Word: comicality
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...star--be it Jim Carrey (Man on the Moon), Martin Lawrence (Big Momma's House) or Ben Affleck (Paycheck)--appear heroic by comparison. Giamatti finally got the chance to move to the middle of the screen in 2003's American Splendor and 2004's Sideways, and he infused comic-book-writing depressive Harvey Pekar and wine-loving, self-hating failed novelist Miles Raymond with such prickly, ordinary humanity that he was naturally overlooked when it came time for Academy Award nominations. Still, the performances were inspirational. "It's my hope that we're getting into an era where the value...
...decades been honorable Hollywood genres: the exotic epic, the adaptation of famous novels, the decorous comedy of manners. But with spiraling costs, the epic soon went microscopic. Big-budget films today are less likely to be adapted from classic novels than from graphic ones?essentially, long comic books. Comedies stayed around, but lost their manners. Hollywood movies, which had been traditionally tailored to the female audience, now went after the male market, valuing impact over nuance, the gross over the gracious. If Merchant-Ivory wanted the old genres, they could have them for free. So they ransacked your auntie...
...take a chatty, psychological comedian and put him in a psychologist's office to chat with people. Though Newhart could do slapstick and broad comedy, he was also his own straight man, and this series showed him at his unflappable, Everyman best. It neatly captured the tone of a comic who kept his head when the neurotics around him had already lost theirs...
...book he was working on called A Long Way Down (Riverhead; 333 pages), you would have gently taken him aside and encouraged him to consign it to that great literary recycling bin into which unwritable novels go. As a writer Hornby is one of the great welterweights-lots of comic flair, good with the voices and the pop culture, always ready with a dash of bittersweet pathos-but he's not generally thought of as swinging a heavy bat, intellectually speaking. There's a reason his books get turned into movies starring John Cusack (High Fidelity) and Hugh Grant (About...
DIED. HOWARD MORRIS, 85, comedic actor who was the bantamweight, uninhibited fourth member of the most famous comic ensemble of TV's Golden Age, along with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner on Your Show of Shows; in Los Angeles. His goofiness enhanced such roles as Ernest T. Bass, a would-be country Casanova on The Andy Griffith Show,and he went on to direct such TV shows as Hogan's Heroes, Bewitched and the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry spy spoof Get Smart...