Word: witlessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then, having frightened his last fare witless--he drives as wildly as he talks--Jerry pulls up in front of an apartment house, trains his binoculars on a window behind which a woman, obviously above his station and equally obviously a love object, is exercising, and we get really nervous. For we seem to be entering Travis Bickle country, an essentially inimitable place that one wants to visit only once in a lifetime...
Well, if the kind of judicial reasoning that applies to tobacco companies also applied to stop-sign cases, then the three witless young vandals would have faced a stiff fine and been forced to downsize the cowboy and put the camel out to pasture. But there would be no talk about prison terms; in fact, Congress would be considering legislation to bar any such vengefulness on the part of the courts. If the youths were fortunate enough to be a tobacco company, they might even find themselves rewarded for their crime with immunity from future class-action suits brought...
...show business, so energized that he seems ready to burst out of the TV set. He bounds into the audience each night to shake hands with the crowd and cackles enthusiastically through every interview. The program is packed with elaborately produced comedy bits, most of them obvious and witless. It's Lincoln's birthday? Jay is seen as Honest Abe doing a TV commercial for his law practice. Guest Ellen DeGeneres has a touch of the flu? The show hires an ambulance to drive her onto the set. What separates Leno from Letterman (and from Carson before...
...Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Here's a marvelously operatic novel, roiling with outrageous men and women and with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative...
Cinema: How can a Dorothy Parker biopic be witless...