Word: oafishness
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...Bloody Streets of Paris," (ibooks; 192 pp.; $17.95), Jacques Tardi's comix adaptation of Leo Malet's 1942 French detective novel, "120, rue de la Gare." Instead of fedoras you get berets. Instead of bars you get cafes. But pretty much everything else that typifies the P.I. genre - sleazebags, oafish cops and beautiful girls - stays the same. With a fascinating French twist, the action takes place during the Nazi occupation. Where most detective fiction involves a city unofficially run by gangsters, here the villains are outwardly in control. As atmospheres go, it doesn't get much more corrupt and poisonous...
Wiggles stage shows and videos (there are now 10 in the U.S.) don't seem to abide by the rules of entertainment either. Their dancing seems corny, their costumes loud and their sidekicks (including Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog and Captain Feathersword the Friendly Pirate) oafish. The way Fatt, 48, keeps falling asleep is just annoying. But Field attributes the group's success to its embrace of toddler notions of entertainment. "The language is very simple," he says. "The songs are unapologetically repetitive. Kids love to shout, 'Wake up, Jeff!' It empowers them...
...much of the world still honors this middle-aged venture is evident, then. But among some Western nations that designed it, at least, the U.N. today often appears worse than dowdy. To them it looks oafish, overgrown, hypocritical, rife with ineptitude and possibly--as some overwrought Americans insist on seeing it--downright wicked. By this light, the creation of a half-century ago comports with reality now about as much as the cookie-cutter shapes of its East River edifices still evoke an idealized modernity. Budget-strapped, groping for a fresh start, the U.N. seems to slouch toward the millennium...
...Home Alone, are rites of self-reliance. Children face adult obstacles (or rather, superhero torture tests) and in surmounting them become adults (or rather, Hollywood's ideal of adults, as kids with weapons). Real parents are redundant in fables for latchkey kids; all authority figures are oafish, evil or, mostly, absent. The lost child finds his own way home...
...movie producer David O. Selznick had to do it. He was a drug addict (Benzedrine), a compulsive gambler (in 1946 alone he lost $581,621) and an equally compulsive womanizer (no star, secretary or script girl was safe from his lunging, oafish passes). He was often drunk, he never smoked less than three packs a day, and he usually worked deep into the night, wearing out ranks of stenographers as he manically dictated memos, stream-of- consciousness-style, in an attempt to maintain control over every detail of his films and of a business and personal life that yearly grew...