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...All of which add up to comedy if the story is in the right hands, as it is here...

...Mahoney fumes dutifully but is not interesting (How deftly Robert Duvall humanizes his comparable role in The Paper) Even the great Paul Newman is reduced to monochromatic rasping and gloating The others in the cast might as well have strings attached to their arms and legs for all the creativity or humanity they get to show Only Tim Robbins manages to break through the robotic Coen regime with a sort of saintly goofiness The look of moronic bliss on his face as he demonstrates a hula hoop is the only pleasurable memory I took away from this movie What's wrong about Coen moviemaking is clearly demonstrated by one of Proxy's cleverer sequences Newman has fallen out of a high window and Robbins has caught him by his trouser legs Will the matenal hold or will Newman drop to his death7 Close-up of trouser stitches beginning to give way as Robbins pulls Flashback Newman's tailor asks the executive if he wants single or double stitching Newman sneers that the tailor is only trying to make a buck and that the cheaper single stitching will do Cut to the stitches continuing to unravel, terrified look on Newman's face as he remembers sartorial decision Second flashback the tailor, alone, decides to put in double stitching for free because Newman is "such a nice man " Cut to the stitches hold1 Newman is saved' Clever, huh9 Yeah, but why does that tailor think that Newman is such a nice guy9 We have seen him behave like a bastard to everyone, including the tailor That's the trouble with the Coens...

...Only squares and dopes want to live ulcer-free lives...

...For me, the director lacked economy and often drove a scene past legitimate comic frenzy into klunkmess That isn't true here Howard always keeps things up to speed but never sacrifices lucidity and grace The reporters bustle all over New York but Howard has found a surprising visual unifier for this story of pnnt journalists- TV...

...Brechtian irony is intended here If our hero needs an angel to bail him out, the world is an evil place, indeed...

...The last film version of The Front Page was a waxworks exhibit because director Billy Wilder and his cast seemed all too conscious that they were working on a classic What was missing was believable bustle, kinetic grace, and hairsbreadth timing All those qualities abound in The Paper The whole cast is wired Michael Keaton's surging eyebrows (a match for Jack Nicholson's any day), Robert Duvall's football coach gesticulation, and Glenn Close's mad-hag, gimlet-eyed propulsiveness give this scnpt all the demonic energy it needs...

...Poor Leigh, a truly talented and steadily improving actress, has been ordered to imitate Kathenne Hepburn and she wears the directorial decision like a straitjacket John Mahoney, as an exasperated newspaper editor, has to snarl and sweat like all those actors in the 1930s' comedies who played the same part...

...In the course of pursuing a story, metropolitan editor Michael Keaton and colleagues uncover the truth about the frame-up of a couple of black kids for a mob murder, but their triumph lies not in clearing the kids (the police had no intention of holding them anyway—the arrest was made to calm tourists) but in beating out the other newspapers to the story...

...But perhaps the most staking performance is Randy Quaid's, because this actor dares to use a slow tempo that neatly counterpoints the predominant clatter and chatter...

...Professionalism is the only ethic and, for the sake of professionalism, practically anything goes...

...His character, an amiably paranoiac city-hall investigator, seems to float in an unbreakable glass bubble in the midst of a raging sea...

...Because cynical reporters have satirical temperaments, critics are tempted to label all stones about them as satires But The Paper is no more a satire than The Front Page is...

...There are television sets on m 22 the city room and individual offices and also in the bar to which Duvall retreats and in the ghetto apartment of the kids about to be framed Sooner or later, Howard's camera always floats over to TV And how appropriate this is For TV is the electronic hfe-and-death ray that keeps the pnnt reporters posted on latest developments but is also the Great Enemy Always faster and brighter and glibber than the gaudiest tabloid, the Tube can be beat only when the reporters come up with the Scoop of Scoops which .TV will instantly transmit to the nation before the morning edition is ten minutes old...

...But its creators, the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—strain, strain, strain for effects...

...You can tell that they want every scene to sing its virtuosity but I heard only screaming, literal and figurative One cinematic trope that you have to endure repeatedly someone in mid-shot shouts and the camera then zooms forward as if it would leap down the actor's throat The shots are so strenuously composed—crowds in V formation and so forth—that they look like the stills put in stagedirecting textbooks to teach novices how to group actors At times, I thought I was looking at the director's storyboard preparation rather than the mounted scene...

...The Front Page ethos is Nietzschean, but in the American grain...

...They can dream up neat stuff, but they never really think about their characters, their story, or their fundamental aims The Paper has no idiosyncratic style There's no shot or sequence in it that makes you exclaim, "Pure Ron Howard'" But The Paper entertains The Hudsucker Proxy, on the other hand, has directorial signature stamped on every frame...

...The Paper is a direct descendant of The Front Page in its celebration of reporters not as crusaders but as swashbuckling predators of the urbanjungle...

...Satire tries to chasten immorality, but The Paper celebrates the amoral energy of its heroes The revelation of this movie's heart is in the cross-cutting that provides the story with its climax A target of his muckraking has drawn a gun on Quaid in a bar Cut to Mansa Tomei (as Keaton' s pregnant wife) hemorrhaging and the unborn baby's heartbeat growing fainter while doctors and nurses scramble Cut to Glenn Close trying to reach a phone to kill a front-page story so that the real scoop can be substituted Will Quaid eat the maniac's gun'' Will the baby and mother live9 Will the scoop be printed9 Is there any hierarchy of importance here9 Nope...

...No one makes movies like the Coens do No one should want to...

...But no Brechtian skill is m evidence The style of this movie is German expressionism crossed with Mad magazine, potentially an interesting hybnd...

...The sleepless milieu in which such professionalism thrives breeds wisecracks, dementia, bursts of hilarity and bad temper, backstabbing, comradeship, and startling reversals of fortune...

...Not even the Coens RICHARD alleva 24...

...Ron Howard's movie, scnpted by Stephen and David Koepp, is not only a triumph of filmmaking energy but an ode to energy itself, urban and amoral This story of twenty-four hours in a newspaper's life doesn't say that any job worth doing is worth doing well...

...It says that big city success depends upon beating out your opposition And if beating out your nvals means that you must teeter on the edge of nervous breakdown for sixteen hours a day, six days a week—all the better...

...I was one of the few critics unimpressed by Ron Howard's Splash...

...The acting is overdesigned, too...

...Hey, news is news...

...I suppose The Hudsucker Proxy might pass as satire or at least as a satirical fairy tale It certainly qualifies as an overdesigned, fatuous bore Proxy is a modern variant of Candide A business school graduate (Tim Robbins) is catapulted into the presidency of a big company through the machinations of a scheming executive (Paul Newman) An investigative reporter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) holds our innocent up to public ridicule, then falls in love with him Through pluck, luck, and the intervention of an angel, our hero triumphs...