Word: comicalities
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...friend, I have to say that the whole setup seems awfully familiar. I mean, back at WJM in Minneapolis we had pompous Ted Baxter; now you've got pompous Ed LaSalle (John Astin), the womanizing theater critic. At least Ted was a comic type--the featherbrained anchorman--that everybody could recognize. This LaSalle fellow doesn't make sense. He comes on as a Broadway blusterer, yet claims he never goes to "commercial pap" like Cats and Dreamgirls. Then what's he doing writing for a blue-collar tabloid? Your other co-workers are more credible. Your boss (James Farentino) seems...
...comic essayist never did produce the serious work he wanted to, and he wasted too much time in Hollywood, playing small parts in smaller movies. But seated on the aisle during the '20s and '30s, as drama critic of Life, the humor magazine, and later The New Yorker, Robert Benchley was in his essential elements of earth, air and firewater. The boozy, bemused uncle of the theater sees a parade of greats. He applauds Jimmy Durante, discovers Bob Hope and Groucho Marx, and collects parodies of a Cole Porter lyric: "Night and day under the bark of me/ There...
...fact, the company plans to make about 20 films next year, more than any of the major studios. Several of them will be either gory shoot-'em-ups like the current Death Wish 3 or comic-book films like Captain America and Pinocchio--the Robot. Golan hopes that one of their films, Delta Force, which comes out next month with Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin, will be Cannon's first $100 million grosser. The script has terrorists taking over an American airliner and Norris and his Delta Force flying to the rescue, spraying bullets everywhere. The plot sounds very much...
...Twelfth Night to mere giggles and kickshaws. Seeing these productions together may enable modern audiences to understand why earlier critics revered the Bard's tragedies but undervalued his comedies, overlooking their moral complexity and their glimpses of humiliation and pain in commoners' everyday life. The stress on low comic exaggeration also robs Twelfth Night of much of its social consequence: there is little sense that the battle between Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio has anything to do with the decline of the old gentry and the rise of the bourgeoisie...
...also the narrative. That has something to do with the audience. Americans seem much more amused by the twists and turns of the plot." This emphasis on emotion marks a deliberate departure from Frayn's customarily wry, bemused tone. He explains, "All humorous writing is detached. What makes it comic is a refusal to be involved with the feelings of the characters. There is rather less of that approach in Benefactors...