Word: comically
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TAKE A CLASSIC TALE of medieval love and romance, add a dash of Runyonesque comic relief, a soupcon of high-tech editing a jazzy MTV soundtrack and seal it with a magical spell and you've got Ladyhawke. This cinematic hodgepodge of seemingly incompatible elements really resolves itself into an eighties version of the Arthurian romance, replete with ladies fair and valiant men of arms...
...Become a Writer" stands slightly apart from these stories, a hilarious account of a writer's development, which ranks as a small comic masterpiece: "First try to be something, anything else... Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire." But in the middle of all the wisecracking remain passages that ring out with such truth that they communicate directly to the reader the pleasure of literary creation, "those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when...
...original, eerily accurate police drawing of Goetz showed the face of the "before" figure in comic-book ads for body-building devices, the pale visage of the scrawny, bespectacled fellow at the beach who gets sand kicked in his face by a burly bully. When the news first flashed that a wispy-haired man in a windbreaker had shot four teenagers who threatened him on the subway, that 98-lb. weakling became overnight a quixotic urban American hero. Because nothing much was known about him, the 37-year-old electrical engineer became a tabula rasa on which Americans etched their...
...head. Suffer amnesia. Exchange identities with the desperately sought Susan (played by Madonna, whose affectlessness in the face of adversity may or may not constitute acting but is marvelously comic). Find herself pursued by one of organized crime's less organized branches. Fall into a loft and a love affair with the projectionist from a kung fu grind house. Find work as a gloriously addled magician's assistant. Get mistaken by the police for a prostitute. In other words, there is more to Roberta's modest attempt at an afternoon's adventure than she bargained...
...pensive or convulsive mood, then fly away. Always changing, always right. "Emotionally," says John Sayles, who directed her as the Jewish princess in Baby, It's You, "Rosanna can go from zero to 60 in no time flat." In Desperately Seeking Susan, Arquette reveals herself as a master of comic body language--and there is eloquence in that delicately voluptuous body--but she still uses something like an internal Ouija board to find Roberta's pressure points. Says Susan Seidelman: "Rosanna has a rich emotional life she's in constant touch with. It meant for enormous temperamental ups and downs...