Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With her ample jowls and round, beamish face, she looks a bit like Benny Hill--without, of course, the late British comic's leering smirk. Her voice is high-pitched, nasal and a trifle slurred, her frequent laugh a piercing cackle. At a time when some Roman Catholic nuns wear discreet designer clothes, she is resolutely old-fashioned in her ankle-length brown robe and hair-concealing white scapular. The Catholicism she espouses is old-fashioned as well, redolent with devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Latin-rite mass, deeply rooted in the Baltimore Catholicism of the 1940s. Some...
...British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. It is a habit that saves his latest novel (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) from becoming an all-too-familiar tale of midlife crisis. Lawrence "Tubby" Passmore is 58 and securely married with a job he loves. But he quickly finds all is not as secure as he believed. Tubby's attempts to recover make for neither enterprising nor funny reading, says TIME's Martha Duffy. But a meeting with a teenage love redeems both Passmore and the book. "By subtle shifts in tone," says...
...Never Can Tell revolves around the Clandon family, whose grown children know nothing of their vanished father. It starts engagingly. A young man (Richard Binsley) poises like a vampire over an attractive young woman (Jan Alexandra Smith). The scene is not grisly but comic, as the bouncy, blue-painted sea behind them suggests. The man is a fledgling dentist who has set up practice in an English coastal town. He has a lot to learn; she--Dolly Clandon--is his "first tooth...
Alas, director Danny Cannon hasn't the skill to make majestic melodrama plausible. As for the facetiousness, Rob Schneider sweats arsenals of ammunition as Dredd's sarcastic sidekick. But the effect is redundant since Sly is his own comic relief. By now Stallone has become a symbol for all that is goofy and grandiloquent in Hollywood's live-action summer cartoons. The hormone that courses through his movie veins could be called preposterone...
...Love for Three Oranges, he managed to find wit and poetry in an opera that is often little more than the famous March. Even more impressive was his way with a stripped-down, hopped-up Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev's great ballet. Designed by the Belgrade-born underground-comic-book illustrator Enki Bilal and choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, this Romeo takes place in a Mad Max universe where the Capulets and the Montagues are fascist thugs and street ragamuffins, and Juliet sports a bustier whose exaggerated nipples fairly scream "radical Eurotrash reinterpretation." Yet thanks to Bilal's dark vision, Preljocaj...