Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BOOKS . . . ZEKE AND NED: Al Capp's long-gone hillbilly comic strip Li'l Abner wasn't elevated humor, but it was funny, and that's pretty much the case with 'Zeke and Ned' (Simon & Schuster; 478 pages; $25), by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. "Advocates for Native American rights will be flummoxed to learn that, as the authors tell it, Cherokees endured the Trail of Tears to the Indian Territory only to end up in Capp's Dogpatch," says TIME's John Skow. "McMurtry and Ossana set their story in the Cherokee town of Tahlequah, but it's Dogpatch...
Goldfinger failed to have the never-ending energy and musical potential of Reel Big Fish or the comic fare of the Blue Meanies' cartoon quality tunes. Maybe the band should have remained true to its ska influences or instead trailed down a more creative musical path. Despite the bittersweet performance, Goldfinger certainly knew how to handle a live audience, which is more than what some bands could ever offer...
...mimic, he played seven characters, all brilliantly. The one unattractive figure, Buddy Love, was a wicked stretch of the Eddie Murphy personality that moviegoers had tired of: sleek, preening, abrasive, an overdog in love with itself. The other characters were marvels not just of makeup but also of comic sympathy; Sherman Klump and his pudgy, putrefactive family had humor and heart. The $130 million box-office take showed how much affection filmgoers still had for Murphy. They hoped it heralded a new Golden Age for the Golden Child...
...comic premises go, this is not exactly a world-beater. But soon enough, the keepers--gentle souls all--are funnily up in arms defending their pets. A wandering tarantula motivates a genteel striptease, and the mean mogul gets his comeuppance. The script, by Cleese and Iain Johnstone, lacks Wanda's mean and giddy inventiveness, and the directors, Robert Young and Fred Schepisi, don't wind their material very tightly. Still, this good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity...
...love and his criticism are tempered by his keen intellect and the immigrant's perspective on what he found in this country that was utterly different from what he left in Nazi Europe. As a young man, he is struck by the silliness of American attention to newspaper comic strips. He sees Superman as "something out of Nietzsche and vaguely associated with Nazi theories of a master race." But in the same strip he is able to see the positive side to this American absurdity: "I sensed America's ability to domesticate menace and shrink giants...