Word: witting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...provide a happy, even triumphant solution to the dilemma, full of hats and horns and two birthday cakes. But, really, that's just dessert to a film that offers much chewy food for thought. The comforting dream of communion at the end can't erase the picture's careful wit about good people in desperate situations or, especially, the wan isolation shadowing a boy who knows his genius has made him alien. Says French filmmaker Louis Malle: "Jodie's film is basically about the profound loneliness of childhood, and she's dealt with it head-on. I would be very...
...federal bureaucrat, Hoover had thought of becoming a Presbyterian minister before he was hired by the Justice Department as a clerk in July 1917. He so blatantly cultivated an image of pious rectitude that one wit dubbed him "that Virgin Mary in pants." In reality, Hoover was permanently on the take: he decorated his home at government expense, funneled royalties from his ghostwritten books into a private slush fund, accepted free vacations in Florida and California from toadying millionaires. Hoover had no qualms about using gossip about clandestine homosexual encounters for blackmail. Meanwhile, he was seen so often...
...that redubs Tommy Tune's somber, doomy Grand Hotel as Grim Hotel. Or a patter song to the tune of Brush Up Your Shakespeare, in which I Hate Hamlet star Nicol Williamson celebrates the joys of humbling his co-stars. This sort of humor -- a cunning blend of insiderish wit and broad clowning -- has made Forbidden Broadway an institution. Since 1982 it has played off-Broadway, enjoying the goodwill and legal cooperation of the very creators it spoofs, and has spawned a national tour and satellite troupes from Los Angeles to London. In the new, eighth edition, everyone shines. Susanne...
...sense, Limbaugh is only the latest and most extreme in a line of right-wing savants, from William F. Buckley Jr. to William Safire to Patrick Buchanan to P.J. O'Rourke, whose Manichaean world view and scathing wit make them livelier pundits than anyone in the gray liberal establishment. But he is also, and mainly, an old-fashioned radio spellbinder in the seductive Midwestern tradition of Jean Shepherd, Ken Nordine and Garrison Keillor. "Rush utilizes the medium better than any talk-show host I have ever heard," says veteran comedy writer Ken Levine, who with his partner David Isaacs...
...parade. The ballads If I Were a Bell and I've Never Been in Love Before and the up- tempo Fugue for Tinhorns and A Bushel and a Peck distinguish any musical. But the savor of Guys and Dolls is in Loesser's capturing of the Damon Runyon Broadway wit, and by extension the unique pizazz of big-town America. No one had put a medical dictionary to music and turned it into a declaration of psychosomatic desperation, as in the nonpareil Adelaide's Lament. Nobody ever heard a love plaint like Nathan Detroit's: "All right already...