Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...life, watching TV reports of the war for the Falkland Islands, Simeon complains to his wife: "What we're doing is going round in circles. I mean, is this where we came in?" To enter this novel is to join an eddy of wisdom and comic resignation...
Director Benjamin's gift for this kind of comic invention (first hinted at in My Favorite Year) is now finely honed. Long is the adorable mistress of frazzled common sense. Hanks poises between panic and exasperation with the kind of weird aplomb Cary Grant used to manage, and Alexander Godunov, the dancer, proves himself a gifted comic actor as an egomaniacal symphony conductor. They are all comparatively new to film, and that makes their display of old, all but lost movie skills even more cheering. The medium may have a future after...
Once off the pedestal, Reynolds could create memorable types. Nowhere in English art is there a sweeter, tougher demimondaine than his Mrs. Abington, reflectively sucking her thumb whilst sizing up the audience with a level look annealed by years of prostitution before her stardom as a comic actress. And it would be difficult to imagine a more sympathic portrait of a minor writer than his study of Giuseppe Baretti, shortsightedly scrutinizing a book inches from his eye with the greed of a man devouring an orange. In Reynolds' intimate portraits, the aura of classical make-believe becomes an ironical virtue...
...Marshall Field's in Chicago, hundreds of disappointed customers placed orders at $195 each for out-of-stock introductory kits of Glycel, a new line of skin-care products. In Las Vegas, caustic-tongued but delicate-skinned Comic Joan Rivers complained that the local Neiman-Marcus was out of Glycel supplies. In New York City, Maryanna Mangino was luckier; she managed to walk out of Saks Fifth Avenue with $300 worth of assorted Glycel lotions and potions. "I guess I'm hoping for something mysteriously new that just might work to get rid of wrinkles," said Mangino. "After...
...were the Marcos shoes, like the billions of stolen dollars, merely grotesque? The Russian word poshlost suggests the transcendent vulgarity at work in the Marcos spectacle. Poshlost is something preposterously overdone but without self-knowledge or irony. It is comic and sad and awful. An 18th century French merchant of great wealth named Beaujean came to the same dead end as Marcos with his Swiss gold and his ruined kidneys. "He owned amazing gardens," the historian Miriam Beard wrote of Beaujean, "but he was too fat to walk in them . . . He had countless splendid bedrooms and suffered from insomnia...