Word: deadpan
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...life resembles a far-fetched hard-luck version of the actual Willie Nelson saga, but it is first and foremost a rolling, highly entertaining chronicle of its own. I all of all kinds of deadpan golden nuggets of humor--greasy, love-to-hate-'em Williams; imperfect but irresistable heroes; hard drinking, good friends, good loving, heartache, strumming acoustic guitar accompaniment--the tale can sound too much like your generic hit country song. But as Doc sings, "We write what we live And we live what we write." And Bud Shrake's off-beat, unpretentious script and Man Rudolph's even...
...Instead of aspiring to Daisy Mae curves, and turning to cotton or cosmetic surgery to fulfill the image, women on the cutting edge of body building demand the taut bulges of an Arnold Schwarzenegger and pump iron (lift weights) like crazy to achieve them. Pumping Iron (1977) was a deadpan docufarce that transformed Schwarzenegger from a curiosity into a celebrity. Pumping Iron II: The Women will probably not do the same for Bev Francis, the Australian Amazon who was at the controversial center of the 1983 Caesars Palace World Cup championship in Las Vegas. The body she has created...
...connoisseur of the deadpan schlock of pop culture, pro wrestling in its latest guise is like a trip to hog heaven. And the crowd is a big part of the show: part upscale, part down-home. Tuxedoed yuppies mix gingerly with the + rip-his-eyes-out! regulars. Andy Warhol shows up to pronounce, "It's hip. It's exciting. It's America." Gloria Steinem stops by to snort, of woman- mauling Roddy Piper, "He certainly is unfit to wear a skirt." Geraldine Ferraro apostrophizes, "Roddy Piper, why don't you come out and fight like a man?" Meanwhile, each month...
...President's State of the Union address: "Oh, he's great. When he gets done, we'll have the rich and the poor. But he's great." Even a visitor primed by years of listening to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion is not sure whether this is a deadpan Minnesota joke, a political opinion--or both...
...Vegas, where she loses their nest egg in a night, and Hoover Dam, where they have a marital wrangle the scope of which matches the backdrop. But never mind this minimalism. Brooks (who directed Lost in America and co-wrote it with Monica Johnson) is a shrewd, deadpan observer of the secret life of middle-class Americans. He likes to bring their dreams of glorious escape to life, let them taste their new world, then watch them scurry back to the comfortable and familiar. His comedy would be cruel if Brooks were not so good at playing the victims...