Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dick, to whom she dedicates her lake-clear version of John Fogerty's lovely, lonesome Lodi, and she is a major admirer of Minnie Pearl. Well, land's sake, this album is full of surprises. Fans might not expect this strong and graceful singer to fall about over the comic antics of the dingbat with the price tag dangling off her hat, but if there's one thing EMMYLOU HARRIS excels at, it's surprise. And, at the same time, consistency. And a restlessness under the conventional constraints of country music. On Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers...
This is more obvious in Pileggi's case, since he wrote the book Wiseguy, about the federal witness-protection program, as well as the Martin Scorsese movie based on it, GoodFellas. Nora, meanwhile, did two comic riffs on the same theme -- screenplays for Cookie (with a Bobby Kennedy imitator as prosecutor) and My Blue Heaven (in which constricted FBI men learn from expansive Italian mobsters how to live). Ephron herself is critical of these movies, which ran into casting and directing troubles; but they are typical of her unexpected blindside tackles of ideology: How many movies have you seen...
...ending up more knowing than anyone else who knew about the matter. The struggle is for a tone so wry and detached that revenge gives way to the work of reappropriating one's life. To psychoanalytical formulas about choosing the wrong partner, she responds with a cleansing comic nihilism: "Let's face it, everyone is the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with...
...novel is a long comic monologue, closer to Portnoy's Complaint than to the higher-class Peyton Place that Mike Nichols made of the movie. "I have spent more sleepless nights wondering how I might have saved that movie," Ephron says. Probably she lost it the minute her first-person voice was removed from the script...
...Inspector records the four days this lamentable investigation takes, and during most of them, Australian-born Peter Carey is at the top of his form. Best known for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), an inspired account of a pair of star-crossed Victorian lovers, Carey specializes in comic compulsiveness, the obsessions that lonely people in underpopulated landscapes create to give some center to their lives. These fantasies seldom lead to anything but trouble and unexpected consequences. Gran Catchprice's desire to destroy what she and her late husband have built seems understandable, given her original expectations: "The only thing...