Word: deadpan
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Guess what? Things didn't work out quite that way. Allen, identified as "Mr. Alien," does deadpan a bit of Shakespeare's text. Mailer and his daughter Kate do appear briefly, but the novelist indulged in a "ceremony of star behavior" and left town. So Godard vamped. He hired Burgess Meredith to play a gang-lord Lear (with many Mailer intonations) and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. And he turned the film into a cynical, pun-laden, nonlinear meditation on virtue vs. power...
Harris probably could have carried a conventional account of the founding of a bananas republic unaided. But Director Alex Cox and Writer Rudy Wurlitzer are helpful deadpan absurdists. They point up the parallels between 19th and 20th century imperialism with sly, casually dislocating anachronisms. Accompanied by a rock score, Coke bottles, North American magazines carrying cover stories about Walker's exploits, even a Marine helicopter all turn up at ! the strangest moments. At best one thinks of Brecht's presentational theater, at worst (not often) of Saturday Night Live. At all times one is glad to see the spirit...
House of Games proves that there's a lot less difference between the so-called normal people and criminals than we would like to think. Mamet's deadpan presentation of evil is bone-chilling. And as Mike tells Margaret, you may "learn some things about yourself you'd rather not know...
...Steven Wright, 31, is one of the few young comics to depart from the Carlin-Klein-Leno style of observational humor. His offbeat, cerebral routines are a string of absurdist one-liners, delivered in a deadpan monotone. Examples: "I was once arrested for walking in someone else's sleep." "When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction." "I was walking through a forest and a tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it." Like many comedians with a shtick, Wright (who grew up near Leno in Massachusetts and also...
...reconciliation. What felt in 1971 like a put-down of old-fashioned musicals for their saccharine irrelevance has evolved into an unabashed celebration of revolving multicolored staircases, grandes dames in glittery dresses and kick-stepping lines of chorus boys in top hats. One of the new numbers, performed deadpan by Diana Rigg, is a striptease ending in a bubble bath. The original Follies might have inspired the wisecrack that nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but in this version, it certainly...