Word: humors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cartoonist's technique to render the wounds of childhood and the consolations of pouting. Spinky receives entreaties from his mother, lectures from his father and apologies from his siblings. Eventually, of course, he comes around, but only on his terms and his schedule. In youth as in humor, timing is everything. Steig has not forgotten that either...
...Three of the film's perpetrators, the ZAZ team, spoofed '70s disaster epics in Airplane! and spy movies in Top Secret! Now they have stolen from themselves, extending their 1982 TV series Police Squad! to feature length. The stretch marks show, in a plethora of chase scenes and bathroom humor that makes The Naked Gun seem like Police Academy with a brain. Well, maybe three brains. Like the ZAZ lads' other films, this is a movie made for a VCR Saturday night. They supply the jokes; you bring the microwave popcorn and modest expectations...
...credited to author Harry Segall's virtuoso incorporation of every popular comedy element known to man into a two-hour script. This play has it all: mistaken identities, fumbling criminals, an adorable romance, a working-class mug playing a millionaire, a boxing match, some good black humor, and a whole bunch of scenes set in heaven with genuine angels...
UNFORTUNATELY, this approach only hurts the play. Woody Allen doesn't write broad physical comedies, and he can't be performed like the Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy, though this seems to be the Dunster House approach. Physical humor, which might play well in the background, is brought to center stage, detracting from the play itself. The audience is treated to such extended vignettes as Axel struggling with Scotch tape and the embassy priest struggling to free himself from a Houdiniesque magic trick. These antics are funny by themselves, but are not anywhere near enough to carry an entire...
Hackman is probably the subtlest screen player of his generation. He is a genius at hiding his true feelings under humor, letting them show with a seemingly unconscious flicker of expression or an unfinished gesture. Dafoe stands up to him with the kind of flat-voiced certainty mastered only by men of few, but unshakable, principles. Though each learns something from the other, their relationship retains its pure scratchiness from beginning to end. These guys are never going to be buddies...