lydia Davis' stories are shorter than this review, but they are funnier, smarter, and will prove more memorable. In deadpan prose, Davis turns philosophical snippets into fiction, with moving results. It is rare for a writer to challenge the tradition of storytelling and still be a pleasure to read. Davis' stories are as clear as children's books and somehow inevitable, as if she has written down what we were all on the verge of thinking ourselves...
...done. The play is beautiful, though—not because the audience is witness to an epic drama, but rather because, thanks to honest performances from Hanson and Rushing, every moment feels genuine. Hanson hits all the right notes with her nervous restlessness, and, though Rushing’s deadpan delivery fell flat in Two Ex-Smokers, here it is the perfect complement to her co-star...
...movie protagonists, but Billy Bob Thornton, that splendid actor, does it perfectly as Ed Crane, a taciturn small-town barber, circa 1949. Everyone cheats on him--his wife, his business partner, his teen lover, his hotshot lawyer. By the movie's end, he is facing his final comeuppance, deadpan sangfroid still miraculously intact. The ever astonishing Coen brothers say their film was inspired by the spirit of James M. Cain's novels about ill-fated dopes. But the Coens transcend Cain. If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking--hilarious yet hypnotic--one would be tempted to see something...