Word: hoot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...looking at a happily fascist world. Maybe that's the movie's final, deadpan joke. Maybe it's saying that war inevitably makes fascists of us all. Or--best guess--maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications...
...fast-paced humor racing through the show, even if it is mainly slapstick. The production is worth seeing for the prologue alone--Erik Amblad '99 and Chuck O'Toole '97 in particular draw screams of laughter from the audience with their girlish giggles. Everyone's costumes are a hoot, from the prologue's two-sizes-too-small jogging suits to the servants' funky get-ups. Again, once the actual story begins, some of the more original artistic concepts are sacrificed in favor of both Shakespearean traditions and basic silliness. But even these potentially fatal flaws are handled so charmingly...
...York Times if you like, they sometimes get it right"). The story of a farm wife, Beatrice (appropriately illustrated with an adapted copy of "American Gothic"), who claims that an alien's wearning her husband Edgar's skin, turns out to be key and makes for a hoot of an interview with Jones and Smith. From a cheap postcard, the Bug tracks down the flying saucers as his ticket off the planet. And of course, the requisite Elvis joke...
...turn, find ourselves in a theater of cruelty, consoling ourselves with incidental pleasures: the anti-comedic darkness of Dunne's lighting and sensibility; the relentless, half-mad meanness of Ryan's performance; the snarling strength Karyo demonstrates in multiple adversity. These people don't give a hoot if they warm our hearts or lift our spirits, and that's not nothing in a time when mainstream movie comedy is all blandness and ingratiation. Too bad we can't reward their bravery with the sound of more than one hand clapping...
...Kurosawa to Kubrick; and above all their refusal to offer us a single likable character. Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot...