Word: witlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...funny, but in antithetical, unblendable ways. The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old- fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets...
...stores this week. Finally, the handful of people who still haven't seen Batman will be able to explain its appeal to the even tinier (but discerning) group who find the film slow, murky, uninvolving and -- except for its visual grandeur, which may be lost on the small screen -- witless...
...fair -- they were ready for prime time); then Michaels returned with an all new cast that ranged from teen flashes-in-the-pan like Anthony Michael Hall to Hollywood veteran Randy Quaid. But the ensemble - feeling had disappeared, and the writing had grown desperate and juvenile: in one witless sketch, Bobby and Jack Kennedy plot to murder Marilyn Monroe. There was talk of cancellation...
...strike many sparks. Like the Los Angeles festivals, the New York lineup gives too much attention to a genre variously classed as dance, except that the dancers are not trusted enough to be given anything interesting to do; or theater, except that the texts are typically minimal and witless; or performance art, except that the real emphasis is on props and tricks rather than performers. A case in point: the pretentious numbers staged by Bill Forsythe, an American, for his Frankfurt Ballet...
Sometimes it seems that the right books never get burnt. But the world has its quota of idiotic and vicious people just as it has its supplies of books that are vicious, trashy and witless. Books can eventually be as mortal as people -- the acids in the paper eat them, the bindings decay and at last they crumble in one's hands. But their ambition anyway is to outlast the flesh. Books have a kind of enshrining counterlife. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of words and books...