Word: fletch
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Understandably, the viewer is not exactly sure what to make of the work--it is hard, after all, to imagine a film suffering from too much talent. But there is an obvious incompatability between the writing talents of Bergman (proven in the past by his works Blazing Saddles and Fletch) featured in this taut, very funny script, and the monolithic acting abilities of two-time Academy Award winner Brando. Matters are complicated further by the fact that The Freshman is largely a parody of the mob ethos engendered by The Godfather and its central character, Don Corleone, immortalized by Brando...
...must seek the abducted "Prince of Light") as it does to place him in conflict with Beelzebub's legions. But it makes little of the comic possibilities in the star's new screen situation. And Director Michael Ritchie, who can be a wonderfully cockeyed social commentator (Smile, The Survivors, Fletch), seems almost as lost as Murphy when he is back of the beyond. They are both men who need to plant their feet firmly in contemporary American reality if they are to deliver their punches effectively...
...many mysteries feature journalists, largely because a great many mystery writers got their literary start at newspapers. Few have chronicled the freewheeling snoop as extensively, or as comically, as Gregory Mcdonald, Edgar winner and former arts and humanities editor of the Boston Globe, in his series about the impertinent Fletch, a man who breaks all the conventions. Fletch is young and handsome, not paunchy and timeworn; he is ethically shady and quick to grab a buck, not a tattered idealist clinging to principle; he is snippy not only to those in authority but also to working people and the down...
...died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent-A-Steed." The third is a former Boston Globe critic and the inventor of the flippant Fletch, whose snooping is sanctioned by a press card rather than a badge...
...example is Social Security, the bawdy but bland story of a Manhattan art dealer (Marlo Thomas), her suburban sister (Joanna Gleason), their respective husbands (Ron Silver and Kenneth Welsh) and the aged mother who drives them crazy (Olympia Dukakis). Playwright Andrew Bergman has written lustily funny movies (Blazing Saddles, Fletch), but he places only ticktock jokework on the stage. Worse, he creates situations of real pathos and then anesthetizes them. The matriarch is 80, unable to get around without a walker, unwilling to be left alone for an hour. By the play's end, this coarse, undereducated widow...