Word: comic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scientology's strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures...
CROSS MY HEART. A 12-year-old's mother has died, and his schoolmates conspire to keep the tragedy a secret. In this comic essay on the desperate ingenuity of youth, director Jacques Fansten nicely reworks a long-held credo of French filmmakers: that childhood is both charmed and cursed...
...here and finishes there, but that's all you can say for it: nothing happens along the way. Mostly he traces, from slides projected on the canvas. And he traces very badly, which lends his quotations from Old Master paintings -- thick on the ground in this show -- an irresistibly comic air. If you are going to "appropriate" an image from Durer or Gericault or Tiepolo or even some routine seicento tapestry, and do it by hand, nobody expects you to draw as well as your sources; but it helps if you can at least draw well enough to make...
...next step is to patch in some disconnected quotes from Modern Life, like a comic-strip balloon, a '30s car, a nude or an outline drawing of a chair. These can be repeated from picture to picture, thus giving the impression that such images are obsessive, a la Jasper Johns. This will lend an expectation of profundity to the series. Why profound? Because Salle, as everyone now knows, has discovered important metaphors of the meaningless overload of images in contemporary life. Thus his pictures enable critics to kvetch soulfully about the dissociation of signs and meanings, and to praise what...
...plot and a minimal set, the text demands that the actors maintain a high level of energy to sustain dramatic interest. The Cabot production succeeds on this count more often than it fails. Jones turns in an engaging performance as Vladimir, the more flighty of the two derelicts. Striking comic postures that require yogic flexibility, he attacks his lines with the right degree of mania and pathos. His lanky frame and expressive face effectively contrast the countenance of his counterpart, Estragon...