Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...behave as though Viet Nam battle stars and scars should be an entrance requirement for public office. Not only is it a bit unfair to single out Quayle for taking refuge in the National Guard, but ; the belated embrace of combat chic, which now stretches from movie screens to comic books, seems a disturbingly one-sided way to redress the inequities of the Viet Nam-era draft. Away from the heat of political campaigns, many Americans acknowledge that the Viet Nam War was fraught with moral ambiguity and that honor could be found in either serving one's country...
...tries to make that separation, and how he stumbles into his own path to sanctity, is Powers' story. He tells it in prose that is like his hero: unspectacular but full of impressive resources. Powers commands a variety of comic voices, from the wild, imaginary conversations with the Archbishop, or Arch, as Joe calls him, to the non sequiturs of sweet, dim Father Felix, the monk who helps Joe out on weekends when he is not chuckling over TV shows. The scenes in which Joe falls woefully short of his ideal of priestly fellowship are wicked social comedy. For days...
When he recovered, the voice of more than 400 animated characters resumed a career that had made him celebrated as the comic foil of Groucho Marx, George Burns and, most memorably, Jack Benny. It was for the Benny show that he regularly played a polar bear, an antique car, a "Union Depot train caller" ("Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc . . . amonga!"), a parrot, a Mexican ("What's your name?" "Sy." "Sy?" "Si"), and the choleric Professor LeBlanc, Jack's violin teacher: "Meester Be-nee, could I have some water, please?" "Water? Yes. There's some in the cooler down the hall." "That...
Demme is tops at luring these confidences, these comic grace notes, out of his performers. And Pfeiffer knows how to dish them out with the generosity of an haut-monde hostess casting intimate glances at strangers. Both artists have made funky music before -- easy on the ears, with reverberations that jangle provocatively in a moviegoer's memory. But the violent mood swings Demme programmed into films like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild often kept viewers at a bemused remove. And once or twice Pfeiffer has been stuck in films she could ornament but not inform. This time, though, these...
When the script deftly maneuvers Angela, Mike, Tony and Connie into the most expensively hideous suite in a Miami Beach hotel, Demme finds a satisfying comic payoff for the first time in his career. And in Pfeiffer -- a California blond in black wig and cramped Queens patois -- he has secured the emotional anchor to his vertiginous sight gags...