Word: comically
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...There is one major difference between the boy who was and the writer-director who is. He has now found a crew of similarly skewed comic co-conspirators and perfected an improvisational technique that permits him to explore - with the sweetest, deadest pan - that place where our visions of glory ought to die for lack of nourishment but somehow survive on the crumbs of hope that drop from the celebrity culture's groaning board...
Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House; 639 pages; $26.95) is a serious but never solemn novel about the American comic book's Golden Age, from the late 1930s to (and this could cause a generational squabble) the early 1950s...
...changes--in a few, but crucial scenes--don't spare Tori so much as Daddy. Gone from the pilot is Marcy's uncle--and along with him, a layer of show-biz complexity and tension. But remaining is Sloane's Marcy/Tori, a brilliant comic creation down to her slightest tic, squeak and emotion-punctuating chest thrust. Marcy is really Pointe's most likable character, a good-hearted dim bulb made a nervous wreck by gossip and the stress of looking impossibly good. (A bulimia scene, also cut, was a cruel but apt picture of the flip side...
...Kavalier, a Czech war refugee, and his American-born cousin Sammy Clay are the novel's protagonists. They create a comic-book crusader known as the Escapist, an unabashed projection of Kavalier's revenge fantasies. A young artist with Harry Houdini's ability to pick locks while holding his breath, Kavalier has escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia by hiding in a coffin containing the mythic Golem of Prague, and yearns to make enough money to help his family flee Adolph Hitler, or Attila Haxoff as Kavalier's overly cautious boss at Empire Comics insists on calling the dictator...
What Joe and Sammy cannot elude is the postwar era. With graphic comic-book imagery, Chabon writes that the classic superhero "had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes." By the '50s, Kavalier and Clay are not only old hat but also targets of a congressional committee investigating the effects of comic books on children. Then, like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the real-life team that begat Superman, Chabon's fictional duo lose the rights to their character in a dispute with cutthroat publishers. Screwing the talent is an old story, but never before told with...