Word: straight-man
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...perfection, sporting an ever-present million-dollar smile. By its end, Sheen reveals a Frost transformed from entertainer to thinker, a man who has come to take himself seriously after confronting serious issues.Sheen and Langella are supported in the film by Matthew Macfadyen as Frost’s straight-man producer John Birt, and by the comedic tag team of Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell, who play Frost’s academic “crack investigators” with relish. The only failure of the film here is Rebecca Hall (last seen actually emoting in “Vicky...
...thanks to Marc Bell's sure hand at story structure. Each of the three main stories (along with the other one-page strips and ephemera that make up this collection) follow a narrative as solid as an Abbott and Costello picture. Shrimpy, the beatific upsetter causes trouble that the straight-man Paul must correct. Thanks to Bell's clarity of storytelling, you never feel lost in the nonsense even when Shrimpy suddenly floats in the air and announces he shall give birth from his knees to twelve tiny Shrimpys, one with a Black Sabbath T-shirt...
...comedy full of screwball personalities, Holmgren’s Mortimer provides a refreshing dose of sanity as the apparent straight-man. By the end of the show, however, he is as neurotic as anybody else on stage...
...profound and a fountain of abstract truth in a world of nicely clipped English chatter. For all this, though, he ends up being as inhibited as the notoriously uptight English; presenting the condition as something human rather than something cultural. When Carmicheal is joined with Byron's solidly played straight-man, and Knapp's desperately bright Mrs. Hapgood, they really hit on dramatic agony; the big gulf between feeling, and action...
...Conrad Vig, in vaudeville terms, would be the 'straight-man' of the movie. Vig is played by Spike Jonze, known not for his acting but for his directing--of music videos, for the Beastie Boys and Bjork, among others. Jonze's performance is one of the highlights of the film. He portrays Vig with a sort of unstudied exuberance, post-adolescent can-do hyperactivity, and is earnestly naive without a trace of self-parody. He delivers lines that may be almost trite in their ignorance--for example, when he asks an Iraqi rebel leader, "So, you guys think all Americans...