Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...outer and inner space (2001: A Space Odyssey), in the nightmare future (A Clockwork Orange), in the duplicitous past (Barry Lyndon) and down the endless bloody corridors of a deranged mind (The Shining). Now he's back. Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie grunt. The boot-camp sequence begins as high farce, with the D.I. taunting his recruits in arias of obscenity that tickle and singe the ear. Kubrick's majestic camera tracks across the barracks, it ascends obstacle...
...this first half of the film is occasionally confused, uncertain whether to portray Pyle as a comic figure or as a troubled man. His sudden psychopathy is barely convincing, because Pyle's getting his act together would have gotten the drill sergeant off his back. Kubrick seems slightly off the mark in portraying the tyrannical nature of the drill sargeant. The sergeant at times seems patriotic to the point of ridicule--tough so he can make his men great in the name of his country--but when he invokes the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald as a great marine worthy...
...chosen to tell the story from coarse Daryl's point of view rather than, as Updike did, from the ironic women's. This is not a movie of compound-complex sentences and nuances. But it is a damned entertaining one, with a textbook display of camerabatics -- if textbooks were comic books with a mean streak...
BORN. To Dick Smothers, 47, perennial straight man of the comic Smothers Brothers, and his wife Lorraine Martin, 28: their first child (he has three from a previous marriage); in Las Vegas, where the brothers are performing. Name: Sarah Alexandra. Weight...
Martin Amis, 37, is the gifted author of five novels, including the extravagantly comic Money: A Suicide Note. He is a second-generation angry young man who, unlike his father Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim), nurtures his distemper from sources that go beyond the real and imagined injuries of Britain's class system. Einstein's Monsters consists of a long lead essay followed by five fantasies, all charged with forebodings of nuclear disaster. In addition to high verbal energy and flashes of satiric genius, the stories hum with the resentment and loathing of a man who fears for his natural ( patrimony...