Word: gagged
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Victoria's recurrent gag of hitting a spectacular glass-shattering high note sums this production up: an idea not inherently funny and repeated too often to the point of tiresomeness...
...Americans taught by years of relentless publicity to think of Disney as "a quiet, pleasant man you might not look twice at on the street," to quote an old corporate promotional piece--a man whose modest mission was simply "to bring happiness to the millions." Going along with the gag, he implied that the task was easy for him because he always whistled while he worked: "I don't have depressed moods. I'm happy, just very, very happy...
Artistically, the 1930s were Disney's best years. He embraced Technicolor as readily as he had sound, and, though he was a poor animator, he proved to be a first-class gag man and story editor, a sometimes collegial, sometimes bullying, but always hands-on boss, driving his growing team of youthfully enthusiastic artists to ever greater sophistication of technique and expression. When Disney risked everything on his first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it turned out to be no risk at all, so breathlessly was his work embraced. Even the intellectual and artistic communities...
...show has some funny, scattershot gag writing reminiscent of Caesar's Your Show of Shows, on which Simon once worked ("But, Mother..." "Don't 'But, Mother' me." "But, Father..."). Director-choreographer Rob Marshall moves the pieces briskly in everything from the perky Rich Kids Rag number to a chain-gang soft shoe. Most of all, there's Short, who gives the kind of knockout Broadway performance that delights us even more because it's delivered by an interloper from Hollywood...
...gets his kicks by leaving a bag of flaming feces at a neighbor's door, saying the F word in a roomful of first-graders, mocking a stuttering boy. As a clumsy hockey player in Happy Gilmore, Sandler kills his dad with an errant slap shot. The films' running gag is of an innocent bystander getting clobbered by a sharp object. Pain is funny, if it's not yours. And the star can do anything, because he's our guy. In short, an Adam Sandler comedy is very like an early Jim Carrey comedy...