Word: manically
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...found myself in the midst of the most talented and hard-working people I had met here. I felt an extraordinary surge of confidence. I began to work in my courses. I was happy. But then the roof caved in. My sister, who was also at Harvard, suffered a manic-depressive breakdown. I still feel a creeping nausea as I think of the policeman coming to get me in my room and telling me that my sister was in Cambridge Hospital. I remember, hours later, shivering in thin jeans and a t-shirt in the hospital's dingy waiting room...
...Hannah isn't ironic because he doesn't look for dualities, but instead goes for the whole damn show. Hannah has some sort of compound eye with an ear to match, and the result is a manic cacophony of life in These United States. His characters comprise the fifth column perpetually looking for salvation in a parking...
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...