Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pieces gathers fugitive articles written over the course of some ten years: fragments on subjects as diverse as Viet Nam, sex, television, Henry Miller and subway graffiti. Occasionally the old pro jabs with acute social observations and feints with malicious wit. He divides his examination of television into channels instead of chapters; he provides a graceful reappraisal of Novelist-Translator Jean Malaquais, who disliked The Naked and the Dead, but of whom Mailer acknowledges: "I had learned as much about writing from [him] as from anyone alive...
Henry IV, Part 1, has one huge epicenter, that Santa Claus of roguery, Sir John Falstaff. The old knight is as nimble of wit as his belly is full of sack, a braggart, a liar, a thief, a cynic and a coward, but with all that an irresistibly endearing tub of bubbling jollity. Early on, Falstaff (Joss Ackland) chides the heir apparent Prince Hal (Gerard Murphy), who has made the Boar's Head Tavern his home away from the castle, for leading him into evil ways...
...sort out. What with the First Secretary on the radio trying to talk him down, and the second Firefox prototype trying to shoot him down, Mitchell Gant has his hands full. He is engaged in a dogfight covering thousands of square miles, and it is a thing of wit and beauty and, above all, lightning reflexes. These planes move with the blasting power of a Star Wars spaceship, and it is fun to see the future zinging and skittering through our own airspace. Eastwood's laconic professionalism plays off amusingly against the high-tech complexity of his flying machine...
...everyone but himself, and Paula Fox, whose News from the World describes a woman and her contaminated seaside village withering for lack of love. Between these terminals, Chekhov, Kafka, Mishima, Hemingway, Borges and a score of other master miniaturists show that brevity can be not merely the soul of wit, but the whole of it, and that almost all writing can benefit with pruning, from the short story to the rave review...
...film's most pleasant surprise is Mr. T who once served as a bodyguard to Muhammed Ali. As Lang, he presents a determined and fearsome opponent. And Mr. T displays confidence and wit. Asked by a reporter whether he hates Rocky, he responds, "No, I don't hate Balboa." He pauses, turns towards the camera and drawls. "But I pity the fool...