Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...offer consolation or encouragement. But ideas are also merely represented by words, and when the teacher, who is the purveyor and curator of words, strides into the classroom and spills the words on his desk, he has no control over them, no way to enforce intelligence, charity, love, wit, or any of the elements of which the books he values are made...
Bacon, a notably venturesome and versatile young actor, wavers in and out of a Scottish brogue but ably blends charm, petulance, wit and selfishness as a would-be artist who counts on his talent to lift him up. Penn persuasively portrays a clever lad who is so defeated that he cannot imagine a light, or even an end to the tunnel. The two young men's high-kicking, cruel humor works better in the play's free-form first act than in the second, which is overladen with plot. But at every moment they capture the futile bravado...
...manage to be topical without sounding like every other pundit; he can venture into quirky subjects without seeming irrelevant. He knows how to provoke readers enough that they keep reading, but not so much that they angrily turn the page. He is a master of both puckish wit and ear-splitting indignation, yet on matters of moral consequence he can write with majestically measured restraint. He boasts of having taken the scalps of Cabinet members, congressional leaders and diplomats, yet he is quicker to offer a correction, or to let a target answer back, than almost any other eminent columnist...
...nuance and gesture, qualities Sayles meshed perfectly (on a $60,000 budget) in his first independent feature, Return of the Secaucus 7. In the more lavishly budgeted Lianna, everyone at first seems to be trying too hard not to try too hard. But as its heroine discovers resources of wit and self-confidence, the film does too. By the end it has turned a "problem drama" into a social comedy, full of cagey behavioral surprises and a lovely performance by Griffiths. Of all the new non-Hollywood films (this one was shot in Hoboken, N.J.), Lianna is the one most...
...camp fashion consultant, Corporal Klinger. To Father Mulcahey, the perfect priest in the Korean War. To Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, and to the memory of Frank "No Lips" Burns, who together perfected the art of irritation. And finally to Benjamin Franklin Pierce--Hawkeye--whose limitless storehouse of wit kept American punsters in full supply...