Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some may inquire whether the subject of wit is worthy of such effort. In my opinion, there is no doubt about it... --Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious...
...industry today has no conscience. Nor does the current cinema possess half the wit, elan and social acuity of Hollywood in the dirty '30s. Those films were more than the sum of their smirks. They were expressions of an industry scrambling for survival, like their amoral heroes for sale, and doing it in a style--raffish, dynamic, truly adult--that we've hardly seen since...
...lover of language. He fell in love (and in hate) with the poem or book under review, bringing it alive even as he anatomized it. These essays, selected by Brad Leithauser, open the reader to the Morgan Library of Jarrell's mind, ablaze with a sensible passion and aphoristic wit. "The people who live in a Golden Age," he wrote, "usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks." When Jarrell died in 1965, criticism suddenly looked a lot less yellow...
...pulpit, this time to eulogize his nephew behind the closed doors of the Church of St. Thomas More in New York City, we could not hear the quiver in his voice. And we didn't have to. It was there in the practiced cadences, the defiant wit, the stubborn Catholicism that insists on seeing all the way to the gates of heaven. "He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love," Kennedy said. And he promised that this family, at least, this old and bruised and sturdy...
Emerging valiantly from the debris are the two young stars. Dunst, 17, has grown up smartly before the camera; she has poise, wit and great dimples. Richards, 27 but plausibly teenish, uses her huge doll eyes (somehow calculating and dazed) and her brilliant teeth (all 50 or 60 of them, lined up like chorines ready to please the sugar daddies) to make Becky both the apotheosis and the parody of a precocious beauty-contestant pro. These are actresses worth watching, performances worth saving...