Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...miss, near-slapstick stories about one "Sam Slade," a private investigator who eventually sells out to the worldwide network of conspirators defending The Canon. (One of the conspirators is Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, who orders her bodyguard "Malloy" to throw an over-inquisitive Slade out of the New York Harvard Club.) Most, however, are serious essays--from the lucid "Integrating the American Mind" to the wandering "Trading on the Margin...
...Minutes recently interviewed Jerry Zucker, writer/director of Airplane: The Movie, The Naked Gun, and Ghost. Brain Donors is his latest foray into the zany world of cinema slapstick...
Wilder's film definitely has its bizarre moments which reveal its unsteady identity. In other words, it doesn't quite know what it wants to be, whether a slapstick comedy, classic romance or comment on the modern industrial...
Winsome Brown, as the "old blind Arab woman," displays the most depth of any character as an embodiment of the native population's suffering. However, even she cannot gain audience sympathy because a French soldier beats her to death in a staged slapstick scene...
Along the way, though, a lot of the fun goes out of this tale of a maladroit family and hapless, unwilling tax inspector. There is a dark and extremely unamusing family secret that has made the Catchprices so miserable and so horrid to one another. What begins as slapstick evolves into tragedy, and Carey does not adequately prepare the ground for this transition. In the end, a reader is left with the uncomfortable sense of having laughed in all the wrong places. If that was Carey's intention, he succeeded, but he should perhaps expect only a muted form...