Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...others stick out for their humorous roles. Kerrick Johnson, who plays the punchy and sarcastic Collie Couch, speaks to the audience occassionally to mention gossip about absurdities in the other characters. And Pauls Raudseps, as the happy-go-lucky Pat Mankey, in his few lines is often a comic relief from the grime trials of the other characters...
This summer, as director and mogul, he has more than enough work to keep him happy. Two new comic adventures bear the "Steven Spielberg Presents" imprimatur. The Goonies, directed by Richard Donner from a Spielberg story, earned a healthy $41.4 million in its first 24 days' release; Back to the Future, a spiffy time-machine comedy from Director-Writer Bob Zemeckis, opened last week to positive reviews and audience acclaim. But that is just for openers. Next week E.T. will beam back down to 1,500 theaters for a saturation rerelease. At Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg's studio-within-a- studio...
That will sound like gentle facetiousness to anyone who does not realize that Spielberg's movie productions are his children too. He can be criticized for photocopying the boy-meets-his-better-self wonder of E.T. in his more recent films; the copy is rougher and darker in the comic nightmare Gremlins, a bit crumpled and smudged in the fun-house frenzy of The Goonies. But the films' very limitations are identity badges on a body of work as personal, even as obsessive, as that of Ingmar Bergman, David Lean or any other monarch of cinema academe. Spielberg the director...
...since the days of the Forty-Niners," wrote Novelist Upton Sinclair in 1933, "had there been such a way for the little fellow to get rich as in this new business." The little fellow Sinclair mentioned could have been Chaplin. Born in a London slum, the comic arrived in the U.S. in 1910. Three years later he signed his first movie contract, at $150 a week; four years after that, he was to make $1 million a year and become, for a time, the planet's most recognizable and cherished figure. Chaplin deserved no less; his poignant one-reel comedies...
Unlike The Goonies, whose narrative is a rapid succession of hotfoots, Back to the Future has a long fuse that, halfway through, explodes into comic epiphany. Until then, the film is nicely propelled by the ingratiating Fox (from the NBC sitcom Family Ties) and some snappy then-and-now jokes (in 1985 the local theater is showing Orgy American Style, while in 1955 the attraction is a Ronald Reagan western). The choice of year is canny, for 1955 is close to the historical moment when television, rock 'n' roll and kids mounted their takeover of American culture...