Word: comically
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...BOTTOM LINE: The cult secret is out: this comic charmer about pen paramours who meet is one of the all-time greats...
...cuddlesome delivery boy. Lee Wilkof captures the humor and pathos of a mediocrity who will endure anything to keep his job. Howard McGillin deftly sketches an oily ladies' man. As his most frequent victim, the dazzling Sally Mayes is all submission, then all self-esteem after her superbly comic ballad, A Trip to the Library...
...part of this world cannot accept the notion that democratic freedoms should be abrogated to protect Islam." He has inveighed against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez Assad in Syria. The "traditional discourse" of Arab nationalism, he wrote on the eve of the Gulf War, is "unresponsive, anomalous, even comic." The Arab media are "a disgrace," incapable of dealing with "life in the Arab world today with its terrible inequities, its self-inflicted wounds, its crushing mediocrity in science and many cultural fields." In sum, if Said is the Arab world's propagandist, it should hire a new one fast...
...trouble is that this nameless Everydog doesn't talk, or even have many discernible expressions. That puts most of the comic burden on the characters around him, who are a dull lot. Mom and Dad (voiced by Molly Cheek and Martin Mull) have plain-vanilla marital spats, and the two kids are boring Bart-and- Lisa wannabes. The plots are thin (Family Dog goes to the zoo or befriends a homeless woman), and the dialogue, by sitcom veteran Dennis Klein (Buffalo Bill), is more garrulous than witty: "That was stealing, and stealing is bad . . . Ipso facto, Fido...
...hard to think of a more widely appealing comic strategy than this. By banishing the issue of racial conflict, the movie remakes the world as every person of goodwill wishes it really were. And by making all the conflicts between Sarah and Hal purely cultural and therefore subject to good-humored behavioral modification, the movie implies that everything else dividing us today can be worked out with equal simplicity...