Word: drollness
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Though it doesn't quite match Ang Lee's wonderful gift for rendering social conventions hilarious, "Shall We Dance?" is bound to tickle the most staid viewer. It makes abundant, admittedly effective use of stock comic devices and characters. Eriko Watanabe cuts a droll figure as the experienced but caustic and somewhat unattractive dancer whom Sugiyama agrees to partner in an amateur competition; Naoto Takenaka hams it up as a painfully self-conscious colleague who dons a wig and hurls himself with fiendish gusto into the rhumba; Sugiyama's two fellow dance-pupils--one short and hyper...
...WOMEN? GRAY'S QUERULOUS, chain-smoking, scatterbrained Chris matches husband Ken for droll facial expressions. In this respect, she edges Catherine M. Ingman '98, who plays sharp-tongued, slightly scornful Claire Ganz. Both, however, are upstaged by Jordanna M. Brodsky '99 as a hilariously dippy, brocade-clad Julia Child-like chef--aptly named Cookie--married to Ernie. Indeed, the odd-couple of Hawkes and Brodsky wins hands-down as the best pairing in the show, and it's a tribute to their skill that the somewhat corny physical humor delineated to them (especially Cookie) becomes irresistibly funny in their hands...
...support group--an old college friend (male) comes on to Ellen, who slowly realizes that she is attracted to the friend's female colleague, played by Laura Dern, a close friend of DeGeneres' in real life (a description that should not be read into). Oprah Winfrey, in a surprisingly droll and low-key performance, plays Ellen's therapist. A whole flock of other celebrities--also friends of DeGeneres', including Demi Moore, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang and Billy Bob Thornton--showed their support by doing cameos on the episode...
...such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud." (V.G.); "But whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting $5 a head for you dolls and therefore pile up as many of you a piece as we can get--this is what too many of you seem to forget. "Coleridge may be said...
...imagine those old poops on the Olympic committee watching the demonstration in 1936. "How droll," the English representative says...