Word: witting
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...presents himself as a hard-core rapper, but essentially he makes music designed to entertain suburban children. His rage-filled persona is too over-the-top to take seriously (he starts this album growling and barking) and his lyrics, ("Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Nigga!") lack wit. On Party Up, he tries to craft a clubland anthem and fails. It's not much fun partying with a guy who's probably just gonna start a fight and ruin everything. Still, one song, What's My Name?, does have a welcome sense of urgency...
...delightful rediscovery. We're in a retirement home for stage actresses, where teacups rattle with the arrival of Lotta Bainbridge (Lauren Bacall), who's had a 30-year feud with resident diva May Davenport (Rosemary Harris). People chatter and reminisce, quarrel and reconcile, and die. Coward's wit has a melancholy glow here, and he has crafted one of the most sensitive, least patronizing portraits of old age ever...
...brittle, epigrammatic plays--particularly Private Lives and Blithe Spirit--or for that foolproof cinematic stirrer of the female breast, Brief Encounter. But where his plays and films bear the whiff of a long-gone age, Coward's songs retain their vitality: the frisky list songs that display his wit (Mad Dogs and Englishmen; Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington) and the achingly tender ballads that reveal his unmatched capacity for genuine sentiment (If Love Were All, Someday I'll Find...
DIED. JOEY ADAMS, 88, borscht-belt wit whose syndicated daily joke column proved comedy is easy ("Myron's wife underwent plastic surgery. He cut up her credit cards"); in New York City...
...since he is played by the marvelous Chow Yun-Fat, who interprets the role as if the cranky volatility of Yul Brynner and Rex Harrison never existed. He has all his hair, doesn't comically fracture his English and, though he occasionally loses his temper, never loses his quiet wit. There is about him a sort of watchful wariness, a thoughtful, insinuating manliness that avoids macho strutting in favor of bemused calculation. He is, in short, an absolute monarch for our postfeminist time. Cutting through the epic gesturings of Andy Tennant's direction, he provides reason enough to return...