Word: wildering
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...generations ago, Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, a play that captures the earnestness and innocence of Americans trapped in towns with one drugstore, one doctor, one minister and one cemetary; towns like the Irish hamlet where Charlie lives with his mother and father. But for all its simplicity, Our Town is imbued with the super-natural: in the cemetary that overlooks the town, a host of the dead assemble to discuss life. One of the dead, a woman named Emily, barters with the play's narrator for the chance to watch herself relive one day of her life, her twelfth...
LIFE OF BRIAN does not do the job on the gospels that Holy Grail did on the Arthurian legends. The scope is more timid, the technique less audacious. We had a right to expect better, funnier, or at least wilder. The more slavishly Monty Python tries to follow conventions--the more they tailor their films to play in Peoria--the less anyone will laugh at them. The film remains only a funny shadow of what might have been--like Jesus Christ beating a dead parrot...
...Philadelphia, he will be tricked by con men, be friended by a lonesome bank robber, roasted by the desert sun, frozen by mountain storms, captured by Indians, and from sea to shining sea, he will cause wise men to marvel at his unparalleled and in exhaustible nitwittedness. With Gene Wilder as the woodenheaded rabbi and Harrison Ford as the lovable bank robber, what could go wrong...
...pass that question for the moment and ask what went right. There is a lovely moment when the bearded, black-suited Wilder, who has just been beaten and robbed, sees some Amish farmers, mistakes them for Jews and rushes toward them, rejoicing at the top of his voice in Yiddish. Another piece of superior nuttiness has Wilder trying, and utterly failing, to suppress his gabby, questioning nature at supper among the silent monks of a Trappist monastery...
...Frisco Kid just misses being very good, perhaps because although Wilder is funny and endearing, we never quite believe in the character he plays. He is not really a pure Polish rabbi, he is Gene Wilder doing bits. We are asked to laugh at all too human failings, as we laugh at Tevye's in Fiddler on the Roof, but through some lapse of direction or acting, we are never really shown a man. - John Skow