Word: inhabitations
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Like many Americans, performance artist Joan Braderman is entranced by popular culture. Her video, "Joan Sees Stars," addresses this national obsession with movies, television, and the celebrities that inhabit them. In the style of "Beavis and Butthead," Braderman's talking head is superimposed above choice film clips from classic movies and contemporary television programs, as she deconstructs the ways in which the entertainment industry invades "our lives, our beds, and our dreams...
...only are the characters in Man is Man unreal, they also inhabit an artificial, dreamlike world. The sets by James Murdoch are disjointed and angular, with ramshackle flats giving way to railroad tracks which slices the stage diagonally. The sounds of this world are also curie; a disembodied voice announces military maneuvers, and the cool mellow jazz of the onstage quintet--featuring most notably Alex Barnett on clarinet--provides an otherworldly, impressionistic musical undercurrent. The cuminsting battle scene is recreated with nightmarish intensity through the efforts of the sound and light crew...
Unfortunately, many may find much of it reader-proof as well. With so much going on -- premise piling upon premise, coincidence upon coincidence -- the point of it all begins to grow muzzy. As the edifice of Irving's invention rears ever upward, the people who inhabit it all begin to look as small as Dr. Daruwalla's dwarfs...
Avery is worth the attention. His best cartoons inhabit a dog-eat-cat, male- chase-female, everyone-humiliate-everyone-else world -- a place at constant war over food crises and turf disputes. It is also a world wholly aware of itself as an artistic fabrication. A joke will apologize for itself by sprouting an ear of corn (Get it? Corny!). A character will pluck a vagrant "hair" from the film-projector lamp, or abruptly go monochrome because he passed a reading technicolor ends here. "Ain't we in the wrong picture?" asks Red Riding Hood of the wolf in Swing...
...that this Carrey -- the ventriloquist who wonders poignantly if he has lost his own voice -- is a bit of a gag too. The Canadian comic, 32, has been having too good a time lately to search for the Inner Jim. And so has anyone who has seen Carrey inhabit dozens of roles on Fox's prime-time skitcom In Living Color or commandeer the big screen in last winter's smash Ace Ventura Pet Detective. That rowdy farce, cagily directed by Tom Shadyac, earned $72 million at the domestic box office. Coupled with big expectations for Carrey's new fantasy...