Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Talk About' lies in its reality. This movie asks questions that people face everyday. It doesn't allow the characters to take the easy way out, and its wry humor strikes an eerily familiar note. This is not a movie with slapstick comedy or old sitcom jokes--its comic moments are all natural, springing from painfully real situations. This movie is a must...
...eight-part PBS series, The Shock of the New (1980). He is completing work on an eight-hour TV special about American art, scheduled to air on BBC late next year. He can also be seen in the new documentary film Crumb, offering a critical assessment of the underground comic artist Robert Crumb...
...know it has to be a Martin Scorsese film when it stars ROBERT DE NIRO and ... DON RICKLES? "Marty said I have the perfect face for Las Vegas," says the veteran comic, who seems to think that's a compliment. In Casino, due out in November, Rickles plays casino manager Billy Sherbet. He hasn't one funny line, but made up for it between takes. "Everyone told me Bob was a serious actor, but within days he was my slave," says Rickles. "The man was laughing at 'Hello' and killing himself at 'Hello, Bob.' " Casting Rickles wasn't the only...
...freshest production is a real oddball: one of the few stagings ever done of Benjamin Britten's first opera, Paul Bunyan. Written to a libretto by W.H. Auden shortly after the composer and poet came to America as pacifists in the late 1930s, the work was conceived as a comic-populist valentine to their new country, one that would be suitable for school productions. Singable it is: the stream of songs and choruses exploits and gently parodies everything from American folksiness to Broadway jazziness, from Italian opera to Victorian ballads...
...British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. In Nice Work (1991) he did a complete about-face, starting at a satirist's typical distance from his creations and finishing besotted with them. In Therapy (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) he describes a classic case of postmodern depression. Laurence ("Tubby") Passmore is 58, securely married, the chief writer on a hit TV sitcom. But he quickly finds he has a trick knee, a fed-up wife and a bad threat...