Word: comically
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...order hidden behind all the slapstick. He raises the possibility that Earl, not his tormentors, may be bananas, but anyone who takes this seriously will find everything twice as senseless as before. What Berger has produced is a tour de force, his most successfully sustained comic narrative since Little Big Man (1964). Like the best black humor of the 1960s, Neighbors offers a version of reality skewed just enough to give paranoia a good name. - Paul Gray
...walk and what's dead stays that way." He is humorless in a crazy world, aiming with violent integrity to keep Jesus Christ from controlling his life but simultaneously embracing the guidance--positive or negative--that Jesus offers him. It is a deeply religious story, wryly tragic and depressingly comic as Haze unsuccessfully probes for the path to eternal damnation...
...screen. It works as if the novella had been the treatment for a screenplay. Like O'Connor, they make these characters seem natural when, in fact, they are grossly unnatural. When Haze wraps himself in barbed wire, a sequence that is at first horrifying becomes tender and comic because these characters really breathe, bleed and smile. Fitzgerald even allows some of O'Connor's imagery to creep into the dialogue when Enoch describes a woman with "hair so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull...
Director Becker sometimes permits Wambaugh's penchant for psychological overexplanation and realistic background to jostle aside the film's essentially comic spirit. Most of the time, though, characters and situations are permitted to develop their own odd and ultimately catchy rhythms. There is no slickness to the movie. Prentiss is sharp without being abrasive, sweet without being sticky. Foxworth offers a daringly understated performance. He attracts attention and then affection through the kind of patience and politesse that one rarely encounters these days in actors playing lead roles. His work alone would make The Black Marble worth seeing...
...least marvel about this Dream is Epstein's ability to draw humor from the play even as he is interpreting it in an essentially solemn way. We expect the rustics and their "Pyramus and Thisbe" to be a comic staple, and certainly John Bottoms's eponymous, stage-struck Bottom, Jeremy Geidt's paternal, befuddled Quince, Max Wright's scallion-chomping Flute and their cohorts dig up laughs you'd only guessed at, reading the play. But the young lovers, too, keep their scenes from bogging down into indistinguishable, interchangeable laments: Sloan's strong-willed and-armed Helena gets a hapless...