Word: deadpan
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ANTHONY T. ULASEWICZ, 54, a former New York City policeman who later served as a private investigator for the White House, was the perfect witness for warm-weather TV viewing. A Runyonesque character, he described with deadpan humor his difficulties in "getting rid of all those cookies"--distributing the $220,000 that [personal presidential attorney Herbert] Kalmbach channeled to him... [B]y prearrangement, he left packets of $100 bills in office-building lobbies or airport luggage lockers. He was obliged to make so many phone calls from public booths that he finally took to wearing a bus driver's coin...
...self-esteem booster (which of course she gets, this being movie comedy land). Debbie Reynolds plays a blander kind of "Mother" more reminiscent of the comic strip "Cathy" than her recent foray with Albert Brooks. Bob Newhart, as the high school principal, manages to keep a completely deadpan expression throughout the entire movie, almost concealing the fact that he isn't given any truly witty lines...
...real stars, of course, are Jones and Smith, who split the one-liners pretty evenly between them. Jones's deadpan is nicely offset by Smith's comical reaction to (and commentary on) every new experience. But this, too, gets old: their immunity to surprise gets to us. There's absolutely zero tenstion at any point, and the movie's non-stop flippancy brings it perilously clsoe to triviality...
...world is well acquainted with hostage holding as a grotesque basis for personal relationships. But here the unusual experience of living in close quarters with your potential killers is intensified in prose as precise and deadpan as a coroner's report. And as he has done so often, Garcia Marquez makes the fantastic seem ordinary. At one point Marina Montoya asks her cold-blooded keepers to kneel with her and pray. They do, each to the same God for the same reasons: to protect their lives and deliver them from evil. It is a classic Garcia Marquez instance--comic, tragic...
...walked into an Escobar trap, taking a film crew with her. By now the world is well acquainted with hostage holding as a grotesque basis for personal relationships. But here the unusual experience of living in close quarters with your potential killers is intensified in prose as precise and deadpan as a coroner?s report. And as he has done so often, Garc?a M?rquez makes the fantastic seem ordinary. At one point Marina Montoya asks her cold-blooded keepers to kneel with her and pray. They do, each to the same God for the same reasons: to protect their lives...