Word: manically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lily Tomlin aspires to Chaplinesque heights of comic intuition and craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...
Greene, of course, will not hear of any hint of bravery or courage on his part. His flirtations with sudden death were nothing more than "ways of escape" from boredom and what he calls his manic-depressive self. He merely sought "that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket." He even uses his extensive experience of the world as a way to undercut the imaginative scope of his novels: "Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last...
ALMOST FIFTY YEARS after the first Popeye cartoon, director Robert Altman and cartoonist-author-screenwriter Jules Feiffer have adapted the sailor to another medium--that of the musical-comedy feature film--using real people instead of animated figures. When such heavies team up with a talent like manic Robin Williams to interpret a piece of American folklore, the result ought to transcend the original material. Instead, they produce a faithful if restrained reproduction of the cartoon version--and somewhat of a disappointment...
...what once, generations ago, was called square has broken into the open. Certain values like stable family, satisfyingly useful hard work, competition and excellence have reappeared here and there: the moral equivalents of Bass Weejuns and button-down shirts. A cynic would say that the culture's manic quest for novelty has simply exhausted some of its adventurously kinky experiments (open marriage, bisexuality, a doctrinaire celibacy, banana smoking and roller disco) and so returned to the Real Thing, temporarily no doubt. It is all transient fashion, the cynic would say, like a return of the '40s look. Jerry...
...born, Catholic-reared philosopher who had switched from conservatism to Communism after five years as a German P.O.W. in World War II. Le Monde, which had published a series of Althusser's attacks on the French Communist party leadership, commented learnedly and protectively about "altruistic suicide," in which manic-depressives kill loved ones to shield them from torments they themselves suffer. But Le Quotidien cried "cover-up," calling it "a complicity of party and of class" that Althusser received such kid-glove treatment...