Word: comically
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...under-aged siren for the creators of stage and screen, luring writers and directors to crash on the undramatic shoals of Nabokov's first-person prose. First Stanley Kubrick in his 1962 movie, then some forgotten adapter in an early '70s musical, and now Edward Albee in this vulgarized comic drama have attempted to drag Nabokov's characters from the sheltering artistry of his novel into the coldly objective glare of the theater. It's beginning to become unpleasantly clear that Lolita's appeal to directors and audiences alike lies not in its author's literary fireworks or psychological insights...
Before AT&T ever thought of it, Patricia has reached out and touched someone. Gerald, who looks as solid as Wall Street before the '29 crash, is love smitten. With a generous helping of comic relief, including Timothy Wallace playing a musical saw, omnia vincit amor...
DIED. Adele Astaire Douglass, 83, Fred Astaire's elegant older sister and original dancing partner; after a stroke; in Scottsdale, Ariz. Born Adele Austerlitz in Nebraska, she began dancing in vaudeville shows with her brother when she was nine and he seven. Their dazzling footwork and comic flair made them the hit of London and Broadway musical theater in shows that included the Gershwins' Lady, Be Good (1924) and Funny Face (1927). In 1932, amid much publicity, Adele married Lord Charles Cavendish, trading her thriving career for life as a British society woman. Three years after his death...
...cinematic locale and roguish approach, the clearest assets in Bye Bye Brazil are Jose Wilker and Betty Fariah as the veteran troupers. Wilker seems to have only two expressions--an unconvincingly heroic sternness and a wonderfully fatuous smile of beneficence--but he deploys them willingly. He provides a continual comic center to the film with his sly corruption and his charmingly sleazy hokum, often delivered at omnipotent volumes over what one suspects is the only amplifier in the Brazilian backlands. Diegues subtly uses Wilker's ridiculously inept shamming to represent more seriously the modern demand to sell out and adapt...
...handles the contradictions of daily life--the ones that give the movie a surreal ambience in details like, an old Indian woman newly dislocated from her tribal existence listening raptly to the Everly Brothers on her Sony or the appearance of Polices in rustic back country hamlets--with a comic finesses that never excludes serious meaning, yet never preaches it. Diegues remains oddly hopeful as he charts Brazil's delirious, stumbling trip into the modern world, celebrating the zest of the new Brazil even as he laught at its absurdities. This third World production has a funky charm and affords...