Word: boyish
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...jaunty and flamboyant hero of an extraordinary life story. Frank McLynn's Robert Louis Stevenson (Random House; 567 pages; $30) describes a hardworking idler, a Scottish Calvinist who remade himself as a romantic and (four days out of any seven) a convincing bohemian, a smothered son who remained boyish all his short life, and an invalid who lived a life of arduous travel and physical adventure. (Another frail, literary, boyish adventurer of the time comes to mind, and though R.L.S. and Theodore Roosevelt seem never to have met, they probably would have enjoyed each other's company...
...Pudding show was fun and rightly displayed the talent of the people involved. But their bawdy performance is subsidized by a rumored $250,000 budget which seemed unaccounted for in the final product. The Pudding offered an occasionally vicious roast while Tom Hanks adeptly side-stepped any awkwardness with boyish aplomb...
Turturro, (whose brother, John, starred in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing") successfully combines scenes of homophobic rage with tender moments of bathing his weak-brained old dad. His ability to span this emotional range saves "Federal Hill" from a nearly one-sided tone of frenetic boyish energy. While Nicky and his other friends clearly demonstrate their desire to become good men, their performances never quite make the leap from edgy conversation and bravado into deep feeling...
None of this is permitted to get Sully down -- not for long, anyway. He may occasionally rage at his narrowing circumstances, but mostly he confronts them with a cheeky joke. Or a boyish prank: he and Roebuck keep stealing a snowblower back and forth. Or some comically self-destructive behavior -- he finally punches out that cop and lands briefly in jail -- that doesn't do him as much harm as it would if this were real life instead of a movie determined to be cheerful at any cost...
...Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien (Houghton Mifflin). A boyish politician, spooked by an election defeat and by undead memories of Vietnam, retreats to a Minnesota lake to sort things out. He and his wife, who has spooks of her own, slip separately through the trapdoors of the mind into the subterranean world where morality, evil and reality itself are shifting phantoms. O'Brien, who served in Vietnam and in 1979 won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, once more displays his enormous talent...