Word: larkishness
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...movies with the force of a party doll at a quilting bee. Each form cheerfully exploited the other; neither was ever quite the same. By the '60s, movies were an indispensable tool for marketing any hot new group. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night pinned the larkish wit of four Liverpudlians on top of the world; Bob Rafelson's Head (co-written with Jack Nicholson) was a brilliant, bilious suicide note from the Monkees to their die-hard fans. Today rock helps sell nonrock pictures from Top Gun to Rocky IV. But it took David Byrne to bring...
...solemnity. As the heir to the throne exchanged troths with a bashful girl just past her teens, it seemed that Prince Charming rode with Sleeping Beauty in a coach of glass. When Charles' younger brother and Diana's fourth cousin wed last week, it was a jollier occasion, a larkish high-society romance scripted by P.G. Wodehouse. No foreign heads of state were present, and no national holiday was declared. Instead, the abbey was full of family and friends, there to celebrate Queen and country and witness the perfect match of two frolicsome young people. The < royal family are royals...
...this score, Absolute Beginners is a pretty little cheat. It promises a larkish tour of London in 1958, the year Britain discovered both rock 'n' roll as an anarchic force and teenagers as a voracious new consumer class. Colin (Eddie O'Connell) is a bright lad who hits the Top 40 of success snapping pictures of mods and trads; Suzette (Patsy Kensit) is a proto-Twiggy fashion model- designer. Sade, Ray Davies and the snakily elegant David Bowie appear in elaborate production numbers--upmarket rock videos, really--and Julien Temple, a master director of the short music form, revs...
...This larkish, disarming tone remains at odds with the object itself. Harrison reveals that he got the notion of collecting his jottings and memories when "two drunkards cornered me in a hotel room near Heathrow Airport" and pressed on him a copy of Captain William Bligh's Log of H. M.S. Bounty, put out by a firm in Surrey called Genesis. This, and a televi sion program on the making of fine books, gave George the idea of "having these trivial bits of paper dignified in this...
What finally prevents Gator from rising above its humble origins is an awkward mixture of moods that Director Reynolds never really manages to sort out and smooth over. The picture's basic ambience is rather larkish, but there are melodramatic sequences of near-Victorian sentimentality (especially in an exploration of a cathouse specializing in drugged adolescents) and others that stress a kind of Disposall-style violence. These sudden shifts in tone are disorienting and make what might have been a modestly entertaining venture into something that is unfortunately less than the sum of its several good parts...