Word: drunk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...victory (though what victories, except perhaps knocking a ball through a goal, have they won in their 15 or 20 years?). Nearly all are wearing caps (the few who are bareheaded haven't taken theirs off here). One out of four is tipsy, one out of ten is drunk. Every other one is smoking, and so disgustingly, with his butt stuck to his lower lip! So that long before the incense-in place of the incense-gray pillars of cigarette smoke rise from the church courtyard, with its electric lights, toward the Easter sky with its brown, motionless clouds...
...Jacques Bens points out in his afterward to the French edition, we are used to fairytales where the supernatural of flying carpets or seven-league boots is inserted in an otherwise normal world. In Vian, on the other hand, the symbolic "pianocktail," which allows one to get literally drunk on jazz, is placed in a universe that continually surprises with flowers growing from the pavement, or with neckties that struggle against being tied. But Mood Indigo is not an anarchic collection of magic notions; what disturbs us from the beginning is a sense of the fantasy's internal coherence...
...actors were the only ones with a past. Their identities were self-perpetuating. The comedians were comic (Marty Ingels wore paper watches in Switzerland because the real things were too expensive) and insecure. (To which of them would Charlie Chaplin grant an audience?) The drunkards stayed drunk, the kind old ladies went to bed early, and the young love interest people pursued love--though not necessarily with the one prescribed by the script. Murray Hamilton (remember The Graduate) gave us sheer good times, singing to us late at night...
...play, which is full of life's nothingness, despair, and death, manufactures miserable versions of characters from mythology. It could succeed; its Bacchus as a barkeep who can't get drunk and a psychotic slattern who might be an uglified and twisted Aphrodite are curious figures, and a raid by a masked group led by Death always has dramatic potential...
Inevitably a virgin is seduced (twice in fact it's so funny) and a teetotalling bar-smasher gets roaring drunk, but this particular show extends its faithfulness to formula a bit too far. Individual lines like "you boys couldn't flatten out a wrinkled postage stamp" ring a little hollow. I wondered during the first act whether the show would stoop to the Beach Party level of repartee with one character emphatically commenting "You can say that again," and his buddy really saying it again. It was there all right, a little dressed up, but dismally there all the same...