Word: comical
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...imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and parody the comic's way of showing envy, then Spillane was a signal success. A Life cover line on Spillane read: "13,000,000 Books of Sex and Slaughter." He didn't exactly invent the paperback market, but he certified their status as the main format for popular fiction. "Mickey Spillane's contribution is far beyond mystery or crime writing," crime-book editor Martin Greenberg says in the affectionate and impressive documentary Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane (available as part of the three-disc set Max Allan Collins' Black Box). "I think...
...other words, he needs a little propulsive help if he is to be something more than an agreeable reactor instead of an actor , and that's what You, Me and Dupree doesn't supply him. It is full of promising comic notions, which are truncated rather than fully exploited and that forces him to run on niceness, not the desperation that might take him to full-scale dementia. When he does approach that state - as in a chase with a security guard at his father-in-law's office, the Russos don't really know how to develop...
...Oscar Hammerstein (Very Warm for May ), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Higher and Higher) and Cole Porter (Panama Hattie). In three of those shows she shared stage space with Vera Ellen, who would join Allyson in MGM musicals; in another she played with Eve Arden, who'd supply comic vinegar to Allyson's sugar in '40s Hollywood...
...shame because Depp is a skilled comic actor. His Captain Jack Sparrow is still a marvelous creation. It's not just a matter of his eye makeup or his variously funny ways of walking, running or sitting still (as when he discovers, to his dismay, that cannibals have decided to make him the main course at their banquet). It's also that Jack is, in truth, a modernist, unaccountably displaced to the 17th century and obliged to undertake the mindless heroics not only of an antique movie genre but also of the spirit of an age when all are heedlessly...
...Gilding the lily - casting the everyday and unexceptional in the most grandiose terms - has always been a weakness of boomers, who in their youth would sometimes compare Captain Marvel comic books to the Sistine Chapel or call Yoko Ono an artist. Overstatement has been George W. Bush's prime rhetorical technique. When he drew our attention to a handful of troublesome regimes, he couldn't just call them troublesome regimes; instead they ballooned into an "axis of evil." His hope of stabilizing the Middle East by fostering self-government was not just a geostrategic Hail Mary - it would lead...