Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Punk is excellent as the gentleman's gentleman. He remains dignified but servile throughout Complex, skillfully playing the audience with his lines and manner. The interchange between Birsh, who is discussing military strategy, and Reynolds, who is singing football songs, is both comic and forceful. Stone gives Redford another side, however, and shows him to be as frustrated as the rest of the characters, desperately dreaming of taking Birsh's money and letting others serve...
...Coming. This film will no longer seem as cathartically satirical as it did when first released in the mid-sixties, when an atmosphere of Cold-War hysteria still hung low, if somewhat less thick than in the 50's, over most of middle-America. But Alan Arkin's comic franticness in this tale about a small New England coastal village thrown into a frenzy when a Russian ship docks in its harbor and the Reds start mixing with the town-folk should still be good for some belly-laughs...
...return of his lost nose. What Roth succeeds in portraying, though, with all the delicacy and poignancy of the Russian dramatist, is that Kepesh is in fact a figure from a Chekhov novel. Not a warped, disfigured monster but a man whose constant pursuit of love reveals the tragic-comic dimensions of our own lives...
This time there is no struggle and no enlightenment: Bertrand is just a flip Don Juan-a stock comic figure who resolves all of life's dilemmas by retreating to adolescence. Despite Denner's amusingly self-effacing performance, it is hard to care about him or, worse still, the women he damages along his selfish way. Truffaut's vulnerability and sweet tragic sense are strangely absent here; this film is just depressing...
While tragedy moves from sanity toward self-destruction, comedy moves from self-delusion toward preservative sanity. In his pride, the tragic hero overreaches human limits and dies. In his folly, the comic hero pounds his head against those limits, is brought to his senses and lives. It is difficult to know which is the less comfortable end - death or self-knowledge - and that is one reason why great tragedy and great comedy are so close...