Word: witlessness
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...remind us all of the difference in quality between the extraordinary, demanding films we hoped to see at Cannes and the over-buttered popcorn movies we have to review the rest of the year, Delta screened Mad Money, a drab, witless heist comedy starring Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes. Of the two traveling Corlisses, one hadn't seen the movie before. She watched the thing, sank slowly under its dead weight and then emerged with this cheerful thought: No matter how bad the films are at Cannes, they won't be worse than this...
...thing, but in recent years, just about every movie that attempts a sophisticated take on romance has turned out to be strained and witless. All the successful recent comedies (The 40 Year Old Virgin, The Wedding Crashers, Knocked Up, to name three) have tended toward the raunchy end of the spectrum. It's as if Hollywood's wise guys have recognized that middle-class American life is just too complicated, perhaps even too inherently miserable, to get an intelligent handle on. You can't quite treat it as a tragedy, but you can turn to its first cousin - farce...
...Squid/Whale anatomized the divorce of a Manhattan literary couple, with particular emphasis on its effect on the children. Baumbach's new movie, Margot at the Wedding, studies a putative wedding involving an even more dysfunctional (and witless) family. Margot (Nicole Kidman, muting her starry presence, but unable to find a plausible alternative) is the literary figure here, a writer of grim stories that I'm pretty certain I'd run miles to avoid reading. She appears, glumly sardonic, at the island home of her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to witness her marriage to a slacker named Malcolm (Jack Black...
...Heartbreak Kid. Now, on consecutive weekends in October 2007, come remakes of those movies. As it happens, the original Sleuth and Heartbreak were smart and funny and took a fairly brutal view of their main characters. The remakes, though honoring the basic plots of their predecessors, are dumb, witless and humiliating to all parties...
...pretty tough, and the pun on the general's name is pretty witless. You could argue that since the verb betray and the noun traitor have the same root, the ad is accusing the head of American forces in Iraq of treason. The ad can also be interpreted - more plausibly if you consider the rest of the text - merely as questioning the general's honesty, not his patriotism. But whatever your interpretation of the ad, all the gasping for air and waving of scented handkerchiefs among the war's most enthusiastic supporters is pretty comical...