Word: slapsticker
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...both as incisive social commentary and as humor. In a sequence near the end of the film, a waiter at a rustic country restaurant with a ritzy clientele gets involved in a grotesque food fight in the kitchen with the chef, who turns out to be his lover. The slapstick technique employed here went out of vogue in America at about the same time that Hal Roach stopped making Spanky and Our Gang films. After all, squids perched atop the suddenly toupee-less head of a middle-aged man are not necessarily funny. Nor is the scene in which...
Aside from an opening that recalls the old Nichols-May "doctor" routines, the script is flimsy and unfocused. Coming from Jerry Belson (Smile, TV's Dick Van Dyke Show), this is especially depressing. Belson wastes energy on repetitive slapstick bits that show the hero's bungled suicide attempts; The End's second half bogs down describing an unfunny friendship between Sonny and a clownish schizo (a mugging Dom DeLuise) whom he meets at a nuthouse. The film's characters and intentions are blurred and trivialized. What should have been a scabrous black comedy in the manner...
...movie's slapstick escapades, it never turns into a Three Stooges picture. Director Robert Zemeckis' broad style frequently rises above silliness to be come a form of pop surrealism. The tip-off to his intentions occurs early on, when he shows us a mob of screaming girls grabbing up copies of Meet the Beatles in a store that stocks only Beatles albums. The scene is not faithful to reality but to our memories of that time. Such dreamlike exaggerations allow Zemeckis to cut to the very heart of his material...
...just the right degree of humor, to Linda Cameron, Figaro's master's love, to Jonathan Prince, the hilarious flunky who serves the highest bidder, the cast is one of the best assembled in some time at the Loeb. If at times we are given a few too many slapstick gags, these times are few. For the most part, the buffoonery is nicely balanced by a moment now and then of seriousness, and any critical comments about the acting would be unjustifiable. Giles Havergal, a true professional brought over from Scotland, ably directed the show, and the cast seems...
Baby girls have traditionally been the more common targets of ideologically slapstick names such as Hope, Silence, Charity, Faith, Prudence, Chastity, Five-Year Plan and She-who-digs-tubers-without-complaint. And now Phoenix, of all places, has an Equal Rights Amendment McCartney [April...