Word: mirthless
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Perhaps it's a case of life imitating bad art. In this year's mirthless Hollywood comedy Couples Retreat: Return to Eden, eight Americans attempt to recharge their foundering marriages by undergoing counseling on a tropical island. At about the same time the movie was disappointing U.S. audiences, a handful of Indian travel agents began pushing "divorce tourism" - package deals designed to help clients salvage their vows while getting away from it all. Six months ago, Viresh Hirjee, chief executive of KV Tours & Travels in Mumbai, pioneered the field by sending customers on holiday with marriage counselors...
...DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942). And that says nothing of the water wheel that comes loose from its mooring at an old mill and rumbles across the countryside, quite like the ferris wheel that rolled out of an amusement park in Steven Spielberg's 1941 to similarly mirthless effect...
First serialized during the late '90s in the UK newspaper The Guardian, "Gemma Bovery" looks nothing like the mirthless "funnies" Americans have gotten used to in their daily papers. One can scarcely imagine the generosity of space and wit that would be needed to accommodate Simmonds' striking compositions, much less her racy and literate subject. As clever with her brush as she is with her typewriter, Posy Simmonds seamlessly matches swatches of strongly written text with expert spot illustrations and uproarious traditional panel sequences. "Gemma" makes for a rich reading experience, as well as a rewarding...
...well as supervised it. "Expectations are so high that no matter what, for some people we'll never make it," he says. "Everybody is trying to steal information. But if we bring out the Episode 1 book early, people get upset that we're giving the story away." Mirthless laugh. "No matter...
Enter Hamlet, mirthless, disheveled and on cue, at the year's end in a Kenneth Branagh movie that resurrected the melancholy, not-quite-corny figure yet again and plunked him in the middle of the aging New World. Here was the eternal young man, immensely gifted and born to high expectations, who had an overwhelming moral problem and either did not know what to do or did and could not do it. His inaction would never have been as poignant had he not been encumbered with the wild idea that a person should do whatever is nobler in the mind...