Word: witting
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Still, the basic mystery is mysterious enough, the antique manners of this genre have an inherent campiness that's fun, and there is a briskness of pace and enough mild wit to hold one's attention. By the end one is rather surprised at how high the pile of corpses is, which means that sufficient style was present to serve its traditional function in the puzzle mystery - distract us from the gore that of necessity lies at the center of this form. Which is a way of saying that they must have been doing something right here...
...crisis in two hours. Yet as a musical revue without a narrative line or cohesive theme, Eubie! ranks as a mini-clone of Ain 't Misbehavin '. That is not too difficult to understand, since Fats Waller's musical imagination was richer than Blake's in wit, satire and sophistication. Eubie! is thoroughly entertaining and unerringly professional, but it bubbles more often than it blazes...
...thrillers, shoves his disgusting images into our faces in a manner reminiscent of Linda Blair shoving a crucifix into her crotch. Crunch, crunch. Blatty's novel needed: a) someone less pretentious than Blatty to write the screenplay, and b) a director with more of a sense of lyricism and wit, a modern James Whale, or a Hitchcock, or even a DePalma. Friedkin and Blatty successfully induce nausea, not terror--unless you're one of the impressionable innocents who gave this film its reputation, in which case, frankly, you have no taste. An excellent performance by Max Von Sydow, a pretty...
...Wit and whimsy for the head...
...undiminished by familiarity. Aware of the story's inherent drama, Berger eventually abandons farce in favor of a simple, unadorned narrative. "All men of that time lived and died by legend," he notes with uncharacteristic fervor, and his homage to those legends is a relief after the showy wit that dominates so many chapters. - James Atlas