Word: yawns
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...unconcern of a dancer scratching her back between practice sessions in The Dance Class, 1873-76; the tension in a relationship between a man and a woman (Sulking, 1869-71) or the undercurrent of violence in an affair (Interior, sometimes known as The Rape, 1868-69); a laundress's yawn; the stoned heaviness of an absinthe drinker's posture before the dull green phosphorescence of her glass; the exact port of a dandy's cane; the professional absorption of the petits rats of the ballet corps; the look in a whore's eye as she sizes up her client...
Confused? Screenwriters Pierson and Rubel hope you'll be, at least at first. They want you to be seeing double before you've settled in your seat. Fanciers of '30s screwball comedy may chafe at this film's substitution of efficiency | for energy, of speed for style; they may yawn at an old mirror-image routine that Midler essays, which is lifted from Silent Comedian Max Linder and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. But Big Business was designed as a compact car, not a classic. Once Director Jim Abrahams (Airplane!) hot-wires the mechanism, the plot takes care of itself...
...read more closely than the court page, a list of everyone caught speeding or driving tipsy or lobstering without a license. "I want to see if any of my buddies are in there," says Carmen Griffin, a waitress at the Pineland Diner on Main Street. It may be a yawn in Portland, Me., but in Ellsworth, it's front-page news when there's a bumper crop of scallops or the cops seize a pet snake (the headline: POLICE PUT PERMITLESS PET PYTHON...
...watching. He may also find that his fondness for vignettes ("Remember when Aunt Bea got squiffed and vamped the delivery boy?") undercuts the dramatic imperative to hold the anonymous viewer's attention. Private lives don't always play in public. Grandpa's % ripping yarn is a stranger's restless yawn...
...Ratings have fallen off, and so has much of the excitement. A couple of hours spent watching MTV today reveal how quickly the avant-garde can become passe. With a few exceptions (the dazzling tattoo of animated images that illustrates Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer), videos have settled into a yawn-provoking rut. Typically they feature scenes of the band in performance intercut with snippets of a fanciful "story" or dressed up with now familiar visual gimmicks (cliche of the season: neoprimitive black and white). Is MTV an idea whose time has already gone...