Word: witting
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...eighth or ninth version of anything (except Beethoven's symphonies) is likely to seem less fresh than the first, and for all its bustle Hercules hasn't quite the wit to make one forget Aladdin. But one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if it's Pegasus. Sixty years after Snow White, Hercules proves that Walt's art form is still sassy and snazzy...
...latest, but surely not the last, case in point is Speed 2: Cruise Control, unworthy successor to the last action movie that ran as much on wit as it did on special effects. That film was in touch, however goofily, with some of our everyday anxieties--a runaway bus on a screwed-up freeway is not entirely beyond our ken. At the very least we can imagine being caught in the resulting traffic...
...Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act. Their job is to keep the whammos coming. Our job is to sit there, absorb the blows and pretend to like their cold expertise. With De Bont's quick wit and tense minimalism on the first Speed still fresh in mind, that's hard work...
...heart of the play is the sparring between Wilde (Michael Emerson) and his courtroom antagonists. The flip, willfully perverse Wildean wit suffered the rude shock of having to defend itself under pitiless legal questioning. Asked if something he has written is true, Wilde replies, "I rarely think anything I write is true." He was a victim, of course, of Victorian prudery but also of the perennial clash between the aesthetic and the moral, the realm of art and the realm of life. Wilde realizes too late that it's an unfair fight. "One says things flippantly," he apologizes wanly...
Like Carnesale, he, too, watches his words and wit, but he does so with a softer, more personable touch, without the ox-like force of a man who can clear administrative hassles like so many acres of tangled prairie. How he will negotiate the vast and wild thicket remains to be seen...