Word: gaggingly
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...gag works for a while, as Martin weaves his own plot-web into the 18 old movies, but pretty soon he's traveling on old good will and flop sweat. I'll say this: he travels in good company. Rachel Ward, his femme fatale in this activity, has taunting cheekbones, eyes like veiled promises and a body that speaks in languages not yet discovered. Miss Ward, just because I have to collar your pal for creative fraud is no reason we can't be friends. My number's in the book. The name is Marlowe...
Lind is nothing if not uneven. Weirdness follows weirdness, vision succeeds vision, sometimes worthy of a Hebrew prophet, sometimes no more than a gag-writer's whimsy. But Travels to the Enu adds up to far more than a tour de force. It takes true stamina to be so profoundly lost. After all these years on the road, Lind is no more bitter and no less funny than when he started, an impressive feat given the course of history in the meantime. His mind may swarm with hoofed and steaming demons like a phantasmagoric painting by Pieter Bruegel...
...genial host at a White House dinner party, Ronald Reagan could not resist getting off a one-liner. He would have preferred a barbecue in the Rose Garden, he said, but all that smoke from the flaming grills might have violated the Clean Air Act. The gag evoked a chuckle from his guests. But environmentalists around the nation were not amused. They see the wisecrack as just one more sign of the Administration's hostility to maintaining the quality of the nation...
...campaign for reelection in high gear, Gov. Edward J. King files multimillion dollar libel suits against every magazine and newspaper in the state. "Anything they print about me hurts me," King says adding that he has asked the State Supreme Court to enforce a gag order regarding his activities and statements on all Bay State journalists...
...soon as the plot develops beyond this point, Porter and his cast lose control over it. Confronted with the need to establish real contact between characters, create atmosphere, or sustain a joke beyond its original gag, nearly all the leading actors falter. In an early courting scene LaVergne and Jamerson stand together uncomfortably, tossing ambiguous comments back and forth, devoid of mood or any apparent emotional contact. Later the ecstatic Lutiebelle launches into "I Got Love," a song affirming her brand-new confidence, without having evinced even the subtlest change in bearing...