Word: laughs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...agent, villainous Russian spy and confused but loving heroine are all solid concrete stereotypes that wouldn't even pass muster in a remake of "The Adventures of Superman." And the dialogue, which seems borrowed from a 1952 State Department propaganda pamphlet, doesn't help--one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the following outburst from the American heroine to her Soviet tormentor: What's the matter, Ivan? Too used to muscle-bound, hod-carrying Russian women? Can't get used to the idea of a liberated gal from the Land of the Free and the Home...
...instance, go on from the murky obscurity of 1918 Zurich while others stay behind. Is it talent, luck, a combination of the two? Or is it the blind dice shaking in the hands of an angry god, rolling thunder, Jordan and sixes with equal equanimity and an uncaring laugh...
...cast works well, too. But an extension of this paragraph must go to Japes Emerson, who plays Cardinal Cynne. Leering with the shifty paranoia of a male Jane Curtin, Emerson moves, under his clerical robes and Rasputin beard, with a pneumatic grace and, except for a deficient malevolent laugh, his voice is the silky articulator of a deft cartoon of nastiness. When, after Emerson and Levi's "Living in Sin" number Mr. First Nighter lets loose his battle cry ("Ex-cellent!), there is no dissent here or anywhere...
Alex Haley and the TV producers had the Lome Greene character farming cotton in Spotsylvania County, Va.; it should have been tobacco. Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, observes: "When you see Leslie Uggams and her long polished nails, you just have to laugh." Although Cruse liked Roots, he thought "the ending was contrived, commercialized and romanticized. For one thing, under those conditions, you don't just tie up a plantation owner to a tree and then get into a wagon and casually drive away as if there weren't bloodhounds and night riders...
...worry about me," he said. "I'm from Illinois. I can handle this stuff. Want a joyride?" Berg declined, then watched the truck slam downhill into a Volkswagen and another truck. Amazingly, no one was hurt. Says she: "My jaws were frozen into a laugh for about an hour...