IOentirelydifferentN,

I don't know if this has been linked before, but it's neat: NotStarring.com.

What are the wittiest movies of the past 25 years? Is wit dead?

The Coen Brothers do wit well (and sure, sometimes poorly). The aforementioned Miller's Crossing is abundant in wit. Whit Stillman's pictures are also well-soaked in wit. Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story was very witty, as well it should have been.

But wit mostly lives on TV now, in Arrested Development and both versions of The Office.

I haven't seen much of Arrested Development, but is The Office witty? The goal of The Office (and most contemporary humor, it seems) is to make one feel clever by making fun of how stupid other people are. Wit, on the other hand, is actually being clever.

Not that any form of humor is inherently better; I'm just tired of seeing the former and want to see more of the latter.

I'm not sure if I agree with that distinction. When I think of classic wits, I think of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, the Algonquin Round Table, etc.. All of whom were (cleverly) making fun of how stupid other people are.

I guess I sort of know what you mean, if you're talking about comedy where there's some actual wordplay or insight rather than "Ha, he fell down! What an idiot!" But someone's usually the butt of the joke.

I think The Office is predicated on great insight into humanity, which is why it's so difficult at its best. But yes, like Twain and the other classic wits Strega mentioned, someone gets to play the ass.

Withnail and I, witty.

I read an essay once to the effect that the difference between humor and wit is the difference between using the feather and the whole chicken.

Which I hadn't thought about before -- wit is exposure, shock, something absurdly revealing and attractive and offputting all at the same time. It's like, ha ha ha, you didn't think I'd actually go there, did you? Well now I have.

And here I thought that was the difference between kink and perversity.

I think of wit as being a particular kind of verbal play based on concision and the quick turnaround. Though, of course, wit can also be expressed visually - I think it still has a highly compressed, quick, allusive quality.

I want to see this movie! The Decay of Fiction

The Decay of Fiction, Pat O'Neill's magnum opus (opening for a one-week run next Wednesday at Anthology), takes the historical phantom zone first evoked by Wilder [in Sunset Boulevard] as its subject. Literally superimposing dream on documentary, it defines sunshine noir. Special-effects whiz O'Neill uses a combination of 35mm location shooting and a digital overlay to transform the once grand, long-shuttered Ambassador Hotel into a haunted mansion. The Ambassador has enjoyed a curious afterlife as a movie set (used in Pretty Woman, Forrest Gump, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to name a few). O'Neill allows the hotel to represent itself in a state of physical deterioration.

The past feels material. Everything is time-lapse. Empty rooms are animated by creeping shadows, fluttery curtains, and the memory of guests past. Silver ghosts gather around the derelict swimming pool. The old Coconut Grove nightclub, originally furnished with papier-mâché monkeys and the fake palms from a Rudolph Valentino vehicle, is a moldering wreck populated by gangster apparitions. O'Neill coaxes the suggestion of a story out of various movie moments, bits of soundtrack, and references to the Ambassador's legendary past (including Robert Kennedy's assassination in the hotel kitchen), but The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.