Word: goodness
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...though Eugenides is an extremely meticulous writer, he recalled how good fortune prodded him into writing “Middlesex”—a novel brimming with themes of fate and destiny. “I was at the artistic colony Yaddo, trying to write the opening with the burning of Smyrna in 1922 without having done my research. But it just sounded so false. I was desperate; I thought I had to give [“Middlesex”] up, so I wandered downstairs where there was a stack of books left for anyone?...
...couldn’t possibly have been predicted by viewers at any point in the storyline. Imagine if “Twelve Angry Men” had ended with the one obstinate juror pulling out an M-16 and mowing down his uncooperative colleagues. “The Good Guy” is kind of like that, except it’s not just the ending...
...Night Lights”) plays the dashing Tommy Fielding, who looks to the audience like a high school senior doing his internship at a Wall Street firm, but whom the film helpfully tells us is actually a stock broker there. Painted from the start as “the good guy” in a depraved world full of cut-throats and egotists, Fielding is dating the lovely Beth Vest (Alexis Bledel of “Gilmore Girls” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”). Bryan Greenberg (“One Tree Hill?...
Almost as frustrating as this cardboard characterization is the fact that scattered throughout this rather awful movie are the makings of a very good one. Director DiPietro is just in the wrong genre. Whenever the film strays into the territory of romantic comedy, it actually works. The lines are funny, the soundtrack is snappy, and the atmosphere is ideal. The actors are winning, if cookie-cutter, and know how to tell a joke. DiPietro is also a very artful showman, able to convey his characters’ emotions through unlikely angles and lush camera work. When his characters...
...Good Guy” is, in a word, contrived. The people in it are props, with actions dictated by the director just as much as anything else on screen. In this way, the film manipulates its characters, its plot, and its audience to teach a pseudo-sophisticated moral about how being true to one’s self is a greater pleasure than all the money, luxury, and girls that charm can buy. “The Good Guy” forgets that it’s hard for a film to preach integrity when its script has none...