Word: deadpan
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...tries his hand at a fashionable fictional device -- passages of italicized commentary interspersed through the narrative. He doesn't need this kind of frill, but when he is not being pompous, he makes his point: the chapter in which Hope is kidnapped by the volleyballers is preceded by a deadpan account of the sport's origins in Massachusetts...
...spirals into the underworld of hatred and despair, Jungle Fever kicks into movie overdrive. It establishes kinship to those fervid '50s weepies directed with deadpan skill by Douglas Sirk: All That Heaven Allows, with young Rock Hudson and middle-aged Jane Wyman daring a love that flouts convention; and Imitation of Life, in which wannabe white woman Susan Kohner throws herself on her black mother's coffin and sobs out her remorse to the throb of a Mahalia Jackson spiritual. Jungle Fever is no less brazen -- or assured. A righteous man shoots his deranged son, and the man's wife...
...screenwriter Michael Cristofer, and director Brian De Palma has succeeded in the more difficult task of finding a cinematic equivalent for the novelist's singular style. Using unconventional angles, lenses and light, he accomplishes on the screen what Wolfe achieved on the page through deliciously exaggerated dialogue and deadpan parody. De Palma lifts us out of banal realism but stops short of forcing surrealism's affectations upon...
...essays in Beyond the Boom vary considerably in quality. By far the liveliest is David Brooks' "Portrait of a Washington Policy Wonk," a dead- on, deadpan satire about how legislative aides and assistants to Cabinet secretaries can rise above their lowly station. Johnston, in "Break Glass in Case of Emergency," effectively skewers yuppiedom's jejune New Age spirituality. And Teachout, in "A Farewell to Politics," argues plausibly that the great ideological battles of the '90s will be fought over culture, a word he defines broadly enough to include abortion; family policy; and "sensitivity fascism" in American academia (which he describes...
...actors are not enticed by the strange scenarios. Much to the audience's amusement--and unfortunately to Hulkower's, as well--the Director becomes more excited, vehement and base as the deadpan players continue to bumble his instructions...