Word: comically
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...never faced a sterner challenge than Dick Tracy, his adaptation of Chester Gould's comic strip about the big-city detective with a right-angle jaw. Batman, the comic-strip blockbuster of 1989, had entranced moviegoers with its dark, brooding take on urban corruption. Would the brighter, perkier Dick Tracy seem of less heft? More to the box-office point, would young people want to see the movie? Who is Dick Tracy anyway? The strip runs in only about half the 550 newspapers that carried it in the Eisenhower years. And who's this Warren Beatty? He hasn...
Fortunately, Beatty had the vision thing for Dick Tracy. As he expressed it in code to his longtime collaborator, production designer Richard Sylbert, Beatty wanted a live-action comic-strip movie with a "super-real" feel. The style would be "going to the edge and not falling off." A 1930s city would come to life, not on location, where reality must be counterfeited, but through mattes, combining live action with painted backdrops, which would lend a "magical" air and keep the budget at a bearable $30 million. The final decision was radical: to shoot the picture in seven primary...
...supporting cast of rogues, most of whom are devil- dolled up in grotesque prostheses and outlandish mannerisms but are given ample room to strut their stuff. Their leader is Pacino, who as Big Boy gives Batman's Jack Nicholson a lesson or two in how to play a comic-book villain: as part psychotic mastermind, part Hollywood dance director -- a Bugsy Siegel who wants to be Busby Berkeley...
...CINEMA: The best comic-strip movie yet: Dick Tracy...
...gangland drama of wit and grace, narrative sweep and unique visual style. All this and Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman (strutting their roguish stuff while devil-dolled up in grotesque makeup) and a knockout Madonna too. It may not be a great movie -- after all, it's only comic-book art -- but it's great moviemaking...