Word: witless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...along comes Steve Krantz, producer of Fritz and likewise of this sequel - as squalid and witless an assembly of animation as could be imagined. By comparison, the Bakshi version looks like Fantasia. To escape the shrill accusations of his wife, Fritz drifts off into cannabis reveries where his libido can run unchecked and where his paranoia eventually assumes control. He idles back to the high-stepping 1930s, then works his way up to the present and a visit with a Bowery bum, whom he accidentally immolates. In the film's most elaborate episode, he eases himself off into...
...overpowering urge to abandon a project of psychic research (concerned with reverse time) just when he felt that he was near a breakthrough. He had a panicky need to back away from the abyss before he was forced to confront its terrifying implications. He said: "I was scared witless that I was about to look into the face...
...probably won't. Over Here is so slick and cheerfully witless that it will doubtless endure on Broadway, not so much on its own merits as on the strength of its public's profound desire to nestle in the world it dreams up. No matter that it is mostly a travesty of the period, of the big-band sound, of the '40s fads and the jitterbug and, above all, the wartime patriotism that seems now so attractive and so unrecoverable...
...Tanenbaum, interreligious affairs director for the committee, conceded that the "Christ killer" image of the Jews "has lost its power" in the U.S. But, he said, it is still a danger to Jews in some countries where the film will be shown. Actually, the film is such a screaming, witless enterprise (TIME, July 30) that religion and stereotypes aside, it probably deserves Strober's appraisal as a "catastrophe." In other respects, the criticism seems exaggerated; it is doubtful that anyone not already a confirmed bigot would be swayed by the film. As for criticizing the Temple's high...
Alas, the context in which Russell sets these performances is obtuse to the point of caricature. Did Gaudier-Brzeska have a mistress? Then she must be a pneumatic and witless art groupie (Helen Mirren), daughter of a landed cavalry officer, who does her obligatory nude scene on the staircase of an immense, frigid Adam country house; she must also be a suffragette, which gives Russell much opportunity for lumpen-sexist travesty by having her do a song-and-hop number about votes for women in a nightclub and then, at Gaudier's demand, drop her knickers onstage. Around...