Word: larkishly
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...energy wedded happily with a larger space and wittier, more elaborate settings, a fantasy urban landscape in which skyscrapers look like zoot-suited people. So he decided to brave Broadway, where Five Guys Named Moe boogied in last week. It is a slight, sometimes silly but absolutely joyful experience, larkish and lighthearted and a bit like running around with a lampshade on your head...
...here! Better yet, let Alan Parker stage it for you. In Bugsy Malone (1976) and Fame (1980), this English director assembled teen casts for slick, violent musical parables. Now, in THE COMMITMENTS, he turns Roddy Doyle's novel about a Dublin band into a rousing entertainment. It has the larkish wit and edgy camaraderie of the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, to which it might serve as a prequel: a kid on the dole (Robert Arkins) organizes a fledgling group devoted to covering '60s rhythm-and-blues songs. How fervently these members of the Irish underclass wish...
That's when Prince of Thieves finally jolts awake. Robin orchestrates a cunning climactic assault, the Merry Men's arrows sizzle through the sky like happy Scuds, and the bustle of bodies and cameras produces congenial movie movement. Two of the actors carry this larkish spirit throughout the film. Geraldine McEwan, in devil-doll weeds, makes for a hilariously desiccated witch. And Alan Rickman, fairly drooling with delight at his own wickedness, plays the Sheriff of Nottingham as a vibrant cartoon villain: Snidely Whiplash rampant...
...other end of the scale of seriousness are two works notable for their sheer larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting...
...their normality, as if they were plump, middle-aged matrons nattering across a backyard fence about their ability to conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role, the ghost-summoning Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's larkish Blithe Spirit, which was revived on Broadway last week. The cast includes Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, all in good form, but this is Page's show. In a career including eight Oscar nominations, culminating in a 1986 Best Actress award for The Trip to Bountiful, and countless...