Word: jape
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...films Duel (Steven Spielberg's first feature) and The Night Stalker and the '90s films What Dreams May Come and Stir of Echoes, based on his novels. Some of Matheson's TV fables - the Twilight Zone story about the gremlin on the airplane wing, the Trilogy of Terror jape about a Zuni fetish doll chasing Karen Black around her apartment - linger at the base of many a viewer's spine, three or four decades after they were first aired. Credit those residual shivers to a nonchalant, nonpareil master of the creep...
Paul Giamatti as Santa Claus and Vince Vaughn as his loser brother Fred, in a holiday jape from the director of Wedding Crashers and one of the writers of Cars: that should be funny. Except, no. The laughs come too rarely, the sentiment is tricked up, and this attempt at a Christmas perennial wilts faster than a cheap balsam choked with tinsel...
...Winterbottom Warning to college students: Don't rent this movie as video Cliffs Notes for that Laurence Sterne "classic" you have no intention of reading. Do rent it to see what happened to Brit humor after Monty Python. TV eminences Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon star in this postmodernist jape, which keeps interrupting the novel's tale to focus on the offscreen agitations of the cast. Since the Coogan-Brydon banter gave the film much of its brio, their very funny commentary on the DVD amounts to a second deconstruction of the entertaining shambles that is Shandy...
...George Kaufman and S.J. Perelman and snappy tunes by Irving Berlin and the Kalmar-Ruby team, the films have a racy pulse to offset their primitive technique. Savor Groucho's balletic brashness and his byplay with that sublime foil Margaret Dumont. Find the source of many an immortal jape: "Go, and never darken my towels again"; "Well, who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"; "You're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did." Revel in the madness of the days when the Marxes and the sound-film medium were both...
...Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, this is a farce with chic repartee, devious twists and a cheerfully sardonic take on the human need for greed. Intolerable Cruelty sends moviegoers back to the '40s, when pretty people said witty things. It's the brothers' brightest, most accessible jape...