Word: sketches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...movie roles. Murphy could--and still can--capture a character's entire life history in a few well-chosen gestures and phrases. Maybe this talent means that Murphy is more imitative than creative, but so be it--he is a brilliant imitator, which is why he was the ideal sketch performer...
...then, to stretch a talent best suited to the five-minute sketch to fit a full-length film? Until now, the answer has been either to have Murphy simulate a variety of roles while actually playing a single character, as in his cop/action flicks, or, perversely, to have him appear onscreen as little as possible, as in Trading Places. The first answer has proved inadequate to sustain an entire movie--else guns and flash would not be necessary--and the second defeats the purpose of a film serving as the vehicle for a particular actor...
...combination of these cameos and the direction of John Landis (who directed Murphy and other SNL veterans in such films as Trading Places and Animal House and has also directed sketch anthologies like Kentucky Fried Movie) makes America a collection of short, funny vignettes, which happen to be linked through a continuing plot...
...Year was founded in a Law School student's apartment, not the White House. The program is an independent, privately funded venture, and Khazei and Brown drew heavily on students and faculty at the Law School when creating it. Even President Bok participated, appraising and discussing a 10-page sketch of City Year which the two presented...
Clearly, Fischl wants an overall look that is not too finished, consistently "imperfect," with an air of unconcern for its own pictorial mechanism -- the creamy, dashed-off realism of a Manet oil sketch. But this requires a mastery over the detail and frequency of brushstrokes, and a certainty about the drawing embedded in them, that he has not yet attained. He will slide from a passage of near virtuoso colloquialism to one of awkward smearing and prodding, and not fix -- maybe not see -- the difference...