Word: witness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mama's boy twist ending, the movie of ten slows to a crawl as it tries to explain it self. On the other hand, that ending is genuinely surprising and, like much of the rest of Psycho II, it has a certain sly wit about it. Indeed, there is a rather good-na tured air about this not overly scary pic ture, which pays homage to Hitchcock's most famous (but not best) work without trying either to rip it off or knock...
...Major, Opus 16 by San Francisco Choreographer John McFall, 36. Lynne Taylor-Corbett, whose Great Galloping Gottschalk was a hit last year, has a moody new piece, Estuary; once again the performances, by Van Hamel and Patrick Bissell, burnish a dull concept. Van Hamel, a dancer of wit and grace, has an even murkier assignment in Jiri Kylian's Torso, a grim, roughhouse pas de deux with Clark Tippet...
...scandalous/novelist/social historian/pornographer named Restif de la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault); an aging but still engaging Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni); the dry English essayist Thomas Paine (Harvey Keitel); a sumptious Comtesse Sophie de la Borde, lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette (Hanna Schygulla); and various peripheral caricatures of the aristocracy. The wit, the life-blood of an era contained in one carriage, offer the potential for a rich entertainment, but the result is an uneven and tedious sequence of quarrels and flirtations, the names and costumes of history failing to conceal the mediocrity of this entertainment. As Casanova admits at one stage...
...Missouri wit missed the salient point about Lord Randolph's son. There is little indication that Churchill distinguished between his deeds and his words. Both were manly forms of action and both could, and usually did, cause trouble. Perhaps his father's early and humiliating death from syphilis made him fear that time would run out before his own destiny could be fulfilled. "How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!" he told Violet Asquith. But if Churchill saw death as an obstacle to ambition, his follow-up remark to the Prime...
...melodies to the contrary, and what you take often exceeds what you make. Love, nevertheless, had never been advanced as a social curative with such blithe musical seriousness until the Beatles' stoned rhapsodies of good will. The songs, composed with manifest, even urgent sincerity, and lanced with fugitive wit, not only caught the fantasies of a generation but got them airborne. Now there is no telling for certain which ended first, the dreams or the band. In any case, more than love was needed to sustain them all. That was the hardest lesson learned...