Word: playlet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inward-looking impulses: revenge and the desire to hide. The characters are conventional middle-class Britons. Their behavior, however, is high gothic. The ironic Loopy, for example, becomes increasingly credible as events move toward the horrific. A middle-aged man, cast as the wolf in a Red Riding Hood playlet, discovers that he likes to wear a furry skin and romp in predatory games. His mother, who displayed such sport to him during his childhood, indulgently calls this business "going all loopy." The narrative works simultaneously as a send-up of werewolf legends and as a disquieting portrait...
Punch-Drunk Love, the latest movie from master filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, is a fresh, subdued playlet of a comedy from a director famed for grand melodramatic spectacle. It has the same brand of cinematic flair that nourished Anderson’s modern classics Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but it’s a matured sort of flair; it’s quieter, more sparingly used. What Anderson has created with Punch-Drunk Love is not his best work, but it’s certainly his artiest—formally brilliant, deliberately paced and rife with transcendent moments...
...Josh could say that. In the fictional world of this playlet, everyone got a good scare, but no one got hurt, lost parents, saw dozens of office workers jump a thousand feet rather than burn to death. It was a lot easier for the fictional class on the screen to take his advice than for the figurative one at home. But that's one problem, with drama and with life, that even I can't blame Aaron Sorkin...
...Arriving in New York, they brought Gardner and one of the other Ravens east, hired two other singers and dubbed the new assembly The Coasters. Thus was born not just a group but a genre. It was a wrinkle on the radio playlet: the two-minute rock musical comedy. "Searchin?," "Charlie Brown," "Along Came Jones," "Little Egypt" - the whole raucous, joyous bunch of pastiches bubbled over with sharp point-of-view writing and obscure movie and radio references. Scarface Jones? Bulldog Drummond? Salty Sam and Sweet Sue (in their masterpiece, "Along Came Jones")? Most kids didn?t know that...