Word: comically
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...nighttime soap about the lives of ex-wives of country singers. ABC has ordered The Gospel According to St. Ann, a four-hour mini-series starring Ann-Margret as a self-made sports mogul. For NBC he is developing a Tom Clancy mini-series and several sitcoms, including a comic version of Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte and a Love, American Style with animals...
...novel that also wants to be a religious allegory, a comedy of bad manners and a portrait of the interior life at a time when TV ads clog the stream of consciousness like shimmering dead fish. Long stretches where the laughs come hard are followed by sudden bloomings of comic rhapsody. This wayward frolic is a bit like Oscar's car. Sometimes you could swear it was stone dead -- until it starts up and runs right over...
Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are awfully good at this sort of thing. You might say they've been practicing since they were (relatively speaking) kids. By this time they instinctively know how to bring out the comic best in each other -- Matthau's bullying misanthropy, Lemmon's melancholic good cheer. It follows that they invest Grumpy Old Men, in which they play querulous neighbors, with an appeal that is nostalgic and, if you are a devotee of well- practiced shtick, technically seamless...
What you see, what confronts and monopolizes your gaze, is a woman on the floor in the foreground. Her bulk is colossal, almost comic. She simply blows away the decorum of the nude -- the ideal body re-formed by thought. She isn't nude but aggressively naked, a biological mountain: swollen thighs and belly, pubic ravine, breasts like boulders, their stretch marks and blotches half- echoing the surface texture of the girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass...
Both LuPone and her London paramour Kevin Anderson seemed miscast. In fairness, LuPone would fare much better in the Los Angeles version. She is a skilled comic actress with an innate instinct for emotional excess. But in an ongoing dispute over who will play the role on Broadway, Close has three big advantages. She is physically much more plausible as a legendarily beautiful face. She approaches the role as a dramatic experience rather than as scenes leading up to show-stopper songs. Most important, she uncorks an almost slapstick comic inventiveness...