Word: slapstick
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Worst of all is Quaid, who plays a Sancho Panza to Murray's Don Quixote. Quaid seems to have forgotten that successful slapstick requires a great deal more than simply acting clumsy, and the audience soon grows as weary of his character's stumbling, bumbling and foot-dragging as Grimm and Phyllis do. By the last third of the movie, he has been reduced to a wheezing, red-faced wreck, and one wishes that his accomplices would simply turn him in to the cops and get on with their escape...
...semicorrupt sheriffs is recognizably not of our era, yet equally recognizably a precursor to it; thus the outrageous sexual politics onstage is not ours, but pertinent to it. Director A.J. Antoon has taken considerable liberties (one character is called Joe Bob), and he uses the setting as much for slapstick buffoonery as for literary insight. But the show, the 14th in producer Joseph Papp's cycle of the Shakespeare canon, works better than any since the opening A Midsummer Night's Dream, also by Antoon...
...scene stealers, with their outrageous slapstick and near-perfect timing, are the twin Dromios (Jeremy Blumenthal and Lukas Oberhuber). They dress and behave like wayward, mischievous children in t-shirts, cut-off jeans, and backwards baseball caps. Oberhuber totes a yo-yo, Blumenthal a Koosh toy, and both add to the goofiness of the two players...
Octopus opens with a slapstick scene in New York City's Palace restaurant. A Sicilian Mafioso is trying to pass off stolen "Tiepido" and "Van Go" paintings and "Stradinoff" violins to an undercover agent with a recorder sewn into the crotch of his shorts. It was 1977, and the detective didn't know that he was talking to a key player in a drug network newly launched by the Sicilians...
...might buy slapstick from this man, but would you buy stock? Funnyman Mel Brooks, 63, said last week that his production company, Brooksfilms, plans a public offering to raise cash for movie and TV projects. The company earned a mere $323,000 in fiscal 1989 and may lose money in 1990. Comedy is hot today, but Brooks may be running out of gas. He has had no major hit since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, which reaped a total of more than $86 million in North America alone...