Word: didion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Married to Joan Didion, author of The White Album and A Book of Common Prayer among others. Dunne has easy access to critical input. Although the two have dramatically different styles, Dunne and Didion work together, reading and advising each other's works-in-progress. The couple is currently collaborating on the screenplay for Vegas, having done four motion pictures together previously, including the film version of her novel Play It As It Lays. Their most recent joint effort, True Confessions, based on his book of the same name, starred Robert Duvall and Robert DeNiro as brothers, one a priest...
This is an accurate and a scary definition of Southern California or at least one regularly suggsted by the other writers of that place--Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald. It thus qualifies as classically American, written with the speculative range, freedom of imagination, and fierce, clear eye that have invigorated this country's proudest works. the verse is clean, quiet, and lapidary; all the excitement is in watching McMichael take up one "unpoetic" subject after another and illuminate it; he turns all the world on the emotions of a child who is trying to find out what...
EVEN BIGGER PROBLEMS, however, are raised by the screen-play, a collaboration of the husband-and-wife team of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Working from Dunne's novel, the screenwriters apparently felt obliged not to graft any artificial eloquence onto characters who would not normally speak that way. Which is fine. The problems arise when Dunne and Didion substitute a peculiar, grunting short-hand that limits the characters and leaves the curious unenlightened. The poor dialogue, combined with the writers' need to explain a complicated and ever-changing plot, result in a dusultory and lifeless narrative...
TRUE CONFESSIONS Directed by Ulu Grosbard Screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne...
...does the movie version, with Robert Duvall as Tom and Robert De Niro as Des, proceed at the sluggish pace of a Sodality novena? Perhaps because Dunne's collaborator on the screenplay was his wife, the Empress of Angst, Novelist Joan Didion. Onscreen, characters who should percolate with rage simply simmer. Two exciting, dangerous actors have little to do: Duvall spends too much time pacing and waiting; De Niro's big scene has him hanging up his vestments...