Word: comically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...assembled a collection of heavy weaponry that Rambo (whose posters also decorate his pad) might envy. It may be, in fact, that the blissful look that crosses his kindly face when he lays hands on a rocket launcher in a situation that compels its immediate use is the comic high point of this sequel. Anyway, he provides a high, sweet note of mysterious absurdity that occasionally cuts through the din of a movie that all too resolutely attempts to replicate the comedy megahit of the decade...
...into and out of trouble, past authority figures both petty and grand, is beyond dispute. That he can assert his brilliance while retaining his character's lovability in these encounters is a little miracle of the performer's art. That he could move beyond riffing and sustain a long comic line if he dared seems a possibility worth exploring...
...Life is full of choices," Charlie Brown once observed, "but you never get any." That bit of wisdom might also be applied to the life of his creator, Charles Schulz, 64, who notes, "It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was." Last week the soft-spoken artist was inducted into the Cartoonists Hall of Fame for 37 years of his Peanuts comic strip, which is carried in some 2,000 papers in 36 countries. Schulz is characteristically reflective about the enduring popularity of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy...
...auteur of Ishtar the movie is film's shyest comic talent, Elaine May. The auteur of Ishtar the event (or would-be event) is the medium's shyest -- but also slyest -- actor-producer, Warren Beatty. It is important to keep those functions separate in mind. Otherwise it is hard to enjoy either the film or the media outcry that any overbudget, long-delayed (six months) production is bound to engender...
...Everyone got what they wanted, didn't they?" Heaven help us; it's close to being true. May, whose painstaking ways and modest grosses do not usually commend her to the studios, gets to work in something near her best vein. Hoffman has a role nicely suited to the comic whine of his neuroses. Beatty, 50, has one in which his distracted air and his lack of traditional star presence can be made to look like modesty -- though at his age, his looks are no longer flawlessly tailored to his boyish manner. Thomson has an occasion for his book...