Word: mock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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mugging, overplaying, looking endlessly over his shoulder in mock bewilderment. Such things are to be expected from a movie star. But Newman can also be an actor...
This question of balance springs from a tension in Shapiro's work, a tension between ideals of consistently hilarious comedy and of valid political and social commentary. Perhaps the two most insightful portions were the ones which tended least to be bombardments of gag lines, in particular, a mock anti-drug program and another "message from the President" on riots in Detroit. Richard Beltzer, who plays the President as well as other roles, delivers his philippics with a devastating sense of timing...
...been proved that the best way to defeat tyranny is to mock it. With mockery Wilson may yet depose the tyranny of racism...
...garden, the self-contained life-style perpetuated by the Finzi-Continis on the inside is rotting at the core. Raised as a bluestocking, Micol quips to Giorgio that she's writing her thesis on Emily Dickenson, "a dried-up spinster like me." Minutes later, in giving him a mock botany lesson, she points to a tree she imagines planted by Lucrezia Borgia. The connotations of that name reveal in her no dried-up spinster, but the malevolence of cruel sexuality. All her dewyeyed clinging to a golden past is merely the weapon she uses to emasculate Giorgio's overworshipful maleness...
Half the time it seems devoted only to undermining the studio-born materials with which Williams has been saddled. And so the continuing "suspense" music contains an echo of mock heroics and banal conversations that are staged in comical settings, like a San Francisco zoo. Of course, such time-honored methods of beating the Hollywood system are the stuff of which auteurs are made--except that in Williams' case, he never goes beyond such kamikaze tactics...