Word: comically
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...Stoppard's rueful tragicomedy Night and Day. But the current wave of antipress feeling in the U.S. may have spread to Britain as well. Audiences at London's National Theater, which in 1972 staged an acclaimed revival of The Front Page, are cheering now for Pravda, a coruscating, comic attack on Fleet Street that portrays reporters as timid, trivial and truckling and that describes a newspaper as "the foundry of lies." (The ironic title is Russian for "truth" and also the name of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper...
Whatever real-world parallels the playwrights may have had in mind for this shrewd, calculatedly savage entrepreneur, Le Roux has a life of his own, and on the grand scale. In Anthony Hopkins' brilliant, buoyant realization, he is a comic creation as monstrously beguiling as Tartuffe. He shares with Moliere's sham holy man the gift of ever renewed plausibility. Time and again, just as the audience is ready to withdraw its sympathy in disgust, Le Roux exposes the hypocrisies of opponents so tellingly that he becomes persuasive anew. When outraged employees confront him, his retort is blunt and seemingly...
Along with Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, little Timmy, a twelve-minute-old embryo, is a character in a recent Doonesbury comic series. The sequence, entitled Silent Scream II: The Prequel, pokes fun at the recent antiabortion documentary Silent Scream. But readers of the 835 newspapers in which Garry Trudeau's comic strip appears will never meet little Timmy. Last week Trudeau withdrew the six strips after discussions with his distributor, Universal Press Syndicate. "We thought the sequence was done well," said Lee Salem, editorial director of Universal. "But we finally decided that the whole question of abortion...
Yesterday's phenom, today's ho-hum. A few years ago, Richard Pryor was the comic everyman of movies and the top black box-office draw. But the pictures he made at machine-gun pace were too ordinary to sustain his eminence. He was still a star, but in spite of his work, not because of it. Worse, a new black phenom, with just as much on the ball and a better batting average, stole Pryor's thunder. Now he works in the shadows, a batting practice pitcher for All-Star Eddie Murphy...
...film's bromidic theme -- that wealth brings not friendship but isolation and that having too much money is just about as bad as having too little -- could suit both the comic's style and his very public private life. Alas, autobiography and farce refuse to jell. Though John Candy (as an overweight catcher who is suggested for the position of Pryor's "designated eater") and especially Stephen Collins (as a smug, conniving wimp of a lawyer) are funny enough, the picture seems intent on drawing morals instead of laughs. Viewers may feel like demanding their own investment in the film...