Word: viciously
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...Bourg draw many smiles and even occasional laughter from the audience as the perplexed and frustrated theater owners, Firmin and Andre, respectively. Carlotta, played by Kelly Ellenwood, makes and excellent egotistical prima donna. However, in this particular production, she seems more pitiful and needy than she does vicious and greedy. Her companion, Piangi (Stefano Fucile), possesses both a self-esteem and a voice pompous enough to match hers. Hating the two of them is still enjoyable, but not exactly a pleasure...
...finest, most brutally consistent performance belongs to Robert Carlyle as the vicious, obnoxious Begbie, whose friends tolerate him out with grudging and fearful respect. You indeed feel real fear that you might be tapping the seat in front of you too much and Begbie's there, ready to reel off a stream of incoherent expletives and then sink a broken beer bottle into your neck. Tearing up a hotel room, living uninvited at Renton's, fighting dirty in brawls--he perfectly embodies the worst of every violent, drunken rage...
...ranks of the Jews for at least as long as the beginning of the current century, if not much earlier. The act of the assassin was shocking not because Jews never knew that such fierce differences existed within our own community, but that they could ever take on such vicious expression...
Ultimately, the movie only follows well-worn paths, trotting out a revelation-of-main-character's-big-secret scene, the shock-of-love-interest-at-betrayal/breathless-reconciliations scene, even a sappy speech about identity that Al Franken's Stuart Smalley could have written. After the vicious stand-up comic scene and another superbly funny nightmare sequence (again, alas, tainted with a gaseous joke or two), the movie simply gets tiresome. It's as if the movie's taking a collective funny potion now and then, having enormously concentrated effects, and then abating, painfully. Even Murphy's Buddy Love fizzles toward...
...Tony's revolves around a group of men, almost interchangeable characters, who exist only in relation to the bottle. They are white and fairly well-to-do, and for 17 days they are hunkered down in a bar in an unnamed city as the whole country is besieged by vicious race riots. Bullets fly around them, but the group's main worry is that the booze will run dry. O'Brien is at his most eloquent when describing this visceral fear: "For the first time in his life," he writes, "Rudd found himself wishing for death, hoping (praying?) that...