Word: schlemieled
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...talented cast is led by Mo Rocca as Seymour, a schlemiel who works in a skid-row flower shop owned by Mushnik (Adam Schwartz). Seymour finds a strange plant, which he names Audrey II, after the Audrey who is the object of his affections (Sibel Ergener). Seymour discovers that the plant flourishes only when fed human blood--and it talks, to boot. He must struggle with the Faustian bargain Audrey II offers him: fame and success for the store and Seymour himself, in return for fresh flesh...
...sour, imposing anchorman who strides through a newsroom decimated by layoffs muttering, "and all because they couldn't program Wednesday nights," to the three principals. Actor-Auteur Albert Brooks (who cast Jim Brooks -- no relation -- in his own second film, Modern Romance) is the all-time appealing schlemiel, notably in a laugh-nightmare when he anchors the network news and sweats his career down the tubes. (Says one appalled technician: "This is more than Nixon ever sweated.") Hurt is neat too, never standing safely outside his character, always allowing Tom to find the humor in his too-rapid success, locating...
...patterns. She succeeds in detecting a few basic clues. The later movies are subtler than the early ones, for example, and Allen the artist separates himself more and more from Allen the persons. Oh, and there are some continuing themes: the contrast of the New York Jew-schlemiel personality with various exotic locates, say, and the difficulties of love in the modern world. But in order to deduce fro.. these indications anything illuminating or even interesting about Allen, maybe Jacobs could use a degree or two in psychology...
...world--irretrievable so to the "commonsensical" folk surrounding him. The Bellow protagonist is a seer, a dealer in the currency of big ideas and grand historical visions. And yet, he has street smarts--savvy gleaned from a long well-spent education. But whether a garden-variety schlemiel like Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day, a disheveled and dislocated intellectual like Mosses Herzog of Herzog, or a questionably successful writer like Charlie Citrine of Humboldt's Gift. Homo Bellow has the task of getting himself horsewhipped by a comically brutal world. Then, of course, the Bellow protagonist will accept the world...
...lost forever. All we miss is the Esther Williams schtick; what we get is Antony and Cleopatra shouting at each other from across the pool, their passions mingling in the sea-air, their bodies metaphorically pulled under by the whimsical undertow of Fortune; Cleopatra viciously dunking the poor schlemiel who swims out with the news of Antony's political marriage to Caesar's sister Octavia; Antony, Caesar, and Pompey carousing drunkenly on the eve of their battle, chucking each other off the raft with merry abandon; a broken, wasted Enobarbus sinking from his skeletal ladder into the shadowy waters...