Word: comicly
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...breed of Disney animated feature. This is, in part, a war movie that understands loss, desolation, death. Power and discipline are the motifs here: bending your will and others', bending the system while working within it. The villain, a crazed, WWF-style hulkster named Shan-Yu, has no comic irony softening his brute trapezoidal lines. He's just an evil machine with vampire teeth. The Wall, the vast plains and hills, the Forbidden City itself, all cringe at his shadow...
...Disney cartoon, with comic relief--a little wheezy at first, in a matchmaker scene that seems to revel in inflicting pain--and yearning romance. It has some star voices, like Eddie Murphy, very funny as the Mushu shrimp, and a fine cast of East Asian and Asian-American actors (Ming-Na Wen, B.D. Wong, Soon-Tek Oh, James Shigeta) playing the main characters. But what's terrific about Mulan is its reaching for emotions that other movies run from: family love and duty, personal honor and group commitment, obedience and ingenuity. Nice notions for kids to think about...
...this marvelously complex, wickedly comic adaptation of Honore de Balzac's schoolroom classic, she has brought them all to ruin--the philandering father (Hugh Laurie), the spoiled daughter (Kelly MacDonald), the clueless son (Toby Stephens) and, for good measure, a self-absorbed young sculptor (Aden Young) who takes her generosity for granted, not realizing that she loves him. She spares only Elisabeth Shue's actress-courtesan, partly because she too is socially unacceptable, partly because she is so useful as the seductress Bette needs to bring off her schemes...
...then, everything had changed, collapsed, coalesced. An early fissure appears in 1951, when Brando brought Stanley Kowalski to the screen; the great beast was unleashed. With the mid-'50s eruptions of lurid B movies, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book and the onslaught of rock 'n' roll, the revolution was born. Now teenagers were the social arbiters, and their pleasure was to love stuff their parents hated. They renounced grownup culture (which was turning pappy and repetitive) for a language of their...
...output was always prodigious, prolific, protean, profound and even, in his self-portraits, prognathous. An artist of staggering versatility, Glimp refused to be chained to one medium. He turned out paintings, novels, plays, operas, ballets, film scripts, poems, TV commercials, recipes, roadside billboards, monogrammed handkerchiefs, rebuses, a surrealist comic strip titled Emil the Talking Bladder, and the gigantic, brightly colored mounds that he wittily called Alps--so massive that the plaster of Paris used to construct them had to be poured over four-story buildings, often trapping the hapless occupants inside...