Word: manically
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Even Dern, stuck with the same crazy-soldier role he played in Black Sunday, manages to keep his anguish from seeming canned: as he realizes that both his wife and the war have betrayed him, the character's manic energy evaporates. Dern perfectly captures the unnerving calm of a man who has lost the will to live...
...long as this anti-hero is kept rattling around, Manhattan, the novel remains a kind of manic satire. Jupe moderates a panel discussion during the convention of Writers Inc. (a "United Nations of literary bureaucrats"); his colleagues include a writer who is making a fortune from confessional books about himself and an author who has sold out splendidly to television. Everyone makes a proper fool of himself, especially Jupe. Elsewhere, Jupe proposes some revisions in the National Book Awards so that every entrant would win something: "There would be awards for The Best Biography of a Man Born on June...
...appear at the festival, and also two people named A. Lehm and D. Oliva, apparently highly-regarded as critics (Lehm helped choose and order the films), and they're comments are bound to instructive, because Czech films of the New Wave are complex, multi-layered movies. Combining the manic blackness of Altman with the visual scope of the great German directors--you either feel as if you could step into the great wide spaces on the screen and raise a family or immensely claustrophobic--this was the finest expression of cinema east of Paris since Eisenstien, and foreshadowed the cold...
Carl Reiner's best films bear little resemblance to Oh God!. Where's Poppa?, for example, was pervaded by a manic hysteria, and peopled by feverish buffoons whose monomaniacal intensities constantly collided, resulting in sprawling calamities that were often exhaustingly funny. George Segal's wild-eyed sexual/homicidal obsessions (frustrated at every turn by his incessantly doddering mother, Ruth Gordon) produced scenes of comic genius, and in a lesser film, like The Comic, such moments successfully diverted attention from Reiner's maudlin tendencies in his quieter scenes. But in Oh God! the maudlin preponderates; Reiner chooses, for reasons...
Frank Rich's review of Frederick Wiseman's PBS film Canal Zone [Oct. 10] does a great injustice to Canal Zone residents. Specifically, I refer to such statements as "Zonians, for all their manic patriotic ardor, are a rootless and unhappy lot; their crime rate and child-abuse rates are well above the mainland rates...