Word: pallid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BOOK IS a pallid, shortened imitation of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972, but lacks that book's hard political reporting. That's probably because Jimmy Carter and his staff were pretty unwilling to share what was on their minds with reporters, or at least less willing than George McGovern was in 1972. That's the trouble with a news event--when there's no news, you go visit the leper colony to dig up some protagonist's great aunt. It's not that Reeves is not a good reporter--he is--but just that there...
There is undoubtedly a good movie to be made about the Alaska pipeline -the rigors of construction, the boomtown atmosphere, the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited. But Pipe Dreams is not it. The old Yukon hands would have had a word for this pallid melodrama: mush...
...roots. Like tumescent udders (ech!) Mel Brooks's toors hang, full of borscht and seltzer while the crazed milkmaids Mostel, Wilder, Dick Shawn and Kenneth Mars squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. So much of the American comic strain flows through this film that it makes a pallid commentary like Bob Fosse's Lenny a misrepresentation. That movie tried to deal with other, broader things, not what Lenny lived for; this does. The Producers lets an audience know the wild juices that flow when a comedian works--it's like running for your life. "I'm wearing a cardboard belt!" Mostel...
Copeland seems to sing with her loins and if Western Union ever puts out a Lustogram, it should hire her to deliver it. Chadman is pallid as Joey, rather like a gypsy dropped from the audition of A Chorus Line. His dancing, however, is always fluent, and the actual chorus line, under Margo Sappington's supple control, both creates and burlesques a raft of dance routines. Mingling sordid facts with lovely tunes, Pal Joey is a modern Beggar 's Opera richly adorned in the apparel of a prince's ransom...
...Travers turned out a series of farces sketching a Wode-housean gallery of silly asses of the English upper class, alas unrelieved by a Jeeves. "They were quite good, but just things for laughter," Travers recalls. By the '50s, this collection of emotional still lifes seemed too pallid for the English stage, so Travers retired to the seaside to watch cricket. But when he was well into his 80s he decided to try again, and succeeded in broadening his vision and style without losing his comic bite, a feat that eluded even Bernard Shaw in his declining years...