Word: manic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...still sings as if he has a gun pressed to his temple: if it's a love song, every line is a plea for life. If it is one of his high-wire rockers, the song is like a last attempt to go out in a blaze of manic glory...
...master of comic insincerity. He speaks in italics and tries to raise the put-on into an art form. His routine resembles Steve Martin's, with a crucial difference. Where Martin is slick and cold, Murray is disheveled and vulnerable. One feels that Murray's manic behavior is a cover for some rather touching neuroses...
Meatballs does at least demonstrate that the success of Animal House was no happy accident. That film's manic vitality and boundless raunchiness are painfully absent here. At its best, Meatballs rises only to the level of TV's now defunct Animal House sitcoms. Through it all, Murray smiles and forges ahead, but his big riffs have been edited down to frantic bursts of mugging. Even worse is the single attempt to capitalize on his personal warmth: an interminable subplot about the friendship between Murray and a shy camper (Chris Makepeace) is so mawkishly presented that it takes...
...mechanicals" or clowns of this comedy. As the town watch and constabulary they are the ones who unravel the intrigue by which Don John (here "the Prince") convinces Claudio of his beloved's infidelity. An adept at malapropism, Dogberry conducts hearings and gathers evidence with the aid of the manic Verges, who in Sellars' production runs from dummy to dummy both to interrogate and to respond...
...last year for inclusion in the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, but was rejected for lack of evidence. Klein, director of research for the New York State Psychiatric Institute, is convinced that lovesickness is real enough. Says he: "These people, mostly women, are not true depressives or manic-depressives. They are so vulnerable that they are driven to repeat their love cycles over and over...