Word: marxes
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Talking pictures were barely a year old when anarchy broke loose at the movies. At the start of The Cocoanuts, Groucho Marx stalked down the steps in his Neanderthal slouch and spat out a flood of puns and insults. It was a new cinema art: rude descending a staircase...
...Four Marx Brothers--Groucho, mute Harpo, Italianate Chico (pronounced Chick-o) and straight man Zeppo--weren't the fathers of every aggressive film comic from the Stooges to Sandler, they were surely their Dadas. And they're seen to best effect on The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection (UMVD, $59.98), which gathers the five Paramount farces they made from 1929 to '33: The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, Monkey Business and Duck Soup. Compared with the bounty of extras offered on the recent package of seven other Marx Brothers films, the new DVD is pretty skimpy: no commentary, no documentaries...
HEALTH: Gyms for men only; cereal cafés; Marx Brothers...
...relatively prosperous rice-farming family, he had an eclectic education that included spells as both a Buddhist novitiate and a Roman Catholic schoolboy. A mediocre student, he won a scholarship to study in Paris largely because so few candidates applied. There, the future communist leader read the works of Marx ("I didn't really understand them," he confessed) and, more usefully, a Stalinist political primer that urged "pitiless repression" of all enemies. Inspired in part by the French Revolution, Pol Pot's hotchpotch ideology was grounded in a warped version of Cambodian Buddhist theology and dreams of past national greatness...
...platitude for every plot twist. "No matter how far a jackass travels," he muses, "it won't come back a horse." Batou encounters lots of fantastic creatures (like the crustaceous Crab Man), elegant vistas (pagoda skyscrapers) and bizarre machines (a plane that resembles both a dragon and Groucho Marx, with a cigar as his nose). It's smart, spectacular, luscious picturizing...