Word: comically
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DIED. BOB KANE, 83, creator of the comic-book icon Batman; in Los Angeles. Kane brought the character to life in 1939, inspired by the masked hero Zorro, a silent movie called The Bat and a picture of Leonardo da Vinci's batlike flying machine. The strength and creativity Kane bestowed on his superhero allowed Batman to leap from comics to a 1960s TV series to the movies (see Eulogy, below...
...poor man's substitute painting. The prints were either displayed in local taverns, public notice-hanging walls or kept in a private collection. Among the assembled prints at the MFA, are both the first "pin-up girl" (a partially nude woman, her left breast exposed) and the first comic strip. Peddlers wandered, carrying mass copies of these various prints on their backs, selling them for pennies each...
...obscure piece that opened last Friday's concert was all those things. The all-Mendelssohn performance began with the overture to a comic opera, The Uncle From Boston. The overture is rarely heard, and this performance marked its Boston debut. The libretto of The Uncle From Boston has been lost, but it is always refreshing to discover and hear a composer's lesser known works, much like finding more sonnets by Shakespeare or short stories by Hemingway. The beginning of the Capriccio Brillant, Op. 22, was more lovely than brilliant. Short and sweet, it was one of Mendelssohn's three...
Aside from the comic irony of seeing her decapitate helpless ragdolls, Struthers' main contribution to the show is her name recognition. She portrays Miss Hannigan as little more than a drunk with a penchant for the laundry man, although she does have a rather entertaining drunken twitch, which starts as merely an annoyance but escalates into a full-body contortion of sorts by the final scene. Her singing is at times a high-pitched and quite realistic whine, and at others a growl worthy of the most horrible of lonely spinsters. According to the playbill, Struthers is the first...
...film that results from this tangled plot is uncategorizable. The first half leans towards comic drama when Tommy beds his first customer, a wealthy widow almost twice his age (Mary McCormack). The romance that ensues is the source of some genuinely funny interchanges as Tommy (innocent and sincere to the point of incredulity) gets knocked around by McCormack and her teenage son, both of whom run in faster lanes than he. When the son (Ryan Reynolds ) walks in on a steamy moment, Tommy tries to apologize in a fatherly manner, but finds that the son (a worn veteran of libido...