Word: comicly
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...tutoring. As they rode home in the dark through the empty countryside, the eerie sounds of frogs and crickets would sometimes scare the brothers into frenzied pedaling. Street stickball was a welcome interruption. And whenever he could, Da-i would sneak off to the neighborhood store to leaf through comic books...
...life, from the beginning, was hardly boring. Born in Fontana Liri, 50 miles outside Rome, to a carpenter who went blind and a housewife who went deaf ("They were like a comic couple," he said), Mastroianni did time in a German labor camp during World War II, then escaped to Venice and later to Luchino Visconti's famed Milan theater troupe. The screen had to claim this face, so sensitive, masculine and alert, but it took a decade or more for him to achieve true Marcellosity. In Visconti's rapturous White Nights (1957), Mastroianni spent the whole movie pleading fruitlessly...
...Sicilian aristocrat in Pietro Germi's wonderfully malicious Divorce Italian Style (1962), he is a creature of tics and slouches, plotting his wife's death and stalking the seraphic Stefania Sandrelli with the gait of a mopey Groucho. He made informed fun not only of these familiar Italian comic figures but also of his own star machismo. At the end of a guest stint on Laugh-In, TV's vaudeville for the Nixon years, he stared moonily into the camera, then yanked off his toupee, revealing a few vagrant strands of hair. The ardor, the bedroom voice, the coiffure...
...easy to gorge on new movies as on holiday dinner. Some 40 films are on view, many as solemn as a Christmas sermon; we consider 10 here. Three are docudramas about challenges to the legal system. Three are tales of senior citizens in decay or defiance. Another three are comic studies of dire events: serial killing, an alien invasion, going home to mother. And it wouldn't be Christmas without a film of some masterwork by a 19th century novelist; this year it's Henry James. Below, a few reasons to visit your local plex--and a few more...
...room to parade his obsessions. A familiar tragedy is made potent by the value of the gift withdrawn: Isaac, whose life is his mind, is losing it. Rifkin sees the majesty in Isaac's madness; he soars as he declines. In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy...