Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This was drama as rant, an explosion of bad manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight. The acid tone, at once comic and desperate, sustained Osborne throughout a volatile career as playwright, film writer (Tom Jones) and memoirist (A Better Class of Person). More important, it stoked a ferment in a then sleepy popular culture. Anger's curdling inflections and class animosities were echoed in the plays of Joe Orton and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a direct descendant), in Dennis Potter's savage TV scripts and in a generation of performers, from...
Woody Allen rounds up the usual show-biz subjects -- egomaniacal star (Dianne Wiest in a great, bold comic performance), earnest young playwright, desperate producer -- and an underworld hit man (Chazz Palminteri) who has what none of them has: theatrical genius. He teaches them all a thing or two about art and life in Allen's happiest, most assured comedy in many years...
...display in Brooklyn this fall), uses the most traditional means -- a bare stage, an all-male cast -- for radical ends. Does cross dressing lead to tatty camp? No, it's an apt way of addressing the crises of eros and identity at the heart of the play, where comic ingenuity escalates into poetic rapture...
...darkly comic film Pulp Fiction cleaned up with four awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association: best film, director and screenplay (Quentin Tarantino) and best actor (John Travolta). Robert Redford's Quiz Show was voted best picture by the New York Film Critics Circle...
...MASH was to war movies, Nashville to country music, A Wedding to the middle-class family, H.E.A.L.T.H. to the organic-food business and The Player to Hollywood, so is Ready to Wear to fashion: a comic panorama of people pretending to get along under stress, creating a bogus community, playing games of power and privilege, establishing who's boss. The tone of an Altman film -- the desperate milling, the sense of isolation within a crowd, the urgency to no clear end -- is the reflection of life on any movie set and, indeed, in the working lives of most people. When...