Word: witnesses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...essay six years earlier, he had already attacked by name the most famous American funnyman of all, Mark Twain. His humor, Arnold sniffed, was "so attractive to the Philistine." It would be truer to say it was attractive to anyone who valued plain speaking and the kind of deadly wit that could cut through the cant and hypocrisy surrounding any topic, no matter how sensitive: war, sex, religion, even race. Twain was righteous without being pious, angry for all the right reasons and funny in all the right ways. You might say he gave virtue a good name...
...Here he's working with a heftier ($65 million) budget and shooting mostly in the Czech Republic under Hollywood supervision, but the movie is pure Bekmambetov, as odd and beguiling as his home-grown stuff. He still has the ability to bring wit to the most sadistic scenes, in a way that leavens the violence, lets aggression approach artistry. You see it in a brief scene where Wesley finally takes revenge on his cheating friend and whacks him with a computer keyboard. The letters come loose and, tumbling slowly in air, form the letters F-*-*-* Y-O-U - except that...
...acknowledge that the movie's stabs at wit are not so much sophomoric as freshmanic. In his Indo-American accent, Pitka asks Darren, "What is it you cahn't face?" (cahn't rhyming with hunt - your kids will explain the joke to you). And even at 80 minutes or so, The Love Guru is overly long and repetitious, unable to sustain its comic conceit...
...animation that stretches back to Gertie the Dinosaur, Krazy Kat and Mickey Mouse, through the classic Warner Bros. cartoons and up to Disney's The Lion King, Pixar's A Bug's Lifeand of course Happy Feet: stick to animals. When stylized artfully, they have so much more wit and personality than mere human beings. Not having to attempt a duplication of reality liberates a good animator's imagination. In KFP you'll see this in the spectacular fight scenes, but also in the character sketching, in the subtlety of glances and gestures...
...anonymous wit scratched those lines on the side of a junked car door and lugged it to a trail near my home in Northern California. The middle of a pristine, ancient redwood grove is the wrong place to find a rusted-out car door, but the words magically transformed the thing from an aggravating piece of junk into art. I Googled the quote as soon as I got home, of course, but found nothing. (Thanks to Google, we live in a world where "I don't know" has become an unacceptable response. So my inability to identify the author there...