Word: shtick
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...performed by the Chipettes, have a generic verve; that's the best that can be said about the movie's CGI animation. (As in G-Force, the animated rodents interact with the live-action humans.) But when it talks, or tries to develop a situation, Alvin 2 relies on shtick that sinks below even the dismal standards of high school comedies and buddy farces. Pain is the key here: the movie has more gags that involve hitting, hurting and humiliating than you'll find in an entire Super Bowl's worth of commercials...
...exhaustion. The Morgans' writer-director, Marc Lawrence, has no special gift for character nuance or witty dialogue. To him, rom-com is simply the recycling of a tired fugitive-couple premise from other bad movies (My Blue Heaven, Witless Protection) and the application of the genre's most formulaic shtick-in-trade: forcing an uncomfortable intimacy on two people who don't like each other. (See TIME's top 10 films of the year...
...radio, hosting a mid-morning show on New York's WNBC that was improbably sandwiched between Don Imus and Howard Stern. His cheerful comedic style seemed antique compared with the grouchiness of those two audio superstars. But even in the '50s and '60s, parading his encyclopedic memory for shtick, he was a throwback to every baggypants tummeler, every silent-movie clown. And like those masters, he knew that a pie in the face was the visual equivalent of a rim shot. Set up the joke, do the punch line, get a goopy Soupy face. He explained this precise, predictable rhythm...
...married women fare no better than the minorities. These are retro, sitcom-style wives, bland and humorless. Ronnie frets about kitchen tiles. Lucy lusts after the Fabio-type yoga instructor (Carlos Ponce, ripping off Hank Azaria's shtick). Cynthia lives to please her controlling husband. At least two of them seem to have shackles to throw off, but in the movie, the only things they free themselves from are their clothes, so we can see how they each measure up to those most demanding of standards of director Peter Billingsley: the ability to rock a bra and panties...
...Woodstock, also about suburban Jews in the '60s), this one actually has ethnic-appropriate casting. The Jews here are sometimes broadly drawn - Larry's family slurps soup at a decibel level that even the Simpsons would find deafening - but they're fully assimilated. Nobody says, "Oy vey!" or talks shtick. If people answer a question with a question, the first would be Larry's plaintive "Why me?" when he seeks legal, emotional or spiritual help, and the second the world's "Who cares...