Word: wit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wit to keep the hard-edged observations in her performances distanced by satire. But a sharp viewer can find them. Even in Legally Blonde, which spins her screen character so genially, a slight chill invades the watcher--all that shrewdness, all that drive devoted to winning not particularly well-considered gains...
...that began 1.8 million years ago, bolstering the theory that modern Chinese are descended from these early men. DIED. WALLACE REYBURN, 87, war correspondent and author of 25 books, including Rehearsal for Invasion, the first-hand account of the ill-fated Dieppe raid of 1942; in London. A deadpan wit, he raised eyebrows with Flushed with Pride, the story of John Crapper, father of the modern toilet and Bust-Up, a spoof biography of the inventor of the modern bra, Otto Titzling. DIED. PAUL MAGLOIRE, 93, dictator of Haiti from 1950 to 1956; near Port-au-Prince. The former general...
...WORKS There is something realer than real in everyone's playing. You feel that their edgy suburban twaddling may be the way Hollywood heavies really behave in private. Some of the "actors' moments" linger too long, but a shadowy anger and misery underlie the sometimes choked-off wit of this free-form chamber piece shot on digital video. Everyone in the cast has his or her solo, and all rise brilliantly to their occasions, notably Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Beals, Mina Badie and a divinely neurotic Jane Adams...
...WORKS This criminal comedy remains deliciously deadpan about the wages of psychopathy. We don't doubt that Michel and his brood deserve a somewhat better life. We can't help admiring the high, dry wit with which their (fairy) tale is recounted. We briefly wonder if Michel, as well as Harry, should pay some sort of price for his good fortune. But, nah--that would interfere with the knife-edged perversity of the piece, the sense we derive from it of fate's inexplicable workings, presented neither doomily nor ironically, but as a supercool form of realism...
...culinary goddess Nigella Lawson, died of cancer in March after writing just six chapters of an "uncomplimentary view of complementary medicine." That unfinished text - cut off, spookily, almost in midthought - is rounded out by an anthology of Diamond's newspaper columns, which show off his first-class deadline wit. (A story about being forced by his Hassidic computer repairman to say the Shema is a classic of the columnists' form.) Even Diamond's accounts of life with cancer can be darkly funny as well as harrowing. But as with all such collections, those stories, written to be read...