Word: riffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cable guy into a victim of TV addiction--all he knows about life he learned as a neglected child parked in front of the tube. When its stupid pieties don't work in real life, he embraces its other method of problem solving: violence. Hard even for Carrey to riff under that weight; his director, Ben Stiller, is more awed than helpful. Aiming, perhaps, for a neat double helix of black humor and prankishness, they've ended up with a pretty ugly granny knot...
...typical MST3K show has perhaps 700 of these asides. There are fewer in this riff on This Island Earth--the whole thing, ruthlessly pared down, lasts only 73 minutes--but watching it in a crowd offers a different high. As the gags pile up remorselessly, and the viewer strains to keep up with the story line and the cutting subtext, a furious but benign apnea takes hold. You can't enjoy a good long laugh because you'll miss too much; you must let it explode in short blasts. It's the happiest form of internal injury...
...rhetoric of Pat Buchanan and his herd of sheep-was one reason for the reluctance to absorb the homeless refugees. Hitler's righthand propaganda czar went as far as to say "At bottom... I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff." This is certainly the conclusion he would have been led to if he was aware that Roosevelt had the ability to order a bombing of the railway lines leading to the concentration camp Auschwitz but refused to do so. Such an action could have saved thousands upon thousands...
...Alexander's childhood friends, Maryville was pretty much as he describes it in his speeches: a town where the schools and churches were busy and crowded well into the evenings; where nosy neighbors kept kids out of trouble. Though Alexander constantly invokes "the challenges of the next century"--a riff mainly designed to paint Bob Dole as a fossil--the vision he offers is one of middle-class village life in the 1950s...
Conceived as a Beat-type riff on the problems of race and disempowerment in the inner city, the play starts to careen out of control in the earliest minutes. While an unseen saxophonist plays, tableaus of conflict are played out on the stage. A young man (Kevin Crockett) fights with his preacher father (Tyrone Bean); a preposterous, grade-schooler's version of a prostitute (Melanie Futorian) fights with her john (Dwight Hart). Meanwhile, incredibly realistic-looking homeless people (Nick Linski and Tania Guimond), complete with filthy hair and that unsettling, rocking motion of the mentally disturbed, drift through the audience...