Word: surreal
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...pants. "I stand in front of her desk," he wrote, "my cheeks are flaming. My thighs are steaming." When his twelve-year-old son's science project turns out to be playing rock music to the house plants, the consequences for the plants, he writes, are surreal: "They're all deaf and two of them are starting to grow zits. And last night our Boston fern's hair caught fire." Stewart remembers when Bombeck wrote at the Dayton paper early in her career. "I wouldn't say that I looked...
...bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity. But to say this is to assume that Mamet's ear-to-the-gutter dialogue is naturalistic. It is not. This is street slang refined and extended into the surreal, the baroque, the abrasive, the lyrical. And as spoken in blazing ricochet rhythms by his energized septet of actors-especially Mantegna, Prosky and Lane Smith as a harried customer who comes close to emotional collapse-Mamet's absurdist riffs almost make sense...
Compelling facts do not always cohere into riveting drama. But Mann, author of the social documentary play Still Life, has shaped the trial transcript and other relevant comments into antiphonal form: the lament of a hard-nosed cop will be answered by a raucous drag queen; the surreal anguish of Dan White (incarnated with creepy brilliance by John Spencer) will be followed by some wildly comic testimony that might have come from Carol Burnett's blooper barrel. Execution of Justice, directed by Oskar Eustis and Anthony Taccone, is a major work that seems to stand outside the perimeters...
...influenced by the Pop painting of Roy Lichtenstein, rock music and Indian mysticism, he surprised colleagues with Olivetti's plastic Valentine portable typewriter. He later did a table and stools called Mickey Mouse, and designed a disco outside Beirut. The restless maestro explains his professional schizophrenia in typically surreal terms: "If you see a girl in a bathing suit in the morning and an evening dress at night, you don't have to ask if she's the same girl...
...closeup of feet--bare feet, mud-covered feet, crippled feet--in short, feet in their most humble form. It then expands to show a procession of peasants trudging across a barren, almost lunar landscape of huge rocks and cracked terrain. Immediately we see that we have entered the surreal, prehistoric kingdom of Shakespeare's Lear. The next shot shows Lear's huge, imposing castle which rises suddenly and rather unnaturally out of the ground, dwarfing the peasants who in comparison look like a bunch of ants swarming on an anthill. Heightened by the effective use of Dmitry Shostakovich's operatic...