Word: comically
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...next, Daddy?" It is enough to say that E.T. stands securely in the company of some classic children's stories, from Peter Pan to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With the crucial help of Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who was present every day on the set, Spielberg has infused comic and dramatic tension into a story in which, one comes to realize, there are no villains. Everyone is nice, and the conflict comes from a taffy pull between good and greater good. That conflict is achingly strong, its resolution euphoric...
...their selections requires more than eleven pages (D.H. Lawrence's A Sick Collier); some need four (Grace Paley's Wants). But the works are small only in measure. All contain social and psychological resonances that sound long after this remarkable book is closed. A few are comic, like James Thurber's If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox, a portrait of the crocked general handing over his sword to an astonished Lee. In two cases, stories provide a mirror effect. Isaac Babel's The Death of Dolgushov concerns the inability of men fully to apprehend...
...world's richest capitalist. Ann Reinking, a terrifically sensuous dancer, has little opportunity to display her talents as Warbucks' secretary. Only Carol Burnett shines, as the shabby dipso Hannigan. Navigating the orphanage at a permanent 40° tilt, like a sinking lighthouse, Burnett brings all her comic resourcefulness to a part no more demanding than those she played on her old TV show. In her hands, Miss Hannigan's malice is broad, precise, engaging, full of wicked-witch fun. The movie's malice...
...somebody may be taking the enterprise a trifle too seriously. That's especially so when we know the title character is not borrowed from anyone's list of the great books, but from Weird Tales, a pulp magazine of the 1930s, and owes his continued life to comic books and paperback originals. Nostalgia for creatures from the black lagoon of adolescent fantasy, even a certain wry affection, is permissible; the lugubrious sobriety John Milius brings to Conan the Barbarian...
...thought everybody just read comic books once and threw them in the garbage can," Carl Barks remarks. "I never knew they'd amount to anything. If I did, I'd have kept a lot more of 'em." Barks, 81, was raised on a farm in Oregon, had a total of eight years of school and worked at every kind of job from mule skinning to lumberjacking. He was 26 and heating rivets on a construction gang when he mailed off some cartoons to "a little gutter magazine." The cartoons led to a series of magazine jobs that...