Word: laughingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...1950s their mother carefully deposits them with her hometown relatives in Fingerbone, Idaho. Then, with equal punctiliousness, she pays some boys to give her car a push so that she can sail off a cliff in it. Her suicide is shot in a way that provokes the biggest laugh in Housekeeping, a movie that is not as funny as some Forsyth fans will claim, but sturdy and rich. All the girls' guardians turn out to be too old for the job, so their Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti) is summoned home from her wanderings to take up the task...
...including the star, it was an immediate smash. New York Times Critic Frank Rich wrote, "So sue me . . . Mason was very, very funny." The professionals closed ranks behind the comedian: Writer-Producer Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) returned eight times, and Mel Brooks announced that "nobody makes me laugh harder." Joe Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, went further. When Donald Moffat appeared as Falstaff in Henry IV, Papp instructed him to "do it the Jackie Mason...
...ground, forcing them to move in with mother's grandparents. But no sooner are they there then Grandpa's comic zaniness changes the mood, as he interrupts breakfast on the veranda to shoot at a rat in his vegetable garden. The scene is absurd enough to make a Scrooge laugh, but it hangs loosely between serious scenes of death and destruction...
...scenes work, but also because it catches its audience in a peculiar bind. The audience of the game show in Running Man represents a bloodthirsty society, a bunch of middle-class husbands and housewives and some little old ladies vehemently cheering on what amounts to a gladiator show. We laugh at this absurdity when members of the audience are given door prizes for choosing the stalkers, but in the very next scene we find ourselves cheering for some of the violence, too. When the studio audience stops cheering for the stalkers and starts cheering for Schwarzenegger, it suddenly becomes clear...
...That laugh, a lusty guffaw about two sizes too large for her 120-lb. frame, is the first hint of something intriguingly unpredictable in Close. Similarly, the controlled expression on her high-cheekboned face often seems at odds with the light in her gray-green eyes. As her Attraction co-star Michael Douglas says, "she always looks like she has a secret...