Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...group and a prim foil to the buffoon Porthos. A summary of his character is provided in his answer to a vexed Athos, who exclaims, "Are you so much holier than the rest of us?" He replies calmly, "Yes, I am." While Depardieu and Irons provide the comic relief, John Malkovich plays the father unhinged by grief who finds a surrogate son in Phillipe, and not always convincingly. His voice seems to express only one consistent emotion: suppressed rage. Whatever he says, he says so deliberately that it seems that he is attempting to keep himself from having...
Coupland has mastered the art of the precisely timed witticism, the understatement and the random comic comparison. His language dances around its subjects, as when Richard discovers that the end of the world has come and "an adrenaline fang bites the rear of his neck." Coupland extends his metaphor of human infringement on nature with the words he uses to describe the post-apocalyptic world: "The darkening sky is becoming a warm, dead Xerox and the winds blow forcefully as though aimed from a hair blower," and "Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million...
Travolta's Jack Stanton may be comic hyperbole, but the real Clinton at his best is just as overstated--a sprawling, irreducible character who belongs not in the cramped precincts of American politics but in the wide-open fields of American fiction, which is where Klein had the good sense to put him. But though Klein left enough wiggle room for a reader to create a different character in the mind's eye, the movie allows nothing of the kind. From the very first scene, that's him up there, and it's a shock--the first of many, because...
...They were who they were." Still, insiders had fun guessing who in the Clinton caravan matched the characters Klein created. Henry's is the most elusive: a sort of mythical grandson of Martin Luther King Jr. crossed with former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. Nearly everyone else is an acute comic exaggeration of a familiar friend or foe of Bill...
Contrasting Bridges' cavalier attitude is John Goodman as his bowling buddy Walter, who gets worked up about everything. The Coen brothers get plenty of good comic material out of this pair and thankfully don't overplay the "odd couple" element. Walter is a uniquely funny character too: though he obviously has a good heart, he can't stop his over-the-top rants. "Shomer Shabbas!" he screams, declaring his unwillingness to play an important league bowling game on the Jewish day of rest. Towards the end of the film, Goodman delivers a hilariously irrelevant, insensitive funeral elegy that somehow also...