Word: matthau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unemployment office, Donald cannot even have a bracing cup of coffee and a peaceful cry in the luncheonette across the street. For it is just then that a masked and seemingly psychopathic gunman (Jerry Reed) decides to hold up the place. With a little help from Sonny Paluso (Walter Matthau), who is also abashed to be out of work, Donald manages to foil the crime. Neither brave nor bright, he just cannot help extending the general messiness of his life to everyone he meets, even criminals...
...catch falling snowflakes on her tongue. Michael Leeson, who wrote scripts for the TV series Taxi, uses that show's mixture of urban gallantry and paranoia in his first feature. He has given Williams his best chance to vent his singular, hysterical style in a movie and provided Matthau, stooped and shuffling under the burden of his sanity, with his richest part in years. The film's moral is spoken by Donald's fiancée. Eyeing the arsenal that Donald thinks he needs to walk tall, she protests, "I don't believe in surviving...
...film. The writer has become complacent about his characters, no longer treating them as human beings, but merely as devices. The irrelevant one-liners that he seems unable to control--"In Brooklyn, you learn Spanish first, then English, then Jewish"--dominate the film. Libby and her father Herb (Walter Matthau) spend most of their scenes together throwing witty remarks across the room; the audience comes to expect no more than impersonal humor. When a serious line does pop out of the dialogue here and there, rather than evoking any real emotion from the audience, it simply sits there, wallowing...
This time Matthau is a career assassin, eradicating Mob stool pigeons with the weary professionalism of a top C.P.A., and Lemmon, a network censor and a jilted husband poised to end his misery in suicide. They meet on their mutual missions, in a hotel room. For Matthau it is loathe at first sight; for Lemmon it is a last grab at camaraderie before lights out. See how they run on the treadmill of French farce, tripping over each other's discomfort, overdosing on the crudest twists of plot...
...jokes and targets have lost their currency ("Prema ture ejaculation means always having to say you're sorry"? Hippies? Slow-witted chicanos?). But if Wilder's antique vehicle is no more than serviceable, it is ever at the service of two meticulous farceurs, and Lemmon and Matthau are never less than funny funny...