Word: wordplay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
GHOULS R US reads the legend on Daffy's office window. He's just the spook sleuth to help a comely se-duck-tress who needs some exorcise. There are homages aplenty to the old cartoons -- lascivious bulging eyes, deft wordplay (in pig Latin) and that bizarre sound effect that suggests a gargoyle gargling -- and laughs aseveral. The pace lags in spots, but any lulls allow the viewer to savor the glory of full, hand-drawn animation. And Daffy is as raffish as ever, talking like Freud or stalking like Groucho. At the end, three ghostly Shmoos chase Daffy down...
Some skepticism may be permissible. The Gallic taste for abstractions and literary fun and games is not universally shared. And wordplay, no matter how winsome, does not travel well from one language to another. In any case, English-speaking readers can now examine Perec's most acclaimed book for themselves. At first glance, Life: A User's Manual looks every bit as good as the French have been saying it is for years...
...well as skeptics. William Goldman tried all this in his 1973 novel The Princess Bride. His narrative had all the proper ingredients and all the right new moves: he deconstructed his text and undercut it with the cadences of a Borscht Belt raconteur. But on the page, Goldman's wordplay seemed too much of a jape. It needed the expanse of cinema -- where on the late show Errol Flynn and Gunga Din are still storybook young -- to revive the poetry of fable. Now, 14 years later, he and Rob Reiner have got it smashingly right...
...these interpretive schemes, biological assumptions of gender are overcome by examining the sexes as socialized functions, so that "it is not true that literature contains no examples of male pregnancy," just as it is equally untrue that all women want to have babies. Moreover, the theoretical wordplay is reoriented, so that one now discusses literary themes in terms of matricide and womb-envy, that is, in terms of the woman's experience...
...February, enabling a revamp of sets, story lines and characters. It did not help: Search for Tomorrow remained the lowest-rated network soap. Its final episode will air on Friday, Dec. 26. After that, the daily woes will be replaced by happy contestants on a new game show called WordPlay...