Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TIME--makes him uniquely suited to oversee a wide variety of magazines as well as to advance Time Inc.'s growing interest in television. A man of many interests, Gaines is an accomplished classical pianist, the father of three (soon to be four) children, the author of one book (Wit's End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table) and the editor of another (The Lives of the Piano...
...royal couple celebrated the third anniversary of their separation last week, it must have been painfully clear to even the most common of commoners that Diana wasn't selected for the princess job on the basis of intelligence or loyalty or wit. The qualifications were simple: she had to be a presentable Protestant from the upper class and a virgin. The last criterion has to do less with morality than with the purity of the product. She was, to put it crudely, enlisted as a breeder, charged with the job of transmitting the Windsor genes from Charles to his eventual...
...easy as it looks. The problem for the writer is to balance a wit that doesn't dry the piece out against sentiments that don't turn it soggy. For the actors it lies in playing highly stylized dialogue while remaining in touch with recognizable human nature. For the director, energy is the issue: too much of it and everyone goes bucketing off in the direction of farce; too little of it and the audience starts admiring the scenery. Or, to put the whole tricky business simply, everyone has to stay grounded in reality while at the same time subtly...
...second act the plot unravels: Fairfax gets Elsie, and poor Point gets a mouthful of dust, despite his "pretty, pretty wit." Phoebe's father gets together with the Dame Carruthers (played very well by Katherine Bryant), and Shadbolt is left with nothing. As we would expect, loose ends are drawn and tied into a neat how and after over 2 1/2 hours, with few moments of truly good performance, we are grateful...
Cool is something these folks wear like a dinner jacket; their offhand wit is so studied that their bull sessions seem like a final they crammed for. But the writer-director is canny enough to salt the stew with poignance, so that by the end these attitude machines have become human beings--more than the sum of their chiseled jokes. Baumbach is a find, of sorts: he has both comic sense and camera sense. Imagine Quentin Tarantino without the guns...