Word: witlessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...acceptance speech, Yorkin traced the history of television from the "golden age of live T.V." in the '50s to the "witless programming that now dominates the networks...
...first murder is one of the most revolting yet put on film. It put me off my popcorn, and I'm not easily nauseated. Alien operates thereafter on our anticipation of similar blood and guts; the tension is totally mechanical and rather unfair. The movie proves witless, plotless, pointless, spectacularly unoriginal, and surprisingly cruel...
...gimmicks, monochromatic sets and portentous, dissonant music. He reduces an all-star international cast-Newman, Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Brigitte Fossey, David Langton, Vittorio Gassman-to interchangeable (and often indistinguishable) ciphers. He blurs the perimeters of his images with Vaseline. Though two writers assisted Altman on the screenplay, the witless lines amount to paint-by-number existentialism: "Every time you cheat death, you feel the pure thrill of life...
DERN BEGINS merrily but uninterestingly, engaging in Yellen's witless but stubbornly persistent banter. He gets to be boyish and lewd and folksy, to plead and be charmingly self-deprecating, to do lots of nightclub imitations (accents were Lewis's specialty), to get drunk and be irrepressibly untactful, exposing the hypocrisy of others, to despair and age and writhe in agony. Dern does well, especially considering he's been off stage for 19 years, but the quality that makes him special, that sometimes seems too intense for the big screen, is imperceptible on stage. You'd think that his body...
...trains of thought, all at once. The fact they were in such trouble eventually only made me focus more on my own. They seemed equally removed when I heard for a fact they were dead, which is odd, since I have as clear a picture of them standing there, witless, as I do of anything else I've ever seen. I even tried in detached curiosity to imagine how they were found--frozen, in one sleeping bag--and even those thoughts didn't affect me the way I would have expected them...