Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...highlight is a supporting performance by Walter Matthau as a writer on Rhodes’ national show who also falls in love with Jefferies; he cynically comments on the action without having the confidence to interfere. Besides biting wit, Matthau conveys the frustration of Cold War intellectuals unable to find a way out of the national chaos percolating around them during the anti-Communist 1950s...
...possibility that our personal well-being might rest upon very thin ice is a favorite topic of McEwan's. Rarely has he explored it with such serene wit or nasty intensity as in this magnificently unsettling novel, the follow up to his 2002 masterpiece Atonement. His central character, Henry Perowne, is a happy man, a successful London neurosurgeon with a loving family and a very comfortable town house. He also shares the generalized anxieties of people everywhere after 9/11. Then one Saturday he crosses paths with an excitable stranger, a man who will turn up soon again in Perowne...
This is the fourth movie in the past month that is set in New York City and involves some sort of criminal activity, and all are smart and entertaining: 16 Blocks, also starring Willis, as an alcoholic cop trying to get a witness to safety; Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty, in which Vin Diesel's mobster acts as his own defense lawyer; and Spike Lee's skillfully orchestrated story of a bank heist, Inside Man. None of them require the audience to embrace heavy-duty fantasy or comic-romantic fatuity. They have grit, wit and style, plus a semblance...
...expressive orator, Lewis has recently carved out a speaking circuit that has included the British Columbia Nurses' Union, the United Nations and Columbia University. With stories infused alternately with wit and heartbreak, he elicits both guffaws and gasps from his audiences. Relating one tale from his book, he described how he asked members of a community project growing cabbages how they spent their profits. "Why on coffins," they answered, almost surprised at the question. "We never have enough money for coffins...
...made The Draughtsman's Contract and 8 1/2 Women, he made meticulously malevolent short films (seven are collected here) and The Falls, a three-hour fake-umentary about 92 people whose lives were altered by a Violent Unknown Event. The textual and textural density is intoxicating, the English wit so dry you could choke on it. A sturdy challenge for movie lovers--and unmissable...