Word: deadpan
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Classically trained and sitcom-bred, Hanks knows that the starkest drama can always use a leavening of wit. For most of the film, he underplays Forrest's reactions at a level somewhere between a fretful deadpan and the rural slyness of the early Andy Griffith. So when he releases his feelings at the end (when questions of fatherhood and family traits are involved), the scene gushes like a geyser...
Peter Theroux, by contrast, genuinely likes the Angelenos and their homeland, whose eccentricities he describes with easy learning , deadpan humor and precise, evocative imagery. Of the largely homosexual enclave of West Hollywood, he notes that "it must have a birthrate only slightly above Vatican City"s ." Entering the ocean near Santa Monica "was like stepping into the small tentacle tips of a monstrous octopus." To Theroux, "every third wave rolled in like an arched emerald wall, rearing up with a thin white crest -- the oceanic equivalent of a cobra spreading its hood, and nearly as un-nerving...
Moore uses a similar mixture of prankishness, populism and deadpan naivete on TV Nation. The show, which features four correspondents in addition to Moore, covers topics ranging from AIDS profiteering to pets on Prozac. In one of the series' typical segments, Moore stands outside the offices of various corporate chiefs and uses a megaphone to ask them to come down and perform simple tasks their employees carry out every day. Louis Gerstner of IBM is challenged to format a computer disk; he doesn't respond. But Ford's Alex Trotman does agree to change the oil in a jeep. After...
...never mind, the film works fine on its own. The director, who earned world-class status in the mid-'80s with The Decalogue (a 10-part Polish TV series of modern fables, each illustrating one of the Commandments), is in an impish mood here. He finds hairpin turns and deadpan delight in the sexual and political intrigue devised by screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz. And Zamachowski, who has some of Dustin Hoffman's molelike ingenuity, plays Karol Karol (Charlie Charlie in Polish) as a Chaplin figure hatching a Kafka plot...
Finney's fable has passed the time test (40 years is forever in pop culture), having been filmed twice as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Don Siegel in 1956 and Philip Kaufman in 1978. The first movie, punctuating California's small-town sunniness with the thunder of deadpan mobocracy, became a cult classic. Both pictures met the horror-movie challenge: they kept moviegoers up all night, ashiver with apprehension...