Word: witting
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...writing a "cottage-industry" employment, and the result is what you would expect from a tireless home craftsman. Winter Brothers is well-conceived and well-crafted. Every piece is carefully set in its proper position, the seams lovingly shaved smooth, every link subtly interconnected to the larger piece. The wit is quiet, the words understated and nuanced, homely yet precise and evocative. Intrigued, you may soon want to stay up late with the retiring, lumberjack-shirted fellow thumbing through browned pages in his patient, archivist's enthusiasm, joining him and Swan as another "winter brother...
...premise is simple: contrive, however flimsily, to get Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor into standard comic peril-a barroom fight, a mistaken-identity bank heist, a kangaroo court, a venal prison system, a convicts' rodeo, a speeding car-then watch them wriggle out with their resourceful wit and eloquent body language. Wilder moves with the psychotic serenity of someone who believes everything will turn out O.K.; Pryor trembles with the neurotic certainty that everything has already gone wrong. Wilder's is the fantasy of the liberal do-gooder; Pryor's is the reality of the mean-streets...
...tradition-repeating every February its original cover of a dandy, Eustace Tilley, eyeing a butterfly through a monocle-The New Yorker has changed a lot. There have been two New Yorkers. The original reflected its founding genius, Harold Ross. ("Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire," the prospectus said. "It will hate bunk," and would not be "edited for the old lady in Dubuque.") Its clever, brittle style survived the Depression but seemed frivolously out of sync when World War II began. So, war coverage was introduced, culminating in an unsparing report on Hiroshima by John...
That was only the beginning. When Ross died and was succeeded by Shawn in 1952, other lengthy reports, some of them prescient, began to appear: Rachel Carson documenting environmental destruction, James Baldwin warning whites of The Fire Next Time. No longer resounding with gaiety and wit, The New Yorker had become a serious magazine with cartoons. For a time, in its outrage over Viet Nam and Nixon, The New Yorker abandoned ironical urbanity and bared its anger. Older readers protested not only the opinions but the shrillness, and for the first time the magazine's circulation fell...
...RAGING BULL is, as the advertisements would indicate, Robert DeNiro's movie. DeNiro combines all the wit and spontaneity and genuineness of a Method actor like Brando with all the craft and attention to detail of an Olivier. You become oblivious to the devices he's using: the way he takes the windmill motion of bodypunching, for example, and turns it into LaMotta's leitmotif. Things that DeNiro did to prepare for the movie--learning boxing well enough to become a good club fighter, for example, or gaining 60 pounds or whatever to play LaMotta in later life--have almost...