Word: brilliants
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...Screen comedy is at its best when it pitches it tent close to the poverty line. Think Chaplin, who once said that all he needed to be funny was a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. Think Keaton, who once did a brilliant special-effects comedy, (Sherlock, Jr.) , where you were almost unaware of his very subtle camera tricks. Think Grant, Hepburn and their wayward leopard. For that matter, think Something About Mary, which pretty much took place in a cramped apartment. The minute the effects budget swells, it starts to crush the life out of comedy, which needs...
...Well, you say, maybe Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man?s Chest wasn't supposed to be all that funny. Maybe the fact that Depp decided to be brilliant was an unintended blessing bestowed on the original production, which the sequel is sort of stuck with. He was so good, doing, as he confessed, his imitation of the piratical Keith Richards, that he grabbed the reviews that brought in, as an unexpected increment, a crowd of grown-ups looking for some wit in an unlikely place - the multiplexes in summertime. This new film lends a certain credence to that supposition...
...geek with brilliant feet, she a pert blond chorine. Yet when Fred took Ginger in his arms and led her across a ballroom floor, he not only defined the film musical but also, deep in the Depression, created a new ideal of "la belle, la perfectly swell romance." Most of their best numbers--Isn't This a Lovely Day and Cheek to Cheek from Top Hat, the all-time sublime Never Gonna Dance from Swing Time--are in this five-film set, along with cogent analysis of the screen's most buoyant...
...seems he saw everything as a potential canvas. That drive is illustrated by the inclusion in the exhibition of works on sheets of newspaper, inside books, on postcards, even on matchboxes. The range of his expression is bewildering, from sculpture to ceramics, exquisitely detailed etchings to the brilliant oils of popular imagination. Anne Baldassari, director of the Mus?e Picasso in Paris, has employed her intimate knowledge of both artists?on elegant display in the catalogue?to produce a model of the curator's craft, a delicate fusion of the accessible and the scholarly...
...back: Smith and Shteyngart are satirists, Foer and Mitchell are wits. Likewise, vigorous, plotty storytelling is in vogue again. For much of the 20th century the border between high and low fiction was diligently policed. Now there's an attractive trend toward hybridizing high and low, grafting the brilliant verbal intelligence of high literature onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction. "That used to be a real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with heavy irony," notes Lethem. "Now, a lot of writing has a very natural degree of engagement with the vernacular culture...