Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure, romantic rue and an almost casual murderousness...
While autopsy results were withheld pending results of drug tests, it is clear that Farley's life was ravaged by his obsession with excess. His comic persona, honed to a sweaty, self-mocking perfection on NBC's Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1995 and in such hit films as Beverly Hills Ninja, was of the ne'er-do-well party guy, the angst-ridden outsider, the addled but lovable omnivore. But that proved to be true life as well, reflecting a fierce appetite for beer, cocaine and heroin, food and women. He went through drug- and alcohol-rehab clinics...
...Chris it wasn't that he had just one problem. It was a constant daily battle, fighting his demons." By the time Farley was providing the voice for the title character in Shrek, an animated film from DreamWorks, studio partner Jeffrey Katzenberg was taking no chances. He put the comic under 24-hour bodyguard during recording to make sure he remained sober. Katzenberg and his associates were at times themselves taking drinks out of Farley's hands. (Based so closely on Farley, Shrek must now be completely reconceived.) The weeks from the end of October appear to have been...
...your brain cells, and pretty soon you'll find it hard to be funny.'" Says Patinkin: "He knew it, and he'd agree, but he couldn't stop." Equally concerned was Farley's mentor Dan Aykroyd, who worried about the young comedian's idolization of another self-destructive SNL comic, Aykroyd's friend John Belushi, who died of a cocaine-and-heroin overdose in 1982, also at 33. Aykroyd says, "When I saw him in bad shape, I brought up John and River [Phoenix]." Meeting Farley in Toronto last summer, Aykroyd says, "I laid into him about what kind...
...Houghton Mifflin) The title is ironic--a Philip Roth specialty. There is precious little rural peace and harmony in this scorching novel about a prosperous New Jersey couple whose good life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a '60s terrorist. In Roth's earlier novels, parents tended toward the comic and repressive. Not here. The author renders the Job-like suffering of a father and mother over a lost child with characteristic emotional force and verbal energy...