Word: tales
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...reached an early maturity with his second full-length play, The Caretaker, which the Lord Chamberlain, the British censor, called "a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett" - unintentional high praise indeed. It's the tale of an old homeless man, Jenkins (played onstage and in the excellent 1963 film version by Donald Pleasance), who is brought to the home of the simple-minded Aston (Robert Shaw) and his conniving brother Mick (Alan Bates). Jenkins begins as the ratty interloper but becomes sympathetic by default as the brothers play their mind games. The plot fits the contours...
...Those pleasant achievements, or happy accidents, kindled hope for Bedtime Stories, the season's only live-action comedy with a kid-approved PG rating. Well, as Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose. The star and his director have surrendered to their old bad habits, in a movie that will nonetheless provide - as Sandler's character does - a balky babysitter for children in search of a new-style fairy tale...
...plot, hatched by Matt Lopez and fleshed out by longtime Sandler scribe Tim Herlihy. Obliged to read the children to sleep with a bedtime story, Skeeter tosses aside his sister's PC books like The Organic Squirrel Gets a Bike Helmet ("Communist stuff," he opines) and invents a fairy tale of his own: a medieval frolic where he is Sir Fix-a-Lot and Kendall is Sir Butt-kiss. As Skeeter wanly improvs, the kids add impish twists of their own: that the sky will rain gumballs, a dwarf will ruin Sir Fix-a-Lot's heroic moment by kicking...
...million in oil-production taxes in just the last quarter of fiscal 2008, 36% more than the same quarter a year ago, and $777 million in gas-production taxes, up 55% over the same quarter a year ago. But the numbers are now beginning to tell a different tale. While natural-gas-production taxes are up 56% for the first quarter of fiscal 2009, oil-production taxes have slipped from the 72% increase seen in fiscal 2008 to a 36% increase in the first quarter, according to the Texas state comptroller. (The state levies a 7.5% severance tax on every...
Shrek, to be sure, has its moments. The ragtag collection of fairy-tale characters, from Pinocchio to the Three Bears, who are evicted from the kingdom by the pint-size despot Lord Farquaad, do a bouncy lament for their sorry plight, "Story of My Life," that is a high point, even if the screechy characters wear a little thin as the evening goes on. Composer Jeanine Tesori (with lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire) has supplied a few other cute numbers, most of them straightforward Broadway pop but with an occasional blues-rock beat, as in the funny, flatulence-enlivened love duet...