Word: wits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dole's famously cranky wit cannot resist a jab or two. "I didn't think it would happen to me. I thought it happened only to Democrats," he quips. Less predictably, his wry remarks on this April day in 1993, 16 months after surgeons removed his prostate, eventually segue into a discussion of the side effects that keep people from seeking treatment. Despite improvements in surgical technique, the majority of patients suffer at least temporary impotence, and a few also become incontinent. "Unless we talk to each other fairly frankly, we don't learn much in these sessions," he tells...
Today how good does he look? A large retrospective jointly organized by London's Tate Gallery, Paris' Musee d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington (where it is on view through Aug. 20) offers the evidence. Whistler was an artist whose legend as wit, dandy and aesthetic kamikaze--for what was his libel suit against the critic John Ruskin but a suicide mission, compelled by his own claims to "Southern honor"?--continued after his death and became a barrier to appraisal of his work. One would prefer to think that Whistler the artist flies free of Whistler...
Nagano's skills were in ample evidence during the first-ever visit of the adventurous Lyons company to America, part of the 50th-anniversary celebration of the U.N. in San Francisco. Leading Prokofiev's slight, charming fable The Love for Three Oranges, he managed to find wit and poetry in an opera that is often little more than the famous March. Even more impressive was his way with a stripped-down, hopped-up Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev's great ballet. Designed by the Belgrade-born underground-comic-book illustrator Enki Bilal and choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, this Romeo takes place...
...typical adventure movie is a big, gaudy lie. It says life is a battle of one man, armed with only wit and grit, against a hostile universe. This romantic, existential notion does a disservice to the way most people live and work. We aren't solo flyers or secret agents. We are a squadron of team players dependent on our colleagues and increasingly on our machines to get us through our jobs. Often, because of those machines or those colleagues--or ourselves--we fail. And sometimes the bravest thing we can do is react quickly, boldly, gracefully to the failures...
...only thing Schumacher and his scrupulous craftsfolk forgot to give the movie was life -- the energizing spirit of wit and passion that makes scenes work and characters breathe. The script, by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler and Akiva Goldsman, settles for the stale pose of antiheroic dialogue and TV sitcom irony. Barbara Ling's sumptuous production design is mainly a reminder of better, quirkier films (Blade Runner, The Hudsucker Proxy). The special-effects aces have created a big destruct-o-fest, with explosions all over Gotham, yet the film is pizazz deficient. A series of set pieces with no forward...