Word: joking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem with Extreme is that the viewer cannot decide whether the film is meant to be taken as a joke. On one hand, the actors seem to take their roles very seriously, uttering their lines with all the gravity one would give to a Shakespearean soliloquy. On the other hand, the lines themselves and most of the action are so uproariously stupid that one cannot help but think that Nolte and company are giggling hysterically behind their iron faces. So it may just be that Extreme Prejudice is one of those rare Hollywood gems: a film taken seriously precisely because...
Badanes clearly enjoys the joke. In fact, such irreverence is his group's trademark. Born at Princeton University during the counterculture days of the 1960s, the Jersey Devil is a traveling band of renegade architects who rejected standard careers to design the really far out and then, in an even more radical break with modern architectural practice, get out the saws, hammers and nails and build these unusual structures themselves. Since their first project, a child's play structure built to resemble an enormous cockroach, they've painstakingly assembled twelve houses, from San Francisco to New Hampshire, parking tents, trailers...
After Magritte, which opens the evening, is a half hour-long exposition of the punchline to some joke based on a mildly obscure Magritte painting. A couple (Andrew Goldfarb and Susan Clafin) engaged in an absurd series of interior-decorating sight gags tries to reason out an event--possibly a crime--they saw in the street earlier that day. Standing in their cluttered set, they argue back and forth; if anyone fails to consider this unusual, Goldfarb's senile mother (Betsy Menes) intermittently plays the tuba to ensure a properly surrealist feel...
...screen with the round face, hulking frame and liquid loser's eyes of the young Peter Lorre. But as photos prove, Ken was physically attractive; it was his manner that repelled people. And now he is memorialized as the haunted child molester from M. Joe would have appreciated the joke anyway...
...will join several other scholars at the WarCollege who at one time taught at Harvard. "Youguys turn out the best people in the field. Therewas a joke going around that the Soviets weregoing to put a plant in the War College because noone would pay attention to him since he didn'tcome from Harvard," Bernstein said...