Word: mellowing
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...prize for Best Musical. And it may well sweep the Olivier Awards next spring. Which is fine by me, since I'm as fond of saucy Broadway musicals as of silly-smart British TV comedy. If an impudent young satire like Monty Python and the Holy Grail should mellow into a fat and happy Spamalot, that's just the normal lifespan of transgressive pop culture: first to be dismissed as shocking, then to be accepted as trailblazing and finally to be cherished in dewy memory. The Idle show returns the Python troupe to their music-hall roots...
...mellow happy. Ray is a rabid cheerleader whose shtick is that moxie and a good attitude will get you as far as you want. Before she comes out from the gated elevator door of her talk-show set, the audience has been pumped up by clips of her set to the insanely upbeat song Life Is a Highway, the same tune Arnold Schwarzenegger has played before speeches. Ray--who often smiles so wide, you see not only her gums but also that weird part above the gums--says that when she's feeling stressed or sorry for herself, she just...
Like many young jazz singers nowadays, Dobson, 26, is trying for a mellow pop-jazz groove à la Norah Jones. Her plangent, almost vibrato-free voice rides over a mélange of island rhythms, bossa nova and folky acoustics, mostly in new songs she has co-written. They go down as easily as frozen margaritas, never more beguilingly than when she slips in scat syllables like "dit-doo, die-yah-da-doo" in Four Leaf Clover, or simply "ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh" in Cold to Colder...
...feral, conniving ex-wife (Jaime Pressly) and her sweetly spacey new husband (Eddie Steeples), he ineptly cuts a swath of penance through his small town. Earl is a cartoony fella--he perpetually looks as if he just lost a battle with the Road Runner--but Lee gives him a mellow decency. This story of a bad man going good badly is a redemptive riot...
...with his leg caught in barbed wire." It certainly was a prickly handful to kids raised on either the smooth Sinatra sound or the orgasmic church screaming of Little Richard. But to Dylan, barbed-wire vocals were an aesthetic and, as the French would say, a politique. Mellow was a lie; raspy was authentic. As he wrote in an early poem: "The only beauty's ugly, man / The cracklin', breakin', shakin' sounds're / The only beauty I understand." With extended exposure, his ugly became beauty. Intimate and accusatory, the voice twisted and tortured each word in a lyric, weirdly drawing...