Word: put-upon
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Baby Mama Directed by Michael McCullers; rated PG 13; out Sept. 9 Tina Fey's put-upon charm bounces so winningly off Amy Poehler's antic humor that this tale of a career woman and the surrogate she engages becomes less chick flick and more buddy movie with babies. Plus, the alternate ending is way cuter than the original...
DIED Over a peripatetic 40-year career, he appeared in more than 100 TV shows, with small parts in hits such as Beverly Hills, 90210; L.A. Law; and hbo's Six Feet Under. But Stanley Kamel will probably be remembered best for his regular role as devoted but put-upon psychiatrist to Tony Shalhoub's obsessive-compulsive detective in Monk, in its seventh season this summer. "I have what every actor dreams of: a hook," he told TV Guide last year. "I'm the psychiatrist on Monk. Everyone knows who that is." He suffered a heart attack...
...and/or Chong with a bar mitzvah. He hasn't the Woody whine and inferiority complex. Like the Martin stage persona, the characters these guys play don't have self-esteem problems; indeed, that is their problem. The only star who simmers with comic angst is Stiller. He's the put-upon loser, a jocular Job, in films like There's Something About Mary and Night at the Museum, when he's not taking roles as the pompous, uptight bad guy (in, say, Dodgeball) or the preening oaf, as in the well-nigh-immortal Zoolander. The moneymen love Stiller too, because...
...tears started during the '90s teen drama Party of Five, on which Fox played the flop-haired, put-upon head of an orphaned family. Unhappy with playing a character that was more a prepubescent girl's fantasy of a man than a real one, Fox overhauled himself. "I decided I'd drop out for two years and do theater in Los Angeles and fall on my face. And then I would come back and change my looks," he says about having shaved his head. I believe that his career hiatus was actually planned not only because of his extraordinary earnestness...
...intentions, not in V., not in his short masterpiece The Crying of Lot 49 and certainly not in his mammoth new book, Against the Day (Penguin Press; 1,085 pages). Of course this makes me not just a Pynchon reader but practically a Pynchon character, another of his comically put-upon quest figures who journey into mysteries that engulf them. Even that is part of Pynchon's grand scheme, which is to make the experience of reading his work a demonstration of his most forceful intuition, or one of them: that history is a monstrously deceptive puzzle and the world...