Word: send-up
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...made without condescension, because swift and artful pacing is the novel's strongest quality. With his five earlier books, Boyd, 39, has gained an enviable reputation as an intellectual who wears his learning lightly, when he does not toss it aside completely. Stars and Bars was a smart send-up of both British and American roads to corruption. The New Confessions turned a dubious premise, a reprise of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life, into a fluent book that is both romp and rumination. His new book is not so bumptiously funny as previous ones, but the author cannot resist...
...film offering the spectacle of a Komodo dragon being transported across a state line for immoral purposes can be lightly dismissed. That's especially true when it also offers a delicious send-up of the contemporary passion for exotic culinary experiences and an equally wicked satire of the grander pretenses of cinema scholarship. The latter is an occupation that director Bergman, who has a Ph.D. in cultural history, narrowly escaped by turning to more self-consciously comic forms (he wrote The In-Laws and the play Social Security...
...Alfred Ludens, who is preoccupied with genius -- he is writing a book about Leonardo -- and obsessed by Vallar. The subplot involves a pigheaded painter and his attempts to maintain a particularly grotesque menage a trois. There is some wit here; the book could in fact be viewed as a send-up of Doris Lessing's more apocalyptic fictional efforts. But in Murdoch's best work, the characters have more zip than these do. On to Novel...
...plot twists and gag lines, most of them leeringly lame. ("Desmond, have you ever been intimate when the two of you knew you weren't in love?" "I've been intimate when the three of us knew we weren't in love.") The show strives to be a wacky send-up of soap operas, but it lacks the deadpan wit of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or the bomb-throwing audacity of Soap...
...cute and irresistible, Eastwood is cute and irresistible, and then the two of them, like ballet dancers, are cute together. Peters' character has a baby, who is cute too, but the kid still has a lot to learn. Everyone plays off stereotypes of stereotypes, so Peters does a send-up of Eastwood's middle-aged machismo, and Eastwood, eyelids fluttering prettily in that fine Mount Rushmore face, takes off Peters' little-girl-lost act. Eastwood wins...