Word: slapstickers
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...back. Instead I use my imagination and let the sailor do the scrapping." Of course, Popeye never used force unjustifiably. "Treat ever' body right and if they steps on ya, sock 'em!" was his motto. The comic strip did not glorify but rather burlesqued violence, turning it into slapstick. He became and remains an incongrous folk hero--a cross between one of the Stooges and Superman...
...assorted ruffians. The fight scenes underscore the limitations of the premise. Clever camera and stunt work not-withstanding, human beings simply cannot contort themselves the way cartoon figures can. Robin Williams can only cock his wrist a couple of times for the famous twister punch. As a result, the slapstick gains in immediacy but loses the necessary hyperbole...
FICTION. Neighbors by Thomas Berger. A surreal, slapstick comedy about life in exurbia. Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler. The literary life, the shenanigans of the rich and newly rich, the pains of middle age and the importance of family loyalties, by Canada's most engaging novelist. Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow. The author of Ragtime plays intricate and haunting blues variations on the American dream during the Great Depression. Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino. One of Italy's best novelists takes time out from his own fiction to become the Brothers Grimm...
...praise to Wayne Fitzgerald and David Oliver, who devised this witty, vivacious credit sequence, and to Dolly Parton for composing and singing the title song. Alas, it consumes only 2½ minutes of Colin Higgins' slapstick sermon on job equality. The rest of the film is misjudged and malign. Higgins has little more to tell us about the personalities of his three secretaries than those first alarm clocks did: Judy (Jane Fonda) is square, Doralee (Dolly Parton) is frilly, Vi (Lily Tomlin) is sensible. Together, though, they are a Stenographic catastrophe; they'd lose the quick-brown...
...clown face, still works the crowd like an aging but adept masseur. But this Scottie is no longer a man one would care to spend an evening drinking with, or even observing. He chokes on his own gag lines; he straitjackets his son (Robby Benson) in a slapstick embrace. The audience is trapped too. The knowledge, from Reel 1, that Scottie is soon to die forecloses a mortgage on the viewer's affections. Saying the film is a failure becomes an immoral...