Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...silhouette, Austin appears to gratify himself in nearly impossible ways. Fat Bastard, the studiously repellent Myers character whose very image is an affront to this hallowed page, expels something into his shorts, then muses on whether it's solid, liquid or gas. The film's title says its wit is in its groin. Laugh or groan at Goldmember - and Myers wants you to do both - it is not for kids...
...free stage and film performance from the kingdom of nice. But Steiger was no mumbler; he spat his lines with acid precision. He often played tyrants--Napoleon, Al Capone, Mussolini (twice)--but his presence was grander: he suggested the Old Testament God, annoyed at the world's slow wit. Even as The Pawnbroker's death-camp survivor, he went for earned rage, not martyrdom. Steiger won a Best Actor Oscar for In the Heat of the Night, which showed a warming trend. But his legacy is one of fire within ice. In any scene he entered, he lowered the temperature...
...Larry claimed to be descended from the German-Jewish poet Harry Heine, the student of Hegel who converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Christian (!) Johann Heinrich Heine. His most famous poem, "Lorelay," set to music by Friedrich Silcher, has some of the melancholia (if not the elfin wit) that marked many Hart lyrics: "I do not know what haunts me,/ What saddened my mind all day;/ An age-old tale confounds me,/ A spell I cannot allay." And a quatrain Heine wrote for his wife Therese - "You're lovely as a flower,/ So pure and fair...
...Written 60 to 80 years ago, mostly for forgotten shows and movies, these bouncy, brittle, worldly and world-weary tunes - "Manhattan," "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," "Where or When," "The Lady Is a Tramp, "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," dozens more - sound both today and timeless. They sing (with confident wit) and speak (with confidential despair) about tough hearts ready to break, melt or explode. Rodgers' melodies get you humming, then dreaming, but the subject and style of these songs, their matter and meter, come straight from Hart's heart...
...Hayao Miyazaki, who in My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service plopped adorable kids into magical situations. (In tribute, the film has Nani open a business called Kiki's Coffee House.) But after a lag in the early sister scenes, Lilo reveals its own very American verve and wit, along with a smart story sense that marks the best animated features, traditional or computerized. When Stitch makes his appearance in a Vegas-Elvis silver sequined outfit, the 'plexes should erupt in delighted laughter...