Word: comical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Back in 1963 and 1964, when I was nine years old, my friends and I were all atwitter about the first X-Men comic book, the new G.I. Joe action figure, the forthcoming Star Trek series, and the Beatles. At home I wore blue jeans and20sneakers, unlike my father or any other grownup I knew, and for my birthday I wanted a set of Mattel walkie-talkies...
...After all, this is the land where salarymen pour over comic books on their way to work and where stay-at-home moms are also videogame afficionados. In many ways, robotics combines two of Japan's biggest cultural crushes: technology and animation. Some experts say the roots of the national love of robotics are in Japan's Shinto religion, which blurs the line between the inanimate and animate and in which followers believe that all things, including objects, can possess living spirits. "Robots have a long and friendly history in Japan, and humanoid robots are considered to be living things...
...thousand-plus pages, with more than a hundred or so scurrying characters and a shape-shifting plot that went everywhere and nowhere, Thomas Pynchon has decided to give his fan base a break. His seventh novel is practically beach reading. Inherent Vice (Penguin Press; 369 pages) is a comic-noir detective tale set in Los Angeles around 1970, not long after the Manson murders added their special note to the already twitchy local vibe...
...forged an Oscar-winning film career as the writer-director of comedy-dramas about attractive neurotics. The needy souls from Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, I'll Do Anything and As Good As It Gets were all variously self-aware and self-absorbed, and they struck viewers not as comic constructs but as real, flawed people - who, on the side, were funny...
...Aldas who talk like frat boys. Compared with the comedies that dominated the 1990s - movies by the Farrelly brothers, Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler in which over-the-top characters triumph over an evil dumb guy - Apatow's movies are bildungsromans in which low-key guys push aside their comic books and triumph over themselves. Imagine Porky's if, instead of getting revenge on the strip club, Pee Wee and Meat had a long talk about life goals, met nice girls and raised children. (See the top 10 movie bromances...