Word: comically
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...other words, neither the actors nor Mazursky, whose gift for portraying middle-class muddles (Down and Out in Beverly Hills) is unquestioned, achieves the kind of confident relationship with their material that Goodman and Ward enjoy. Goodman is terrific in his big comic set pieces (notably a decorum- shattering rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly at a royal ball). But even in those he avoids the temptation to broad farce. He and Ward trust themselves to go for something sweeter and more wistful, the tone of the fabulist, and they sustain it with near perfect pitch...
...insane/A humiliating business." This is hardly the typical love-song sentiment. But Stephen Sondheim is not a typical lyricist, and an evening of his persistent cynicism can be quite wearing. Fortunately, the creators of Love is in the Air have coated the bitterness of Sondheim's songs with enough comic relief to make for a delightful experience...
...Early TV was shot live, and a considerable part of its charm -- witness The Honeymooners -- was its ramshackle unpredictability. The Very Best solidly documents Sullivan's skill as a talent scout but gives little sense of the show's herky-jerky rhythm and calculated structure -- one novelty act, two comic spots and so on -- or of its host's weird, looming omnipresence. Solt's deconstruction is a pleasant memory tickler. It could have been more...
Leave it to the Japanese, who take their meticulously drawn adult comic books seriously, to publish the first cartoon treatment of the war. Japan's newest best seller is Iraq vs. U.S.-Led Multinational Forces, which features a variety of war scenarios. Released on the day the war started, the 300-page collection was an immediate hit. But some of the scenes of combat are improbable, showing Japanese and German soldiers participating in the conflict and U.S. forces staging a fake attack on fellow warriors to jump-start the war. The Japanese, however, prove to be inept on the battlefield...
...golden age, when Garbo, Davis, Hepburn, Crawford, Dietrich could sell a film and give it class. That was a more genteel time, one that prized wit, heart and, on screen at least, a sexual equality of emotion and intelligence. Movies were about grownups; the toy-boy heroes stayed in comic books. Maybe audiences were more mature too. These days, Ghost and Pretty Woman are the big-hit exception, not the norm; moviegoers tend to measure heroism in terms of pectorals. Somewhere ! between Rambo and bimbo, between roles for children (the only age group in which the movies employ more females...