Word: humors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Along with his black-and-blue humor, the author is unsparingly accurate about the R.A.F. 's highly inflated claims of shoot-downs and its antiquated early tactics. But he never loses admiration for the sacrificial pilot, and his sentiments are dead on target: midway between Catch 22 and The Winds of War. A natural for a PBS miniseries, Piece of Cake could run on Masterpiece Theater just as easy...
...exquisite clothes-felt hats as smooth as satin, overcoats that Garbo loved. Helena Rubinstein is remembered for the beauty of her buttonholes, Clark Gable for the best eyelashes she ever saw. And if the tall stories about kings and playboys often ravel, the shrewdness and impersonal good humor of the storyteller are intact. Cole Porter, of course, wrote a couplet about Vreeland: "Here's Diana/ Sittin' on the piana." And that's where she has been, swinging her legs, for most of the century...
This is true gallows humor, bitter and funny, set in Argentina nearly ten years ago during that country's period of paramilitary repression. Left wing violence triggered a savage righ wing reaction, a protracted spasm of bloodthirstiness and fear among the police and the military. To be a professor, a student, a known reader of books, or even to be associated distantly with anyone who might be stigmatized as an intellectual, was to risk joining the "disappeared ones," which meant to be seized, bound, tortured, murdered and thrown into secret graves...
Uneasiness ends when he is at his best, as in Bridging, about a bereaved husband who becomes an eager assistant leader of a Girl Scout troop from which his daughter drops out. Here Apple illuminates love and loss with tender humor and sadness, and he is obviously not kidding...
...MOVIE FLOWS so well because of the plot, which combines a serious drama with dashes of brittle good-humor. Paulie's rather limited vocabulary and satire of the lifestyle of small-time gangsters. New York City is the colorful setting for the film, which features scenes of the gritty city rooftops, velour interiors, and the all-too-appropriate music of Frank Sinatra...