Word: stolidness
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...solid gags in Frank Oz's deft direction of Paul Rudnick's pointed script, the biggest one is that it's not just Howard who seems gay. So do the teachers, the town barber, Howard's stolid brother. And what exactly is the gay style in a time when bullying machismo rules on the street and on the screen? It is to be pleasant, considerate, gently witty--virtues once celebrated in American life and Hollywood comedies...
...Land--a sharp-eyed character study and virtuoso acting class masquerading as a violent melodrama--he is played by Sylvester Stallone. This time Hollywood's longest lived action star is not battling Apollo Creed or the Vietnamese or a killer mountain, but his own rep as a stolid, vaguely comic, pre-Modernist hunk-lunk. Freddy is surrounded by guys who think they're men because they carry guns in the big city. But Sly is crowded too--by an intimidating gang of quality thesps, including Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta. They've been doing the heavy acting...
...following scenario is played out daily. Wife and Husband have decided to buy a new family car, their last one having been rendered immobile by the accumulated weight of gum wads, empty juice boxes and broken plastic toys from McDonald's Happy Meals. Do they go with the stolid minivan or the racy sport-ute? They consult consumer guides. They compare prices. They make, if they have the stomach for it, a few desultory visits to a variety of reptilian car salesmen. And they gather promotional brochures...
Some Commusicals did fit the stolid stereotype--Mikhail and Judit shouting, "Let's harvest the beet crop right here!"--but many have an enduring buoyancy. Grigori Alexandrov's pioneering The Jolly Fellows (1934) percolates with jaunty jazz, Cubist compositions and a Dietrichish blond in a party hat. The amazing Midnight Revue (G.D.R., 1962) is a comically cynical parable about the difficulty of making a musical when your producer is not Arthur Freed but a pack of philistine bureaucrats. We can't approve your film, the apparatchiks sing...
...filled in. This task was largely undertaken by his powerful mentor, John Ford, a director whose sentimental pictorialism masked a mean and primitive spirit. Wills devotes almost as much space to him as he does to Wayne, yet never notices that Ford romanticized not far-darting freedom but stolid dutifulness. He and Wayne gave it near tragic dimensions in the great They Were Expendable, a terrible obsessional quality in The Searchers. Twice (in Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) they endorsed the creation of elaborate lies in order to lend grandeur to this essentially selfless and military...