Word: spoof
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...pictures. Assault on Precinct 13 is the most solidly worked out and the most satisfying. Ignored as an exploitation film upon its initial release in 1976, it is Carpenter's second feature (his first was a science-fiction spoof expanded from a film school project, called Dark Star.) The basic situation and central characters, actors' mannerisms and shards of dialogue are derived from Rio Bravo, a late Howard Hawks film. Assault largely inexperienced cast lurches beneath the preposterous weight of a self-consciously anachronistic script. The dialogue is as tersely as any Hawk's film, and it is often difficult...
...speeding bullet? Not likely, when Superman's bright blue leotard bulged from a paunch that was bound to blunt the man of steel's airstream in flight. Actually Texas Senator John Tower, 53, never did get airborne, but otherwise the conservative Republican performed nobly in a Superman spoof mounted in Dallas by a drinking club of politicians and newsmen. "I was born to play Superman," acknowledged Tower, flipping his cape for dramatic emphasis...
...principal character is the snow. It isolates the town and stills all action. The escapes and chases that fill an ordinary story are stalled in Jameson. A marksman in snowshoes is the only prowling menace. In the commissaris ' whining sister Suzanne, van de Wetering finds a way to spoof his native country and contrast it to Maine. The old lady lives sur rounded by tacky reproductions of Dutch scenes and execrable examples of porcelain. Her brother briefly thinks that she may have killed her husband but concludes that he is overinfluenced by the fact that her meals constitute...
...BEST was yet to come in the form of Woody Allen's outrageous farce, God, also a spoof of Greek tragedy. In contrast to the small cast in Phoenix, God has a cast of thousands including people planted in the audience, characters out of Tennesee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire, several playwrights and Allen himself (an offstage voice, don't get too excited). If Phoenix is a bit unsubtle, God is a bull rhino in a package store. A more insane play could hardly be imagined...
Ironically, Nicolas Pacana's Jester spun out the ballet's only truly arresting dance--capering, cartwheeling, bursting up in a jangle of lines knocked askew. As a clown, the Jester can spoof and comment like the ballet itself, exercising the only mode of feeling and moving, which is neither blunted nor ridiculed...