Word: comical
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...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...
Director Marc Webb (a vide-auteur making his first feature) gives every scene a bang for comic or emotional effect; as he cuts away you can hear the rim shot. The songs that spray-paint the sound track, as well as the myriad movie references, are mostly antique (1960s to '80s); Webb wants old people to like this young-lovers film. Wants everyone...
...That's sex in a very PG, Potter fashion. The "snogging" engaged in by the 16-year-olds has a chaste, comic choreography, as if kissing were a minuet of locked lips. When Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his pal Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) talk furtively about the girls they're mad for, it's to acknowledge vaguely that they have "nice skin." And when our hero's notoriety makes the Hogwarts girls just wild about Harry, his friend-girl Hermione (Emma Watson) can't suppress a little sulfur puff of rancor. "She's only interested in you," Hermione snits about...
...performance of some kind, even if they didn't always get the joke. Baron Cohen takes his act out into the wider world, all for the fun of proving what fools these mortals be. That includes the mortals called Ali G, Borat and Brüno - Baron Cohen's comic characters are as dumb and deplorable as the people they mock. Ali G is a self-deluding white guy who yearns to be a black rapper. Borat is a rube and an anti-Semite. This is why the inevitable debate over whether the new film is a critique of homophobia...