Word: deadpan
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...date clothes, get to shine comically more than the other bit-players. As Bobo's brother, Lloyd is a hapless straightman, demonstrating his own talent for physical comedy by being a complete klutz. He is at the mercy of both Bobo and his loopy mother (Cloris Leachman). With her deadpan delivery of some of Walk's funniest lines, Leachman almost steals the limelight from Mandel...
Strange pictures: deadpan but not flippant, ironic but not campy. They ( used advanced elements of photographic language -- extreme distance from the subject, unemphatic treatment, carefully achieved but understated color -- but to pose what questions? Not until the Houston show, assembled by Curator Anne W. Tucker, were Sternfeld's purposes really clear. The title American Prospects, which applies to both the show and an accompanying volume of his work (Times Books; $40), points to Sternfeld's ambition for his work to be placed in the line of two other great photo essays on the national mood: Walker Evans' American Photographs...
...creator or a too cute movie robot. Instead, Malkovich invests him with a preternatural smoothness. His character is equally subtle. It may be based on the wise-child conventions on which the typical sci-fi robot is modeled. But Malkovich informs and energizes his performance with the deadpan bravery, the relentless will, the invincible ignorance and the infinite need to give and receive love that all parents observe as their offspring pass through the infamously terrible twos...
...plane, but calculations show that his 223-lb. frame will put the cargo over the weight limit. There are MTV-style music videos, a game show called But Who's Counting?, and a funny continuing feature entitled Mathnet, in which a pair of mathematician-sleuths do a dead-on, deadpan parody of the old Jack Webb Dragnet series...
...Zone and Meat. Their monologues, just serious enough to be plausible -- Brustein actually does believe that directors have as creative a role as writers -- eventually become self-mockingly funny. But the jokes seem to go over the heads of much of the audience; instead of laughing, many spectators stare deadpan as if trying to catch up. Later sequences offer conventional, tell-me-a-story pleasures: a mother with a toothache tries to dispel it through elaborate religious ritual; a drunken father comes home and dies in a poignant scene made all the more impressive by the fact that moments before...