Word: funnier
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Gogol promised Pushkin, who gave him the idea for the plot, that his play would be "funnier than hell." It is fair to assume that Gogol meant the stress to fall equally on the first and last words. Greatly gifted though he is, Rumanian Director Liviu Ciulei has ignored the balance and projected the work as knockabout farce with an infusion of German impressionism. The result is that the characters become animated puppets and imbecilic caricatures of venality. They are robbed of the quality of vulnerable humanity that lies at the heart of the play, the play wright...
WHAT REALLY SAVES this evening of Mamet--arguably America's hottest playwright--is the other, simpler, less garrulous drama--The Duck Variations. Not only is it funnier, more interesting, and better acted, it is deep and relevent and genuinely responsive--without being bombastic or tiring...
...needless complexity. Yet it does have a certain charm. Romy Schneider is extraordinarily attractive as the woman, and Victor Lanoux (of Cousin, Cousine) offers both stalwart charm and ideological reticence as the revolutionary. We are allowed to gather that what makes him more attractive than her husband, who is funnier and probably better company over the long haul, is that belief in something beyond oneself tends to make a fellow more exciting sexually. A dubious point, but sufficient for a movie which, like others written by Semprun (notably La Guerre Est Finie), insists that there is a link between...
...past ten years. A feminist leader was once playfully asked if there would be sex after women's liberation. "Yes," she replied, "only it will be better." That seems, for many, to have come true. Women, especially those well past the stage of reading Tolkien, seem smarter, funnier, sexier and more self-sufficient than before...
Worse are the lapses that occur in the course of the action. Sellon, for example, mispronounces the word "elan" as "uh-lan." And one of the funnier lines in the play--Wyke's remark of his wife, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz"--comes out, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz." That means, I suppose, that she couldn't get Johann Bach to waltz, either. Moreover, any self-respecting mystery buff can tell you that a "mashie-niblick," that jolly skull-splitter, is a five-iron; Bloomfield ludicrously brandishes a driver. All this may sound like...