Word: sir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movie industry, with a representative collection of fools: Mickey Boorman and Pat Sligo, two pot-smoking "New Wave" filmmakers from L.A.; Carl Dorf, a self-exiled victim of McCarthyism; Dan Rashur, the wunderkind director with the Colgate smile; Sy Joelmersbagger, a tweedy history professor from Yale; and Sir Flute Parsons, an over-the-hill British screenwriter with a fondness for money and American boys. Wood gives each one his brief theatrical moment and tries to build an act out of a few comic situations (like Joe's constant run-ins with his assistant, Wesley) that can't last very long...
Mostly, though, Has "Washington" Legs? happily serves as a vehicle for Frederick Neumann as John Bean and for ART's Jeremy Geidt, as Sir Flute Parsons. Here is Neumann, wrapped in a cloak and his own stoic machismo, surveying the troops at night--"I am afraid, Joe," he says deeply, slowly--and then doubling over in agony when told he cannot have the final cut: "You have cut off my balls, Joe. My Balls!" Here is Geidt, prancing on tiptoes, delivering an hilarious monologue on what America means to him (mostly strapping young boys), and miming his way through Washington...
...performance within a cinematic framework. Before each act, he places a sound collage of favorite American movies ("We may be rats, we may be crooked, we may be murderers, but we're Americans, Joe!"), before the first act we have movie credits ("Starring Robert Redford as George Washington, Sir Laurence Olivier as General Burgoyne," etc., all to the strains of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man"), and we have a delightful second-act coda with Thomas Derrah delivering a voice-over of a soldier's death for a sequence of the movie. This helps to lessen the play...
...little to do with American history as the movie within it. Its techniques and its themes are essentially British, and I'm not sure the Brattle St. crowd is any better prepared for this than for Lulu. The best written part of the play, it seems to me, is Sir Flute's second-act monologue (which resembles Tom Stoppard's New-Found Land in a lower comic vein); here Wood seems to be speaking for himself, evoking the romantic America of Paramount and MGM: "You said all that pretentious rights-of-man nonsense, and then you went...
...becomes like Atlanta. What would you say to that? So I asked the school board attorney, 'Tell me, please, how is Atlanta?' And at that time, he said that the Atlanta school population is more than 80 per cent Black. And my response to the attorney was this: 'Sir, there is no problem at all. I have known many excellent school systems that were 80 per cent white.' Whereupon the attorney said. 'No further questions...