Word: dolls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...playing the down-and-out loser spewing inarticulate cliches about the American dream. Likewise for Peters, who seems to feel obliged to say most of her lines (and especially winners like, "I am not very at ease with people...[long pause]...Men I mean") in a monotonous baby-doll voice uncannily reminscent of a T.V. commercial for an underarm deodorant called "Tickle." Both Martin and Peters approach their roles in a curiously stylized way, staring out of glazed eyes either vapidly (Peters) or with an intense manic glow (Martin). Only Jessica Harper, who plays the dull, frowsy Joan, seems...
Behind the wat is a shack where the coffins are kept before cremation; and behind that, near a patch of sweet potatoes, the crematorium sits in a clearing under a shed, like a doll's chapel. There is no activity there today. But the wat itself is busy with a festival marking the last day of the Buddhist Lent. A monk in yellow sits cross-legged on a table, while children crouched in a circle burn incense. The smoke is supposed to fly to heaven in order to beckon their ancestors to descend and join them...
...face straight out of a 1930s B movie: smooth, smiling, with regular features and a subtly oafish flair to thejawline. Jessica Harper is frail, frazzled, wide-eyed and sad-mouthed in the '30s tradition of soiled ingenues. Bernadette Peters looks like the offspring of a Kewpie Doll and a Munchkin. Christopher Walken's face is a gigolo's death mask: the character lines have been ironed out, leaving only the dry-ice eyes and the knowing pout. As icons, these four performers would seem perfect for the bittersweet revisionism of this musical drama about a sheet-music...
...five-and-ten freak and movie junkie, this compendium of glittering gimcracks from the '30s and '40s provides a deep wallow in nostalgia. Among the glories of Woolworthlessness are cutouts of Carmen Miranda with the plaster-banana wall plaques she inspired, a Charlie McCarthy paper doll "with movable mouth," and a lurid World War II poster of a starlet straddling a bomb inscribed TOKYO EXPRESS...
Next to the pocket battlefields and miniature gridirons made possible by the microprocessor revolution, though, talking insides is old hat. There is one descendant of the line left, a Mork (of "and Mindy" fame) doll. For under $10 you can pull his string and he will say "Na-No, Na-No and seven other crazy things...