Word: witlessness
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Take Craig Wilson's Recent Tragic Events, another off-Broadway arrival, starring Heather Graham as a Minneapolis single woman who has a blind date on the night of Sept. 12. The play wavers between curdled sitcom (the evening is interrupted by a busybody neighbor), witless absurdism (a visit by Joyce Carol Oates--played by a sock puppet) and failed melodrama, as Graham waits for word from her twin sister, who may or may not have been in the towers. Then it all takes off into the stratosphere, with a discourse on free will and determinism, a stage manager's voice...
...Sandra Day O'Connor said diversity is "essential to the dream of one nation" and to the "legitimacy" of our leadership class. Anthony Kennedy said homosexuals are entitled to "dignity" and "respect for their private lives." If nothing else, these decisions demonstrate the distance between social reality and the witless intemperance of the current political debate--indeed, the gap between reality and politics is one of the reasons Americans find politicians so odious. Which may be why George W. Bush didn't have anything to say about either decision last week...
...Sandra Day O'Connor said diversity is "essential to the dream of one nation" and to the "legitimacy" of our leadership class. Anthony Kennedy said homosexuals are entitled to "dignity" and "respect for their private lives." If nothing else, these decisions demonstrate the distance between social reality and the witless intemperance of the current political debate-indeed, the gap between reality and politics is one of the reasons Americans find politicians so odious. Which may be why George W. Bush didn't have anything to say about either decision last week...
Anyone who sits through A Mighty Wind, writer/director Christopher Guest’s latest entry in the mockumentary subgenre, will be tempted to make comparisons to Guest’s earlier work, This Is Spinal Tap. The classic parody of perpetually witless hard rockers finds its complement in both music and volume with Wind, which focuses not on the disaster-prone tour of a brainless metal band, but a disaster-prone tribute concert in memory of a late, legendary folk music producer. The premise is just the sort of odd episode that Guest has mined so skillfully in the past...
...People want him to return to the form of what they fondly recall as his glory days--Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But those days are long gone, and we are pretty much left with Altman's signature mannerisms (improvisatory off-camera and overlapping dialogue), attitudes (a glum and witless misanthropy about his characters) and, above all, the lack of dynamics in his direction...