Word: comically
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...mass extermination, but that brutal reality is never vividly presented. Indeed, the prisoners don't seem to see much of their jailers, who, when they do turn up, act as if they've drifted into this film from a Hogan's Heroes rerun--barking incomprehensible orders to cover their comic ineptitude...
...also fair to say that Benigni--whose self-love, if not his comic skills, could charitably be described as Chaplinesque, or perhaps more accurately as Robin Williamsish--devotes much of his film to peacetime passages overestablishing Guido's childlike yet shrewd, cheeky yet romantic character as a wise innocent, an idealized Everyman. His pursuit of his principessa, who is engaged to a local Fascist leader (and is sweetly played by Benigni's wife Nicoletta Braschi), and his casually farcical assaults on decorum and authority are, if you have a taste for simpleton comedy, inoffensive...
...efficiency, but without any formal teaching, taught themselves to speak their native tongue. And then in schools, they are forced to memorize and regurgitate and are certified by the rigid, demeaning, coercive, boring pseudo-academic institutions they attend. A few schools, by using only interesting material like newspapers, games, comic books, art, music and talk, have shown us how to stop schooling and start educating. They've eliminated formal assessment, stopped quizzing and pushed basic skills. ROBERT E. KAY Philadelphia...
This is John Updike's third go-round with "the semi-obscure American author" Henry Bech. Bech at Bay (Knopf; 241 pages; $23) displays the same mordantly comic look at the literary life that enlivened Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982). The five stories that make up this new installment of the saga show an older and grumpier Bech still worrying about his long bouts of writer's block and finding ways of getting away from his desk whenever he can. On a State Department-sponsored junket to communist Prague in the mid-1980s, Bech meets dissident...
...COMPLAINT] St. Louis Blues hockey player said his name was used and defamed in Spawn comic...