Word: comically
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...straw hat with a striped band may mean campaigning in the U.S., but in England it's boating on a river." Ideas may come from unlikely sources. One of his son's comic books inspired the drawings for a Science story on black holes in September 1978. "Tool catalogues are particularly helpful," Holmes says. "An ax can be used for chopping a budget or firing Cabinet members." A glistening picture of Body Builder Arnold Schwarzenegger is kept on file to provide another metaphor. Explains Holmes: "Some day the dollar is going to have muscle again." Such imagination...
...flexibility of the screen allows Simon to integrate more smoothly than he did onstage a broadly comic subplot in which Joe Bologna, playing a brother, and Valerie Harper, as a best friend, fail to have an extramarital affair. Simon does not think much of those; commitments are the basis for the order he believes to be a personal and social necessity...
What remains clearly legible throughout is Greenberg's complaint against contemporary society and what one character calls the "weekend-guest view of life." Aunt Bessie bobbing helplessly across her ceiling is a comic parable of the effects of freethinking, except that the author is not laughing. Her stony integrity often redeems these stories from irritating knuckle-rapping. They engage the mind, unsettle it and survive as disputatious reminders of first principles and last things. -Paul Gray
...London Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti conductor, London; 4 LPs). "Summer lightning made audible" was Shaw's metaphor for this miraculous score, and it serves well to describe Solti's performance-swift, dramatic, deft. The tragic hints in the work are systematically underplayed; the elegant comic surface remains unbroken. Colin Davis' 1974 recording, with its darker moods and more muscular texture, still provides a compelling alternative reading. But the splendid cast and Solti's conducting make this set at least the equal of any now available...
THIS IS JUNK, and not even the good junk that we've come to expect from Neil Simon. Many of the touches in the movie are familiar--you will probably recognize your own refrigerator--and once an hour one of Simon's characters delivers a comic yet profound line about American relationships on the run in the 1970s. But Chapter Two, an adaptation of Simon's long-running Broadway play, never grasps onto more than the obvious...