Word: mad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prick Up Your Ears is a view from outside, cool as Orton's craft. But Ken Russell has always been caged inside the beautiful mad creatures he imagines artists to be. No distance, no irony, no coherence, no prisoners. And no surprise that Russell now turns to Gothic, Stephen Volk's script about the famous night in 1816 that Byron (Gabriel Byrne) spent with his mistress Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), his lover John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson). From that spectral evening emerged Mary...
When presented with a baby, otherwise healthy adults are overcome with the impulse to assume a series of funny faces, and to then make strange gurgling noises. In this way they work themselves into a mad frenzy that culminates in the desire to love, feed, and possess the organic mound of flesh that has just drooled, vomited, and peed on their laps...
...American list of similar complaints on that score is long. In the past ten years, Washington has pressed mightily to open Japanese markets to such exports as beef, oranges and even U.S.-made baseball bats for a baseball-mad country. In almost all those situations, the U.S. has eventually succeeded, at least to some extent. Last October, for example, Japan agreed to open its cigarette market to U.S. manufacturers by suspending its 20% tariff on that product. American cigarette manufacturers estimate that their market in Japan will quintuple, to an estimated $1 billion annually. But in every such case, contends...
...wait. Seidelman has had the wit to cast that uncannily resourceful actor John Malkovich as both Jeff Peters, the mad -- well, anyway, crabby -- scientist who created Ulysses, and the mechanical marvel himself. The former is a ferocious misanthrope, misogynist and klutz; the latter is, naturally and logically, everything his master cannot hope to be. He moves, for example, not with the herky-jerky nervousness of his creator or a too cute movie robot. Instead, Malkovich invests him with a preternatural smoothness. His character is equally subtle. It may be based on the wise-child conventions on which the typical...
...REAL delight in the film, though, is what the Coen's don't include: the bits and pieces of plots and suggestions of plots that appear at the fringes of the frame: the strange prisoner who claims to eat sand, the Mad Biker's bronzed baby shoes, and an unexplained tattoo coincidence...