Word: comically
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...Brazil, an equally disturbing new film from Python member Terry Gilliam, this darkly comic "Bright Side" philosophy is brought to its ultimate extreme. Using a setting strongly derived from George Orwell's 1984, Gilliam gives us a hero whose world is so dark that he loses the ability to see anything but the bright side...
Director Altman has given the claustrophobic tension of Shepard's stageplay breadth and richness without upsetting the mood. The story unfolds in a disheveled motel room, a fenced-in playground, a formica dinerette. The action shifts comfortably from the present to the past, the comic to the tragic, the real to the imagined. And the characters, both skillfully drawn and portrayed, swing with lightning quickness from the pathetic to the courageous, from the cruel to the ridiculous...
Plausible by New York City standards, these and other characters in Thomas Glynn's second novel (his first, Temporary Sanity, was published in 1976) live in the Building, a decaying apartment house somewhere in ungentrified Brooklyn. It is a timely setting for this unruly comic fantasy about the failure of social engineering. Condomania has yet to reach this frontier of violence and depravity, and the Building's activities are too strong for the local evening news. In the bloodstained lobby, the old joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged would not be funny...
...world view is considerably sunnier on Amazing Stories. Creator Spielberg sees the supernatural as an object of wonderment and a source of fun: in one clever installment, an actor portraying a mummy wanders off a movie set and encounters a real mummy. Too many episodes have strained for comic-book laughs revolving around TV in-jokes (some teenagers contact an outer-space civilization that is reproducing old TV sitcoms). Yet even the worst shows have had moments of wit and a let's-try-anything charm...
...Shepard's voice has often seemed querulous or cruelly funny. Even as he was attracting an avid following as perhaps America's foremost active playwright, critics sensed in his plays a compulsive urge toward violence, a lack of compassion, a reveling in the bizarre. His comic scenes made viewers wonder whether he was laughing with or at his characters. His work has shifted from expressionist flights of fancy to a kind of grim, weird naturalism and has tended more and more to portray families as the poisoned wellspring of human evil. He has brought to life the same fumbling, feckless...