Word: witnesses
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...Cirque Invisible has the wit and wonder of some half-remembered childhood reverie, as well as some of the contemporary sass of Penn and Teller. But Le Cirque is not quite invisible. To make it appear full-blown, in all its winsome glory, the audience must supplement the inventions of its two creator- performers, Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste Thierree, with creativity of their own. It is an aerobic workout for the imagination...
...Better yet, let Alan Parker stage it for you. In Bugsy Malone (1976) and Fame (1980), this English director assembled teen casts for slick, violent musical parables. Now, in THE COMMITMENTS, he turns Roddy Doyle's novel about a Dublin band into a rousing entertainment. It has the larkish wit and edgy camaraderie of the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, to which it might serve as a prequel: a kid on the dole (Robert Arkins) organizes a fledgling group devoted to covering '60s rhythm-and-blues songs. How fervently these members of the Irish underclass wish...
...Hollywood, everyone heads for the Xerox machine. Used to be that moguls would tell their minions, "Gimme the same, only different." Now they skip the different. But this doesn't work for comedy, which is based on the shock of wit. A joke is a story with a surprise ending; it should explode like a novelty-store cigar. It fizzles when the gags are sequeled and recycled. Why pay $7 for a summer rerun...
These are not strong women who use their ingenuity, humanity and mother wit. They are Rambo in drag. They have a higher testosterone count than the national debt ceiling; they solve problems with artillery and adrenaline. And too many filmmakers, strapped by the conventions of the shoot-'em-up genre, think they are solving the problem of beefing up women's roles by turning them into beefcake. It's steroid screenwriting. Cameron wonders, Why can't a (modern) woman be more like a (mean) man? Then he makes her into...
...voracious reader whose interests range from Peanuts to the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican's annual equivalent of Who's Who, Ed is known for lugging 30 or more books to his vacation home on Cape Cod every summer. He is known as well for a dry, sharp wit that belies his normally self-effacing style (he once wryly observed that the return of a former, imposing managing editor would be "the Second Coming...