Word: comically
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Alas, director Danny Cannon hasn't the skill to make majestic melodrama plausible. As for the facetiousness, Rob Schneider sweats arsenals of ammunition as Dredd's sarcastic sidekick. But the effect is redundant since Sly is his own comic relief. By now Stallone has become a symbol for all that is goofy and grandiloquent in Hollywood's live-action summer cartoons. The hormone that courses through his movie veins could be called preposterone...
...Love for Three Oranges, he managed to find wit and poetry in an opera that is often little more than the famous March. Even more impressive was his way with a stripped-down, hopped-up Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev's great ballet. Designed by the Belgrade-born underground-comic-book illustrator Enki Bilal and choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, this Romeo takes place in a Mad Max universe where the Capulets and the Montagues are fascist thugs and street ragamuffins, and Juliet sports a bustier whose exaggerated nipples fairly scream "radical Eurotrash reinterpretation." Yet thanks to Bilal's dark vision, Preljocaj...
...barrels leveled at the weeping women comes directly out of Goya's The Third of May. They are fantasy weapons, more like ray guns than rifles. Their odd shapes, and the robotic look of the soldiers, suggest that Picasso had also been looking at American sci-fi comic strips. It isn't clear who the killers are, and the naked victims don't look at all Asian; every Marxist in France (which in 1951 meant most of the French intelligentsia) assumed that the painting was a denunciation of some unspecified American war crime...
...have followed the comic strip For Better or For Worse since its inception, and I was saddened when the dog Farley died, as you noted in the tongue-in-cheek Milestoons section [CHRONICLES, May 22]. In fact, I wept at his demise and wondered why his owners, the Paftersons, did not. They looked worried and scared, but not one tear was shed for the hero that saved their little girl's life! Sara Hughes Midland, Michigan...
...cheerful, knowing way, the hit movie Casper mines this same dark soil. On its face, it is a high-gloss update of the "friendly ghost" who starred in 55 cartoons between 1946 and 1959, a long-running comic book and a short-lived 1979 TV series. Director Brad Silberling mixes rude slapstick for the kids with pop-culture cues for their parents, including gag cameos by Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson and Ghostbusters' Dan Aykroyd. The movie even has its own theme-park ride, a kind of human car wash. All jolly enough. But in its haunted heart, Casper is another...