Word: comics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...into the metaphysics of Beckett's later works, as well as Joyce's, but has remained only in the hands of critics, since it is long out of print. It possibly offers even more as an introduction to Beckett's ability to combine heightened abstraction and idiom in a comic synthesis (even in serious criticism). The essay begins: "The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded hamsandwich...
...juxtaposed with scene after scene of little Shirley Temple, ever an orphan, lisping and dancing her way into the audience's heart. The moody films of the '40s follow a series of loners down a series of mean streets-an echo of postwar confusion and anxiety. A comic and ultimately sorrowful section is devoted to Marilyn Monroe, following her from screen tests to her last incomplete film, tracing her biography in rare shots with Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio. There is also a haunting, overproduced birthday party for John F. Kennedy, where the tardy star is introduced...
...raging energy and fantasy of Henderson the Rain King (1959) do not always thrill to the hothouse introspection of Herzog (1964). Those who can get along with the serious, well-mannered author of Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) are likely to gasp at the wisecracking Borscht Belt comic who hoofs onstage during parts of Humboldt's Gift. The picaresque hero of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a brash New World kid, while a wise Old World man fills the title role of Mr. Sammler's Planet...
...Comic strip is one of the terms critics have used for the Ken Kesey counter-culture novel that inspired One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest. Big Nurse, Billy Bibbet, Randell McMurphy--zip, zam, zowee-am, swoosh, but with a heavy psycho-social punch packed behind it all. Yet the first shots of Milos Forman's movie--grainy, solemn, self-consciously non-colorful--make clear that this Cuckoo will not foist off a super-super allegory of a nut-fram, but a real Oregon mental hospital, in all its disturbing bleakness and isolation. This interpretive risk pays off, and, except...
...consonants, as Shaw once suggested she should, with a "ten pound gun hammer spring." Thomas Champion, as Burgess, Candida's father, has a laudable Cockney accent, and Mariani himself oozes idolatrous servility as the cleric Lexy. One of the most successful scenes in the production is the comic encounter between Prossy, Burgess and Marchbanks; in this run-in with characters who have the outlines of caricature, Marchbanks' own exaggerated mannerisms find their proper context...