Word: comically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is not to imply that Flash is an art film. Its adapters had an easier task than Popeye's did, since the comic's creator, Alex Raymond, was the most movieish of illustrators. His space fantasies are replicable on a sound stage, because they consisted largely of art deco architecture, primitive emotions and sexy states of undress. One gets a sense that Production Designer Danilo Donati had fun recreating Raymond's visions, that Writer Semple's script was lettered into balloons, and Director Hodges kept a pile of old comic books on hand to suggest...
...conflict that features an attack by the Hawkmen, hearty barbarians who flap about on giant wings. Max Von Sydow has a good time as Ming, and Ornella Muti, as his daughter, is simply gorgeous. All in all, Flash Gordon is as good an approximation of the hard-edged, gaudy comic-book style as one is likely...
That line is all right, within limits. If memory serves, the comic-strip Popeye spent some time in just that...
...constructed on Malta, and it is as jumbled as Segar's Thimble Theatre was clean-lined. Worse, the sound track is constantly amutter with asides, off-screen voices, half-overheards-Altman trademarks at odds with the spare, sharp verbal play that was one of the delights in the comic...
Shelley Duvall makes a fine Olive Oyl lookalike, but Popeye, as played by Robin Williams, appears to be undergoing an identity crisis far beyond the powers of spinach cure. As a result, his moral force -and he was once one of the great comic-strip exemplars of righteousness tied to a short fuse-appears sicklied o'er with the pale cast of self-absorption. The rest of the characters-excepting Swee'Pea (played by Altman's grandchild, Wesley Ivan Hurt)-are blurs of lost innocence...