Word: slapsticking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...made 10 a box-office success. Edwards stages one nightclub scene starring Norma (Lesley Ann Warren). King's old girlfriend a Chicago chorus girl with a Brooklyn accent. Singing a paean to the Windy City. Norma struts her stuff and the camera zooms in close enough to count hairs. Slapstick routines, the inevitable waiter with a large cream pie, also form a backdrop for the main action. A few yuks fall flat but most of the jokes sustain a low chuckle coming from the audience...
Hoffmann is best seen as the progression of a soul. There is the comic slapstick of Act I, in which the eponymous poet falls in love with Olympia, a mechanical doll. Next there is the sobering disappointment of Act II, in which the hero falls in love with a faithless Venetian courtesan. Finally, there is the tragic catharsis of Act III, in which Hoffmann's sincere love for the simple, shy singer Antonia is destroyed by the vicious machinations of the evil Dr. Miracle. Each affair should appear to be more intense than the last...
...peopled the row with an assortment of all-too-familiar oddballs. There's Doc (Nick Nolte), a handsome, lazy scientist: "the seer," a dotty wise-man-of-the-sea type: and Mac and his boys, a bumbling gang of filthy but lovable squatters that Ward milks for all the slapstick...
...Neill has been blessed with a strong complement of actors and singers in the lead roles, but only two have a crucial element that earns them special praise. Tom Uskali as the Pirate King rivals Groucho in his mastery of greasepaint-mustache manipulation but never descends to slapstick. Uskali's perpetual air of bemusement gives lines like "our revenge will be swift and terrible" a wonderful screwball appeal...
...events leading to the release of the sub were a mixture of high drama and low slapstick. For six days, Commander Pyotr Gushin refused to leave his stranded vessel to talk to the Swedes. Not until Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko allowed Gushin to cooperate did the commander relent. The skipper and his navigation officer emerged, asked for and were allowed permission to shower, and then settled down to claim during a seven-hour interrogation that they had hit the reef because their compass had failed...