Word: spoof
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Double Duty. The son of a New York rabbi, he graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High, where Woody Allen was a contemporary. Then came Harvard and graduate school and the first of the flops. It was called Sing Muse, a spoof on the classics that Segal was teaching, and it was written as a Harvard house musical. It was good enough to attract an off-Broadway producer, but outside the congenial connnes of the academic atmosphere it lasted only 39 performances
...Veneto add daily calories to the Sweet Life. The Appian Way leads into the past, into the harsh, lurid revels of Petronius, who mocked Nero's ancient Sybarites with the first Satyricon. Although only fragments of that manuscript survive, they are enough to reveal a Homeric spoof. The hilariously ignoble hero, Encolpius (sometimes translated as "the Crotch"), is a randy homosexual. His wanderings lead him not to godlike beings but to all too human Romans...
...sesquicar-bonates, lithium chloride, magnesium sulfate, hexachlorophene-everything, presumably, but cyclamates. BELLY BUDGETING. More appetizing recipes are offered in the spa's dietetic dining room. There guests bend over their menus like accountants, busily subtracting a prune whip (40 calories) here and adding a rutabaga julienne (36) there. "Spoof champagne" is served from big icy bottles with popping corks. As your dinner companions chat about "bulging adipose tissue" and "draining metabolic pools," it's reassuring to discover that you are only sipping carbonated water with grape flavoring. Afterward, resisting an urge to drink the finger bowl, you wait...
...hard to say where the spoof ends and the soap opera starts. After Butch and Sundance flee to Bolivia, a sterile melodrama sets in. The script now embraces such weighty matters as the alienation of the cowboy from modern society, the alienation of the outlaw from repressive society, and various other alienations. In other words, alienation-a good theme, but a little too ponderously applied to this wisp of a comedy...
...movie ends abruptly here. Director Hill has too much affection for Butch and Sundance to slobber over their death agonies. He has partly compensated for the dreary pacing which prevailed earlier. Yet the awkward, and frequent, overlay of farce and social comment has marred an otherwise excellent spoof...