What are the wittiest movies of the past 25 years? Is wit dead?
Would Wilde count, what with much of the wit having originated in the 19th century?
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What are the wittiest movies of the past 25 years? Is wit dead?
Would Wilde count, what with much of the wit having originated in the 19th century?
when society was stressed, laughing at someone's misfortunes (Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, Three Stooges, Tom Cruise) was ascendant, and when society felt confident, humor that required the audience to be "in the know" was more popular (Johnny Carson, SNL, Eddie Izzard).
American society was very stressed during the '30s and '40s (at least, if the Depression and WWII aren't significant stressors, I don't know what are). Yet that era may have given us the peak of witty comedies.
Also, technology matters. Just looking at the movies, verbal wit only became possible when the talkies arrived.
Thirding what ita said.
I think wit is a subset of humor. Humor includes wit, but wit does not include all of humor.
But this, too. Maybe because of phrases like "keeping your wits about you," I usually associate wit with smart humor -- definitely a Gilmore Girls type of thing. Whereas broader humor includes things like Benny Hill and pretty much anything starring Tom Green. Not witty at all, but funny (in a completely subjective way).
So, Joe and I rewatched Fellowship and Two Towers over the weekend.
I still have an issue with the way OB gets on the horse behind Gimli. I has to be a CGI fuck up.
IIRC from some DVD extra or another, that scene is a victim of injury. They had tried the scene, but it didn't look right, so they were going to come back and do it, but then he broke his back and they didn't get to come back to it. So they had to CGI it instead.
BROKE HIS BACK?!?
He broke his back before the movie. It must have been another injury.
I thought that was the phrase they used, but now I feel this need to pull out the DVDs... sigh...
He's only broken his back once, and it was definitely before the movies filmed.
Aha. Found this:
The Warg scene that includes the infamous shot of Legolas leaping onto the horse, was filmed on the same day that Orlando fell off his horse and cracked his rib. He landed on a rock and Gimli's scale double (Brett) fell on top of him. So they couldn't film Orlando actually jumping onto his saddle, because of the injury. Later in post production, about six months before the release of TTT, Orlando had grown a beard, for the filming of Ned Kelly. He wasn't permitted to shave, which meant he couldn't do the pickups for this scene in TTT, so they created a CG Legolas to do the actual springing onto the horse.