Word: slapsticks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film's cast is both talented and sexy, but Handkerchiefs is a director's movie. Blier consistently conquers the challenges of mood and texture set up by his script, weaving disparate elements into a ripe, dreamlike whole. The film opens in the slapstick manner of a cartoon, then evolves seamlessly into a bucolic Renoir romance. In the second half, Blier stages chase scenes, a benign car crash and a farcical kidnaping-the larky stuff of American screwball comedy. The film's stylized denouement, shot around a wintry mansion, is a surrealist's spooky intimation of tragedy...
...playlets are quite dreary. In the weakest, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby appear as vacationing Chicago doctors whose Los Angeles visit is ruined by slapstick mishaps involving torn clothing and wayward automobiles. It is a thin recap of an old Simon screenplay, The Out-of-Towners. Jane Fonda and Alan Alda fare only slightly better in their sketch. She plays a tart-tongued Newsweek editor who has flown West to fight with her ex-husband over the custody of their daughter...
...moved under the spotlight as the stage turned, but the power failed. When the board members were asked to walk around the stage and come under the spotlight one by one, the men, already standing in a circle, turned in different directions and bumped into one another. Slapstick comedy had returned. At a Law Day convention in Portsmouth, R.I., a dozen Boston policemen were discovered cavorting nude in the Ramada Inn pool; unfortunately, the discoverers were a group of visiting parochial school girls led by two nuns. And who can forget the sign that the Las Vegas Hilton hung...
...SELLARS has stroked a bold production of Antony and Cleopatra in the ghostly waters of Adams House Pool, with frigid temperatures and floating death cooling the flames of Shakespeare's most passionate tragedy. Not that it isn't lively--Sellars sustains the initial gimmick with scene after scene of slapstick splashing and general mayhem, but balances his off-the-wall antics with a sound sense of the appropriate; invention almost seems subordinate to the text. If it frequently resembles a circus, it is an indisputably Shakespearean circus, the Bard doing breast-stroke, the actors barnstorming with the kind of relish...
...been made aloud. No one, including the Piloboli themselves, could say exactly what it was that the troupe was doing when it began experimenting in 1971. It certainly was not dance, say the purists, meaning that it was not classical ballet or any recognizable modern dance. Was it acrobatic slapstick, abstract-expressionist mime, some kind of muscular, head-over-heels tableau vivant? The startling truth was that Pilobolus entangled human bodies in ways that no one had ever seen before. When the group performed on Broadway last year for four weeks of near sold-out performances, Critic Arlene Croce admitted...