Word: comicality
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...actors. Lewis's commitment as a spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, notably in the 19-hour MDA telethon he fronts each Labor Day, has certainly earned him a hearty Hollywood thank-you. But it's a minor token, almost an insult, to one of the wildest, most imaginative comic talents in any medium and, without question, the definitive showbiz ego of the mid-20th century. (See pictures of Jerry Lewis...
...only the demolisher of Oscar's gravitas but the unkillable specter of his first eminence, in the late '40s and '50s, as the goony kid prancing around the cool crooner. (One producer cruelly called Martin and Lewis "the organ grinder and the monkey"). He is the comic whose genius, or even the robust grosses of his movies, nobody in Hollywood took seriously. And because he was championed as an auteur in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Lewis's detractors have made him the derisive punch line to every joke about the French that came after postcards and before Freedom...
...might actually detract from their involvement in the film. And the majority of movies can't be called visually sumptuous. You could watch a Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler picture on the oldest TV set, with tinfoil on the rabbit ears, and not miss the important stuff: the comic spectacle of men behaving like boys...
...pungent aroma still fleetingly hovers over today's city, once you escape its air-conditioned malls, but it was more powerful in the late 1930s, when the novel is set. The story sprawls around the family of Walter Blackett, a wealthy British businessman who is clinging, with increasingly comic desperation, to the old colonial order as his beloved city lurches toward World War II. Around the bungalows of Tanglin his tempestuous daughter is conducting love affairs with variously unsuitable men, his son is proving too unreliable to inherit the family firm Blackett & Webb, and his business partner, once a model...
...plan was to max out on leisure, binge on self-gratification until I could take it no more," writes Ayres in his comic satire, the satire part of which is more satisfying than the comic. As a portrait of pre-recession, debt-financed, image-obsessed Los Angeles, Death By Leisure is spot-on in its details, though the British writer succeeds in making the city sound like the worst place in America, full of status-obsessed grifters like himself. Whether it's sneaking into Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch or finagling his way into a studio exec bash, Ayres simultaneously...