Word: improve
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Ledger!), Ledger carries in him the deranged threat of a punk star like Sid Vicious, whom he supposedly took as one of the models for his character. The Joker observes no rules, pursues no grand scheme; he's the terrorist as improv artist. Evil is his tenor sax, Armageddon his melody. Why, he might blow up a hospital or turn ordinary people into mass murderers to save their own lives...
...recognize this failing in movies with other graduates of SNL. Trained at the Second City improv company, blossoming on late-night TV, they created or inhabited recurring characters who had five minutes to establish themselves. Even the most amusing of these characters, if they were to be expanded, were suited more to half-hour sitcoms than to feature films. But that's where the Blues Brothers, the Coneheads, Stuart Smalley, Pat, Mary Katherine Gallagher and the Roxbury guys went, not always justifying their films' running time. Leaving SNL for movies means you can't go back, which deprives the show...
...three shaken survivors are being questioned in a police station by two outside agents (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) who are skeptical of the variations in the stories they hear. Think Rashomon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Twin Peaks, and give lots of leeway for the gooniest improv overacting, and you may get on the warped wavelength of this semi-comic parable of social anarchy...
...exceptions: Sarah Silverman. Tina Fey. Ellen Degeneres. Rosie O’ Donnell. But the fact that I have to include Rosie O’Donnell in a list of funny people should suggest how slim the pickings are. At Harvard, too, women in comedy are few and far between. Improv groups, humor magazines, tv shows, the stand-up comedy society: each features no more than a handful of women, if that. This isn’t because these groups are fighting off droves of talented women out of some kind of prejudice; the applicants are also overwhelmingly male...
...writer is having an informed point of view. I find the most interesting people, even that we were hiring at The Daily Show, came from backgrounds of academia or journalism. They weren’t people that came up through college humor magazines or who had just studied exclusively improv. It was people who were like: ‘I was a molecular biology major and then went to Phillipines and did work-study.’ That informs your point of view so much more than just being really well-versed in early Monty Python...