Word: mimed
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Placing someone with paranormal powers among ordinary people is a classic conceit used by many television shows, including Bewitched, My Favorite Martian and I Dream of Jeannie. But Williams' pastiche of mime, light-speed improvisation and complex clowning is giving that one-joke vehicle a new velocity. Delivered with his engagingly boyish grin and calculated inflections, such gibberish as "nano, nano" (meaning hello) and "nimnul" (meaning jerk) can send audiences?and producers?into paroxysms of delight: last week the show shot up to seventh place in the Nielsens. "This guy is going to be a superstar with or without this...
...premise more appropriate to Saturday morning TV than prime time, but Williams transforms trivia into a tour de force. He speaks in dozens of different voices that ape the sounds of computers and animals as well as other show-biz personalities. He tosses off inventive bits of mime and times his lines with a precision that rivals Johnny Carson's. Though the gags are vintage My Favorite Martian, Williams' improvisational verve makes them irresistible. In a matter of weeks, children all over the country will be imitating Mork's vocabulary of alien sounds. Otherwise rational adults...
These, however, are obtained at a heavy cost in tedium. It is not merely that the brilliant material from the Peking Opera-that highly stylized mixture of comedy, acrobatics, music and mime that really has no Western equivalent-and popular Chinese dances-they put one pleasantly in mind of Radio City Music Hall choreography -are embedded in an evening in which an earnest soprano hymns the joys of revolutionary struggle, and musicians tootle and plink away on strange-sounding instruments. Nor does the dull excerpt from a revolutionary ballet showing a young woman abused by the minions of a wicked...
...goes on to stock questions that permit the young Senator to rattle off his policy positions by rote. Murrow's notion of challenging Bogart, Bacall and Monroe is to ask them to name their favorite film roles. He even allows Harpo Marx to make all his responses in mime; the audience, no doubt, had tuned in with the expectation that Harpo would speak...
...Children of Paradise. A true epic, deeply compelling, visually unforgettable. Marcel Carne's masterpiece is set in eighteenth-century France, among the clowns, thieves, actors, pickpockets and peasants. It's impossible to do justice to this film in a mere paragraph, this story of three artists (an actor, a mime, and a murderer) who love the same woman, and must cope with their passion and jealousy in startlingly different ways. Carne's characters revel in theatrics; illusion and reality smash into each other, driving each man to the very brink of his art, to the terrifying edge of truth. Jean...