Word: comically
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TIME's story on the Hollywood Free World Association v. the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals indicates no editorial preference for either organization but reveals in comic style an anti-Hollywood bias. We film-makers realize our community is a gorgeous subject for satire. We grant, or anyway most of us do, that we are the world's funniest people. You can write more jokes about us than you can about plumbers, undertakers or Fuller brush salesmen. Hollywood is guilty of deliberate withdrawal from the living world. It seeks to entertain, and we suspect that...
...published a comic novel called Floater that was set in an unnamed newsmagazine. I shouldn't have been surprised at how often I was asked about the extent to which my fictional magazine was really TIME, where I had worked for a few years in the early '60s. Instead of the conventional disclaimer, after all, Floater began with a claimer: "The character of Andy Wolferman is based on John Gregory Dunne, though it tends to flatter. The other characters are fictional...
...easier. See Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953). So simple a janitor (Bud) and a half-wit (Lou) could stumble onto a big silver sausage of a rocketship, flip a few switches, and go all the way to . . . Mardi Gras. Then Venus, with all the usual misadventures and comic contortions along the way. The code term for this is "classic comedy." It's a warning, because it's dated. Soft spots, stiff acting by supporting players, and yet A & C fans (you know who you are) are watching for a reason. The slapping. The double-takes. Watching Costello bounce...
Director Richard Kwietniowski, adapting Gilbert Adair's novel, uses Priestley's fretful blankness to handsome comic effect. But Hurt is the big news here. Dignified and dithery, he makes Giles one of the most charming predators in ages. Like Von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, he is a man of culture finding beauty in youth, in coarseness--in "all that I myself have never been." To Giles, ecstasy comes in small packages. For viewers, this film is one of them...
...contestants, went through make-up and, after many comments on my resemblance to actor Peter Gallagher, walked onto the set. I was immediately assailed by the art-deco-neon-overload-meets-industrial-constructi on set, complete with a live band, stacks of old books as props, local stand-up comic Greg Fitzsimmons as host, two attractive brunette "hostesses" (Heather and Shonda) in tight pastel blue outfits and a giant brain sitting in the center of the set. "`Jeopardy' on acid," I thought...