Word: goldsman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...part because it was a very bookish book: an elaborate web of church lore leading to the 2,000-year-old dish that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been married and their God-woman offspring walked the earth today. To be faithful to the book, Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman had to lard the movie with giant extracts of religious arcana. Cinematically, it was a slog. (Read TIME's review of The Da Vinci Code...
...Christmas, he has another one-man dystopia drama. It's I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence, the Viennese director of music videos who made his feature debut with a good science-fiction film, Constantine, and written by Akiva Goldsman, based on Mark Protosevich's script for a 1999 I Am Legend project that was to be directed by Ridley Scott and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. As in I, Robot, Smith has seen the future - and it sucks...
...anticipation for the opening-night film was so sizable, so tense and tangy, it was almost erotic. Think of it: a big new movie from an Oscar-winning quartet - star Tom Hanks, director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. Yet nearly as soon as The Da Vinci Code began, the critics fell into a peckish mood. At the end of a long, soggy film, the black-tie swells went off to their parties, and the critics slumped away to write their regretful pans. Though we didn't know it then, The Da Vinci Code experience would turn...
...however, intrinsically visual or dramatic. To make a real movie out of The Da Vinci Code, rather than an audio CD or a "special illustrated edition" (which have been done), requires a rethinking of the book. Or at least a thinking. Instead, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman pounded out a faithful synopsis and filmed it. The result is a work that is politically brave, for a mainstream movie, and artistically stodgy...
...Howard and Goldsman have efficiently touched all the bases. But they haven't found a way to replicate the book's page-turning urgency. The games Brown plays - anagrams, the Fibonacci sequence, the art-history gamesmanship, the delving into Gnostic gospel lore, all the clues and miscues in his devious treasure hunt - are best savored by readers with a long night or a long flight ahead of them. They're not intrinsically visual or movie-dramatic, however many car chases the Howard version cranks...