Word: comically
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Robin Williams is a movie misfit. As the decade's reigning comic soloist, master of the improvised trip through his own weird inner space, he generally arrives onscreen bearing the burden of our heightened hopes for a divine madness. Up to now, his genius has not fit any known film format. Narrative obligations and the implicit demand that leading characters be sane, likable and consistent have always constrained...
...Audubon Society Book of Water Birds (Abrams; 256 pages; $35) presents enthralling photographs of creatures that seem made for metaphor. They are clouds hovering pink and white across the surface of a lake, dive bombers plummeting to strike seaborne prey, bankers in tuxedoes posing in comic solemnity at a social event on an ice floe. But the easy, intelligent prose of Authors Les Line, Kimball L. Garrett and Kenn Kaufman allows the real creatures -- from the lava heron of the Galapagos to the bald eagle -- to emerge from the metaphors in full dimension. Not all the faces are pretty...
...trouble with most great comic figures is that they are desperate to be loved. Woody Allen has the opposite problem: people are desperate to love him, and that perturbs his essentially wary and austere nature. Every so often he makes a so-called serious film, as if to test his own integrity and perhaps that of his audience's feelings. When he does, astonishment and disappointment are his unfair rewards...
Fans of Poet Robert W. Service know that despite the title, The Cremation of Sam McGee (Greenwillow; $13) is comic art. Some 80 years after the poem was composed, Painter Ted Harrison has complemented the work with bold and antic landscapes of the Yukon in the days of the gold rush. McGee, frozen over, demands, "I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains." His listener agrees, only to find a surprise when he opens the furnace door. Sam is inside, burbling, "Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time...
...cast does a fine job with these down and outers, though there's a silly tendency to slide into Southern accents for comic effect. The players from the ART's new Institute are also sharp, especially Bernadette Wilson, who plays Jody, a girl who abandons Tucson for a biker-ex-con named Sonny (Michael Balconoff). Unfortunately both the script and the actors, particularly John Bottoms, occasionally lapse into caricature. It's here that the production loses good opportunities to be compelling and truly memorable...