Word: comically
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...from the Muppet Show. Kermit the Frog is Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy is Mrs. C., Gonzo is Charles Dickens . . . so this must be THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL, the first feature from Jim Henson Productions since the founder's death. Director Brian Henson hasn't his dad's genius for comic detail, and the film often sinks into the brown funk of a wake for the passed master. But when Kermit (now voiced by Steve Whitmire) says of his dead son, "I'm sure we shall never forget Tiny Tim," the film pays touching tribute to Kermit's creator...
...MOST GLORIOUS COMIC ACTING ON film, Peter O'Toole played a washed-up swashbuckling movie star, raddled with debauchery yet oddly innocent. The man journeyed hours to glimpse an estranged daughter but did not dare speak to her and dismissed his screen heroism as fakery until he thrillingly discovered that it, like all art, came from deep within. The barren Broadway musical of MY FAVORITE YEAR, which opened last week, turns O'Toole's holy hellion into a soulless self-pitier (a deft if charmless Tim Curry) and wrongly presumes that the film's appeal was its setting amid...
...Picking Leno as Carson's successor seemed a logical move at the time; Leno, after all, had drawn good ratings as Carson's permanent guest host. But Letterman, once regarded as Carson's heir apparent, was publicly grumpy at being passed over. And Leno, a well-liked and hardworking comic, has suffered a shocking run of bad publicity, much of it stemming from the hardball booking tactics employed by his departed executive producer Helen Kushnick...
Childhood-as-salvation appears frequently, usually to better effect, as in the wistfully comic ```Wild Boys of the Road''': "And there's the happy one,/so little she was excused from most occasions." This kind of praise for childhood as innocence, of course, is only possible for those who have left it entirely behind--if you really are too little to understand, you don't know what (sorrows) you're missing. If there is hope of poetic continuance in Ashbery's cosmology, it is in another, more plausible vision of childhood regained, a vision of childlikeness as a triumph...
...instant of choice, but the instant before, in which these poems take place. If that denies Hotel Lautreamont the chance to affirm any one view of life or mind, it is, surely, a small price to pay for lines, views, forms, surprises, ideas and indeed whole poems so various, comic, sad, elegant and moving as the many in Ashbery's new book...