Word: comically
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Sometimes menacing, often bleakly comic, always alarmingly precognitive, the visions of Writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) have their cinematic possibilities. The trouble is his movie is mostly banal, the stuff of arrested adolescence. It contains obsessively recurring images: woman as spider, devouring her mate once she has lured him to sexual consummation; woman as elusive Madonna, offering salvation to wayward boys if only they can catch her attention; campy sacrilege committed on Catholic iconography gloomy reflections on the artist's unhappy lot in a staid bourgeois society, with particular reference to Holland, where the audience is uneconomically small...
...Rica, by contrast, has sought to defend nothing more than its own implacable neutrality. Ever since a brief revolution in 1948, the country has had no army, no tanks and no troops. Indeed, its defense force might almost have been recruited from the chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. The air corps consists of seven planes; the 250-man company that is assigned to defend the capital of San José relies for transportation on a single Land Rover. More than half the 8,000 members of the Civil Guard are traffic policemen, who until recently wielded...
Muriel Spark's 17th novel is informed with that perception. Her central character is a pained, Job-like figure regarded in a comic light, as if, between losses, he is playing God's fool. It is a difficult role. Harvey Gotham is a wealthy scholar-dilettante who retires to rural France in his mid-30s. There he occupies himself with a monograph on the riddle of universal suffering: If the Lord is beneficent, why does his earth contain so much misery? On the bestseller list that conundrum is called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Here...
...that country. At her Cape-style home in Braintree, Mass., the shy, dark-haired wife of a silverware-company executive can be as reserved as the framed family pictures in the living room. But beneath the propriety is the heart of a humorist. Dykstra struggled to be a comic writer for a decade, but got little encouragement until Bombeck responded to her advice-seeking letter by urging perseverance, "because there isn't enough humor in the world." Dykstra pressed on, and two years ago began selling" whimsical pieces to the Boston Herald. Last year she was given...
...Clark, a journeyman among movie genres (Murder by Decree, Tribute, Porky's, A Christmas Story), directs the script by Phil Alden Robinson and Stallone to its pre-arranged destination without many bumps or scenic side trips. Tim Thomerson wrings some sweetly comic juice from his role as Dolly's conniving ex; and Stallone, who as a singer seems to have taken charisma lessons from his songwriter brother Frank, is game and good-spirited in a role that plays too heavily on urban oafishness. Rhinestone, though, belongs to the lady. Parton is an irresistible screen presence, cute and cuddlesome...