Word: deadpan
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...WORKS This criminal comedy remains deliciously deadpan about the wages of psychopathy. We don't doubt that Michel and his brood deserve a somewhat better life. We can't help admiring the high, dry wit with which their (fairy) tale is recounted. We briefly wonder if Michel, as well as Harry, should pay some sort of price for his good fortune. But, nah--that would interfere with the knife-edged perversity of the piece, the sense we derive from it of fate's inexplicable workings, presented neither doomily nor ironically, but as a supercool form of realism...
...European reaction has been mostly deadpan, welcoming President Bush's emphasis on consultation but avoiding outright condemnation of the proposal despite widespread skepticism. After all, Europe has little to gain by publicly challenging a plan that President Bush has made clear will go ahead regardless. But the major fear on the continent that scrapping the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile treaty takes away the foundation of all subsequent arms-control agreements between Washington and Moscow, removing a key regulatory mechanism on the nuclear balance and potentially prompting an arms race. Europe may be less worried about the details of the missile...
...write about - the fact that they don't seem tortured by the question of Japan's position relative to the rest of the world. When the heroine of Yoshimoto's Kitchen mixes Japanese and French dishes in her menus, she's not making a point about cultural miscegenation. The deadpan Yoshimoto seems to be merely reporting how people eat in Tokyo...
DIED. "BROTHER" THEODORE GOTTLEIB, 94, deadpan performer of what he called "stand-up tragedy"; in Manhattan. In wartime Europe, Gottleib was carted to Dachau but used his family's money to buy his freedom from the Nazis and was assisted to California by Albert Einstein, reputedly his mother's boyfriend. A sort of West Coast Will Hunting, Gottleib worked as a janitor at Stanford, where he simultaneously beat 30 professors at chess. After his nightclub and TV appearances in the 1950s and '60s waned, he resurfaced on Late Night with David Letterman in the 1980s...
...funny as the sidekick of the late Chris Farley in Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, Spade’s post-Farley attempts to step in the lead have exposed his limited acting capacities. Joe Dirt is no exception. Spade simply cannot pull off the lovable, upbeat, misfortunate hero; his deadpan acting style fails to elicit any sympathy or emotional involvement whatsoever. The audience is more mystified by how Brandy could possibly be attracted to this dope than to whether or not he actually gets the girl. Furthermore, a romantic theme involving the moon is directly copied from the animated classic...