Word: nebbishness
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...relegated to the chorus? I've finally figured it out, now that I've seen John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, which is not an Apatow production (but observes all its rules) and in which Rudd finally gets a starring role. It's that Rudd is a handsome nebbish, a fellow programmed to be agreeable, soft, semi-cuddly, in a movie universe that not only doesn't value those qualities but sees them as failings. The actor has a furtive, slightly abashed niceness, the yearning of a square peg trying to fit into a cool hole. He knows what...
...Levi's geek charm and Chuck's tentative romance with his fed overseer, Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski). The new episodes quickly jump back in, with higher stakes and sharper jokes, and creator Josh Schwartz hasn't let the strike stop him from developing Chuck's character. He's gone from nebbish-out-of-water to nerdily assured operative, capable of seducing an enemy agent over cocktails with high-IQ trivia banter ("... and that is the true history behind the croissant...
...mounting horror as he realizes that they realize that he meant it all to be about them. Chunky Jason Alexander, with his spark-plug, salesman's personality, plays a characterization of Eugene's brother Stanley that has shifted radically since Brighton Beach. That Stanley was a sweet and decent nebbish, acutely aware of his limitations. For the new Stanley, Alexander's neurotic edge and propulsive energy are just right...
...person, Solondz is stooped and balding with large-framed glasses that magnify his eyes to a bulgingly, distracting level. His slight nervous stutter, nebbish Jewishness, self-mocking, and ingratiating demeanor combine to resemble Woody Allen, an impression mostly confirmed throughout the conversation. Solondz is, in reality, the scion of a middle-class family. He grew up in suburban New Jersey and went to Yale and NYU film school. The only dissonance to the impression of a younger Woody is when an interviewer probes his work and its relationship to his personality; then, he starts resembling an older Woody with...
...biography of a 19th century rabble rouser, or the snippet of Charles Burns' inky teenage horror comedy "Black Hole." Other superstars have brand new work. Robert Crumb, the underground pooh-bah, provides one of his patented war-of-the-sexes pieces, "The Unbearable Tediousness of Being," where a dull nebbish attempts to woo a distracted, hard-nippled Amazon-like woman. Further on appears the wordless examination of man's attempts at ordering nature, "ctrl," by Richard McGuire, an artist who virtually disappeared after creating "Here," a singular, diamond-like piece of brilliance almost fifteen years ago. The funniest piece belongs...