Word: plotlessly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plotless show in dead voices doesn't leave performers much room. John Lithgow as Lincoln was the only member of the able cast called upon to act. His Lincoln had a frontier body and a lawyer's voice. The excessive makeup limited his face somewhat, but his Abe was a spark of life in a dead play. Kirstein, however, gave him nothing to live for so he went out and had himself shot...
...success is all the more remarkable because it is virtually plotless. A suburban husband (Walter Matthau) decides that the grass is greener and the lass keener in the other fellow's backyard. A colleague with a wandering eye (Robert Morse) nominates himself as Matthau's instructor in the arcane rules of high-infidelity. Like most modern teachers, Morse goes in for visual aids: every time he makes a pedantic point the screen lights up with a lively sketch from life, featuring 13 stars in cameo roles as "technical advisers...
...involved in the film's pallid episodes. In Fiammetta, a Florentine figlia who lives with her widowed mother gazes dreamily at the family's carefully manicured estate, brooding about the disorder within herself. "The warmth in me is so soft that it hurts," she mutters, in a plotless sequence as muzzy as her mood. Marie-France and Veronica tells of two chic Parisiennes, not yet 17, sophisticated but full of curiosity about the homme-dingers hanging around them. While Marie-France reads Baudelaire, Veronica lives him, at an endless round of wild parties. Her destiny, she sighs...
Andy Lee's "Bach and the Beatles" is a world premiere, of sorts -- its pieces have been performed, but never before staged. "Staging" Bach cantatas and Beatle hits is not as easy as it sounds. It means keeping two dozen bodies onstage through the plotless wanderings of the Peasant Cantata looking as if they belong there, and it means dramatizing John Lennon's wonderful language without distorting it beyond recognition. And -- considering that he snuck this ambitious premiere into a House dining room -- director Ken McBain has managed something of a coup...
Foolish, nearly plotless, and with all of its explosions timed to go off just a split second too late, Fantomas ends up hors de combat. In its livelier moments, the picture is devoted to a chase involving runaway automobiles, crazy motorcycles, a freight train, a motor launch, a whirlybird, a miniature getaway submarine and an inflatable raft. Making such movies must be more fun than a picnic. Seeing them turns out to be less fun than the funny papers...