Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...festival, one excellent film is a fluke, two are a faint promise. Cannes '93 has showcased a dozen or so delights, including Mike Leigh's comic scorcher Naked, from Britain, and Alain Cavalier's potent French film Libera Me, a deadpan document, in wordless closeup, of political prisoners and their torturers in an unnamed country -- any country, alas. Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close!, a sequel of sorts to his great Wings of Desire, is a monumentally quirky film essay that gradually, and satisfyingly, surrenders to the conventions of the thriller genre. The festival had two out-of-nowhere finds, both...
...bending mayhem. For four nights next week, ABC will plunge viewers into the bright, bizarre world of Wild Palms. The six-hour mini-series is the brainchild of two intriguing newcomers to network TV: Oliver Stone, the director of JFK and Platoon, and Bruce Wagner, writer of a hallucinated comic strip in Details magazine on which the mini-series is based. A few minutes into this futuristic fantasy, and viewers numbed by TV's docudrama deluge will realize they've stumbled onto something special. A few more minutes, and a lot of them might be zapping off to Married . . . with...
...writers and producers who learned their craft in the 1970s at the MTM factory and created such hits as Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi. Their shows typically revolve around the workplace rather than the family, are filled with intricately crafted one- liners and feature ensemble casts of exaggerated comic types. By the end of its run, the Cheers laughpoints had become so familiar -- Woody's naivete, Carla's surly put-downs, mailman Cliff's out-to-lunch monologues -- that the show seemed almost to write itself...
There is some sentimentality in this, but it is lightly, genially stated. And it is balanced with a sharp comic shrewdness. Reitman has succeeded in recruiting all sorts of prominent people -- ranging from sitting Senators to the McLaughlin Group to Oliver Stone, contributing a paranoid slant on good- heartedness -- to satirize their own and, more important, the media's self- importance. They impart to Dave just the topical edge it requires...
...weary wariness down perfectly. Ving Rhames as a Secret Service man allowing Dave to melt his professional steeliness, Kevin Dunn as the press secretary for whom "no comment" is a moral statement, and Charles Grodin as a CPA appalled by federal accounting practices complete one of the best comic ensembles in years. Under Reitman's unforced and confident direction, they ground improbable fantasy in very human, very winning believability...