Word: comical
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There was reasonable assurance that converting Marvel’s comic-book heroes to live-action heroes was a smart thing to do, given the solid fan base clamoring for film versions of its favorite comics, as well as a ready-made lineup of characters, story lines and personal histories. I read only one issue of The Amazing Spider-Man but what really sucked me into the Marvel world was my brother’s stack of superhero trading cards, with profiles, stats and full-fledged character bios on the back of every one. Most of the heroes, and even...
Societies other than the U.S., while not exactly laughing off the sexual abuse of children, manage to acknowledge this reality without the same episodic hysteria. In England, for example, the "randy vicar" is a stock comic character. And even in America we recognize and tolerate the inevitability of certain tendencies that have occasional antisocial consequences. The military services would have a harder time filling their recruiting quotas if they were successful in screening out everyone with an unhealthy enthusiasm for violence. Instead they work to control and channel those impulses, and they largely succeed...
...centric films that sometimes (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) found large audiences. Lucas, who had written a third-grade theme that began, "Once upon a time in the land of Zoom..." and loved to tinker with cars, replayed his Modesto, Calif., adolescence in American Graffiti. Then he reworked the beloved comic books and B-movie serials of his youth into Star Wars, a film as stylized and sterile as a piece of abstract animation, yet an adventure potent enough to please mass audiences...
Only in this case the waiter would be wrong. Charlie Kaufman is one of Hollywood's hottest It boys. At a time when so many movies seem formulaic--sequels, prequels and comic books--Kaufman's scripts are like the products of chaos theory. His first movie, Being John Malkovich, stunned even jaded moviegoers with its tale of a puppeteer who discovers a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich. His next offering, Human Nature, in cinemas now, is another head snapper. Patricia Arquette plays Lila, an abnormally hirsute woman who falls in love with a light-in-the-shorts...
...question, When is it O.K. to stop crying and start laughing again? Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin; 276 pages), is a very funny book about very tragic times, and it's just a little bit nervous about being so funny. After one comic aside, the narrator--a Ukrainian would-be hipster (and remedial English student) named Alexander Perchov--feels as if he has to reassure his audience: "It was not wrong to make a funny here. It was the right thing...