Word: deadpan
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Jarmusch transposes borredoin and disappointment into a deadpan dramatic bass-line that lops along with its loom-pah-loom-pah Sereanun' Jay Hawkins soundtrack. The camera just watches these characters, from above or below like a surreal intruder, or straight-on as though it were positioned behind a one-way mirror. They don't perform; they just are and sometimes they just are not. The camera watches them watching television, not talking, avoiding each other, waiting, arguing impatiently when forced to think about what is, to them, the painfully obvious. Punctuated with blackouts at the end of every scene, Paradiseis...
...could bemoan the loss of a man who is smart and ambitious enough to be President, a man who could only fall prey to his slight stature, his high-pitched voice, and a deadpan wit that would make him the hit of a Harvard party but an ass in Austin...
...last week there was a similarly surprising noise that sounded, just maybe, like the first tremors of a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. It came Thanksgiving Day, with officials in each country reading identical statements to reporters. At the White House, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane delivered the tidings deadpan. "The United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to enter into new negotiations," he reported, "with the objective of reaching mutually acceptable agreements on the whole range of questions concerning nuclear and outer-space arms...
...actor, Bill Murray; facial expression, plastered; the films, Stripes, Ghostbusters. Drama? Comedy? Pick either; if Razor's Edge tells us anything, it's not to indulge in such theoretical musings; were a reincarnated William Shakespeare to cast Murray as King Lear, no doubt every wimp's favorite drillmaster could deadpan even the death scene...
...hide out from hard truth. Richard Yates is usually considered a master of the realistic voice: spare and shrewd, cutting and chilling. But for all the leanness of his writing, his language can carry considerable weight. Without apparent effort it eases past the conventions of simple realism toward deadpan comedy and social panorama. Young Hearts Crying could stand as a definitive portrait of a man and woman, maturing in the 1940s, who spend the next three decades trying to get a grip on dwindling dreams that will not die and who have to settle down and, finally, just settle...