Word: witness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hollywood, everyone heads for the Xerox machine. Used to be that moguls would tell their minions, "Gimme the same, only different." Now they skip the different. But this doesn't work for comedy, which is based on the shock of wit. A joke is a story with a surprise ending; it should explode like a novelty-store cigar. It fizzles when the gags are sequeled and recycled. Why pay $7 for a summer rerun...
These are not strong women who use their ingenuity, humanity and mother wit. They are Rambo in drag. They have a higher testosterone count than the national debt ceiling; they solve problems with artillery and adrenaline. And too many filmmakers, strapped by the conventions of the shoot-'em-up genre, think they are solving the problem of beefing up women's roles by turning them into beefcake. It's steroid screenwriting. Cameron wonders, Why can't a (modern) woman be more like a (mean) man? Then he makes her into...
...voracious reader whose interests range from Peanuts to the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican's annual equivalent of Who's Who, Ed is known for lugging 30 or more books to his vacation home on Cape Cod every summer. He is known as well for a dry, sharp wit that belies his normally self-effacing style (he once wryly observed that the return of a former, imposing managing editor would be "the Second Coming...
...break into applause for the best ones. Americans are more casual, even disdainful about ads, but when they gather at their back fences or around office water coolers, they discuss them as avidly as they do the shows that surround them. The five-day Cannes festival celebrates the wit and imagination that prompt that interest. As New Zealander John Doig of the McCaffrey and McCall agency put it, "We come here to remind ourselves that ads don't just sell. They also make the little hairs stand up on the back of the neck...
...first Terminator, a model of clean craft and violent wit, was a retelling of the New Testament's Annunciation story: the Archangel Gabriel (a rebel from the 21st century) visits the Virgin Mary (a Los Angeles waitress named Sarah Connor) to tell her she is to be the mother of a political messiah -- and that if she wants to give birth to this redeemer, she must stay out of the terminator's steely grasp. In T2, 10 years later, the T-man is back, but on the side of the angels. His mission is to protect Sarah (Linda Hamilton...