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Word: witlessness (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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Love it. Dick Tracy's look surely does merit rapture, but the movie also has wit and grace in a film era of witless gross-out. Scan the bold sweep of the narrative, which poses ripe dilemmas of career, love and family for a loner sleuth. Hum the songs written by Stephen Sondheim in his (hummable) Follies mode and splendidly performed by Madonna and Patinkin. Attend to the bold filigree work of the film's supporting cast of rogues, most of whom are devil- dolled up in grotesque prostheses and outlandish mannerisms but are given ample room to strut their...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Cinema: Extra! Tracy's Tops | 6/18/1990 | See Source »

...years, advocates of softer-sounding causes have been intoning the sacred syllables as piously as the Pentagon. It is firmly implanted in conventional wisdom that our economic competitiveness is a matter of national security. Fighting drug traffic is proclaimed a matter of national security. So is repairing our witless educational system, our unhealthy health system, our crumbling infrastructure...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Essay: An Idea Whose Time Is Fading | 5/28/1990 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Cinema: Murphy's One-Man Band | 11/27/1989 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Critics' Voices: Nov. 20, 1989 | 11/20/1989 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Video: At 15, Saturday Night Lives | 9/25/1989 | See Source »

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