Word: witting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from Carousel. He would be, she thought, just the guy to offer sex, schmoozing and comic relief, between babies. Oh, yes, and they were famous, at least in the emerald ghettos of Manhattan and Georgetown. For Heartburn was a smart, tattling novel pretty much about its author, the saucy wit Nora Ephron, and her second husband, Watergate Wonder Boy Carl Bernstein...
...wit of that picture lay in its relocation of that classic device of the horror genre, the haunted house. Instead of being a Gothic pile isolated on a bleak moor, it was a spaceship visiting an unwelcoming planet in an obscure corner of the universe. But the situation was the immemorial one: a monster, in this case an alien life-form requiring human hosts for gestation, is stalking the spaceship's endless, ill-lighted corridors, picking off victims one by one. But there was only one creature, six frightened earthlings and little more subtext (or, for that matter, dialogue...
...never self-sentimentalizing. She is discovered as a silent little creature, scuttling through air ducts too small for the aliens to penetrate, living an almost rodent-like existence. Her plight would be enough to touch anyone's heart, but in this context, only Ripley has the time and the wit to appreciate...
Shakespeare would have had a fine time with Sigourney Weaver: creating Viola and Beatrice with her in mind, collaborating with her on the odd comic masterpiece, vagabonding through London in some very comely company. Shaw would have been smitten by her combination of regal beauty and irreverent wit, of life force and light farce. The old Hollywood masters of penthouse comedy would have embraced this screwball Garbo, alive and kicking up her heels...
...group of Marines includes Vasquez, the Hispanic tough macho lesbian, who ends up sacrificing herself for the rest of the crew; Hodgson, a dumb, smartass soldier whose terrified vulnerability in the face of the aliens makes him human after all; and a mean drill sargeant with a dry wit who has one of the film's greatest lines. Cameron manages to work in just enough comic relief to keep the audience from breaking down under the strain of intense fear...