Word: veber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Francis Veber believes in machinery...
...ageless contrivances of farce. Here, as in his scripts for La Cage aux Folles, L 'Emmerdeur (remade in the U.S. as Buddy Buddy) and Partners, Veber throws a tough guy and a soft guy into an improbable stew, mixes identities, spices with a gangster or two and stirs to a giddy boil...
...director, Veber elicits endearingly screwball performances from his leads: Depardieu, who looks like the last side of beef they hauled out of Les Halles, and Richard, his cartoon face ever ready to burst into laughter or tears...
...Neal occasionally overcomes the film's limitations; his timing is good--though not his lines, which are penned by La Cage Aux Folles' Francis Veber. La Cage dealt with effeminate homosexual homebodies, too. But Veber fails to recapture any of that film's charm and wit. Most important, Veber presented the characters in La Cage affectionately. Partners is, if anything, mean-spirited. It doesn't introduce a single homosexual who isn't rendered weak-kneed or babbling by O'Neal's chest, eyes or "fabulous" thighs...
...half-century and directing them for almost as long, has slowed though not mellowed with age. Gone is the crackling pace of Some Like It Hot and One Two Three; now the actors pause after a punch line for laughs that may never come. The pirouetting narrative (from Francis Veber's script for the French film A Pain in the A-) is occasionally incredible. Wasted in flaccid supporting roles are the comic gifts of Paula Prentiss and the decadent-skeleton face of Klaus Kinski. Some of the jokes and targets have lost their currency ("Prema ture ejaculation means always...