Word: witting
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Offutt blends wit, compassion and insight to make this memoir a much more palatable brew than the crude Kentucky Straight. At its heart, The Same River Twice is touchingly human. Offutt's honest, self- effacing style seduces the reader with its openness. Twenty-five centuries ago, Heraclitus asserted that you cannot step into the same river twice. Offutt, too immerses himself in the old conundrum of change and decay. His story springs from time-honored tradition and flows it course with a river's enchanting elegance...
...demonstrate his superb musicianship and rare virtuosity: Chopin: 4 Ballades -- 4 Scherzi and Earl Wild Plays His Transcriptions of Gershwin (Chesky Records). Chopin's works vary widely in mood and tempo, yet Wild sustains the long singing lines that provide their pulse and shape. That singing -- with wit, warmth and Lisztian heroics -- defines Wild's Gershwin, especially his extended Fantasy on Porgy and Bess...
...Huck (plucky Elijah Wood) eludes his troglodyte father (Ron Perlman, doing an uncanny Tom Waits impression) for an eventful honeymoon on a raft with Nigger Jim (just plain Jim here, in a nicely balanced performance by Courtney B. Vance). Huck's runaway mouth gets them in trouble, and his wit gets them...
Thompson has that luck; she can bear the camera's scrutiny. Her face is common sense emitting star quality, wit raised to beauty. Her bright eyes and ironic smile suggest an intelligence of the cultivated heart -- what used to be called breeding. No wonder six of Thompson's eight feature films are period pieces, closer in spirit to the West End stage than to the West Coast sound stage. She is comfortable as Katherine in Branagh's Henry V or as Beatrice in his new film Much Ado About Nothing, as a 1930s English domestic in Remains...
...subject matter may sound trite, but the play itself astounds with constant wit and poignancy. The intensity of the action, with just four characters thrown together in a cramped Manhattan apartment, accentuates the emotional desert which these characters inhabit. The hysterically funny but caustic dialogue undercuts any romanticism in the relationships portrayed. Burn This propounds a pessimistic vision of human nature...