Word: comically
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...black comedy, but the length and the detailing that Girod lavishes on this sequence dissolve that conceit more quickly than the acid turns the victims into glop. Since Girod's view of the proceedings is both slavishly realistic and entirely amoral, irony, satire and rage - the comic artist's basic tools - are not at his disposal. But the film is actually unworthy of even that much critical comment. It should not be reviewed but posted - like a poisoned water hole...
...successful comedian and a man struggling for his livelihood and the respect of his peers. The second act is dominated by scenes that expose Lenny's personal deterioration from the stresses of litigation and legal stumbling blocks, and Brill handles these with as much sensitivity as his comic routines in the first...
Indeed De Palma is particularly tough on the youths who invite people like Swan to swindle them. They are observed to grow as hysterical over a talentless transvestite swinger named Beef (played in the film's gaudiest comic turn by Gerrit Graham) as they do over the pure loveliness of Phoenix's voice. A wedding onstage turns them on, but so does an assassination. "That's entertainment!" Swan cries, and no one challenges his all-purpose definition of the term. The terrible possibility exists that he is right-that nowadays all turn-ons are equally transitory...
...second third of the Little Theater has more immediately obvious problems, I think. It's a sort of comic opera--some of it, particularly relatively peripheral touches like a running dialogue between the heroine's second husband and the portrait of her first, is really very funny--about a woman who kills herself when her husband throws her electric waxer out the window. The neighbors sing would-be operatic choruses, rather in the manner of the angels in Mefistofele, and the whole thing is evidently intended to be wild and laughable. But the ridicule of people's high regard...
Early Wounds. On the other hand, if he had been less wounded himself before he found his true comic voice, if he had not found doom so attractive, he could have survived assaults from the law at its lowest, least sensitive levels...