Word: gagged
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gag here is that the two heroes engaged in the movie's requisite action scenes - the hand-to-hand combat, the car chase, the climactic military-style battle ending in a giant explosion - are klutzy boobs. Dale and Saul have the need and instinct to fight, drive and run, but none of the skills. One sequence, the movie's lamest, is either a demonstration of this theory or an undercutting commentary on it. As they stagger through the woods searching for a cell phone Saul has tossed away, Rogen and Franco take a stab at a slapstick routine but possess...
...spectacle of mordant vaudeville; the role of Estragon in the first Broadway production was taken by that comic Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr; and in a 1988 Lincoln Center revival, directed by Mike Nichols, the stars were Steve Martin and Robin Williams. The set up to the play's gag: they wait for Godot. The punch line: he doesn't show up! Maybe this is concept comedy, an essay on the deflating and the persistence of hope, but it's as comic as it is cosmic...
...nearly eight feet tall and looked like a cast-iron coffin. At first, I thought it was somebody's grotesque idea of a joke - a gag gift, perhaps, for Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopath son and head of Iraqi's sports administration. But when I opened it, I realized its purpose was deadly serious...
...That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point. So, too, is that his sidekick is played by the lissome Anne Hathaway, who also seems willing to go along with a gag if only she could find one. Or that their nerdy colleagues in CONTROL have a few attenuated comical moments in their fight to save the free world from KAOS. They are all strapped to a hurtling plot line that is heading from one fireball to the next, with only...
...disarms the movie's constant flirtations with bad taste. For example, The Zohan gets a job in a rundown beauty parlor and rises from sweeping up the floor to creating sweeping hair-dos - and incidentally to providing sexual services for its aging clientele. It's a variation on a gag that happily served Mel Brooks in The Producers, and as in that enterprise, the result is more innocent merriment than discomfort for the audience. But still...issues keep arising...