Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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HRST nearly does the impossible in giving Frayn's script the dual-leveled comedic chaos it demands. "Noises Off" is a guaranteed evening of laughter, and ends the adventurous HRST season with a successful staging gamble. It is also the last chance Harvard audiences may have to claim recent graduates Fish, Guillory, Lithgow and Walling as their own before others discover them...
...This frenzied display has become known as the "laughing revival," or "Toronto blessing," from the city that has popularized it. Though similar to the emotional outbursts found in some U.S. Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, the paroxysms of laughter are new, particularly for straitlaced Anglicans. And they are catching on. After first appearing at Holy Trinity only last May, laughing revivals have been reported in Anglican parishes from Manchester to York to Brighton...
Though virtually unknown today, holy laughter was a long-standing Pentecostal tradition that petered out in the 1950s, according to religious historian Vinson Synan of Virginia's Regent University. Why has it resurfaced in such an unlikely place? "It's a kind of emotional release for a lot of people," maintains Synan. "It shows there's a spiritual and emotional hunger that's not being met in mainline churches...
...forewarned, this is a hilariously gory and graphic film. Despite your sex, sexual orientation or whether you have contemplated the possibility of changing your sex, the scenes showing the sex-change surgery will make you think twice, fall in the aisle from shocked laughter or chunder your meal...
...voice over continues as she dresses, paints her nails, applies her lipstick. Finally she looks at the camera and says with her accent, "Last year I was a man." As sad as it is, it is hard to repress the laughter. She appears throughout the film, telling her story which, because it is so sad, juxtaposes oddly with some of the other portraits and grows tiresome...