Word: witness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Beyond its narrative difficulties, Vicki Polon's screenplay still leaves a lot to be desired. Polon is no wit, and her attempts to portray such overly familiar New Yorkers as SoHo art dealers, pushy cab drivers and Greenwich Village hipsters fall flat. Hot issues like lesbianism and abortion are dragged into the action for cheap effects rather than serious consideration. There is not a single memorable or startling line in the movie...
Based on Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone's dark and ambitious novel of four years ago, this is a well-made, soberly intended film. It contains some dialogue and situations that have more ironic wit than one expects to find in an essentially depressed, and depressing, context. The trouble is that the movie deals predictably with an ugly milieu (drug dealing) and with characters whom one cannot, in the end, even pity...
...mortals, aimed his barbed burlesque at the House of Lords and, through the character of the Lord Chancellor, at the legal profession (of which Gilbert himself was a member). Although his libretti were largely drawn from ideas in his earlier Bab Ballads, they show a greater infusion of dazzling wit and a range of metrical experimentation that was positively Aristophanic...
...English history called the Restoration is Restoration comedy. Playwrights such as Congreve, Vanbrugh and William Wyncherly fashioned a brand of theatrical social satire using the raw materials afforded by courtly foppery and greed and the devil-take-all decadence of the urban upper classes. Relying heavily on wit, bawdry, and ludicrously fashioned images, these plays were often quite vicious in their criticism of London society despite the fact that many of the playwrights were a part of the madhouse themselves...
...sculpture and painting, whereas before it had been the frame for a subject. In the '60s and '70s, the language of photography rather than the pattern of events tended to become the essential subject for many photographers. The retreat from public posture also combined with personal fantasy, reverie and wit. The result has been a rather low-pressure art that refuses to strum on the heartstrings. For convenience, Szarkowski divides the images in this show into "mirrors"?pictures that mean to describe the photographer's own sensibility?and "windows"?realist photos of fact, including the facts of photography...