Word: kasdan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WRITER: LAWRENCE KASDAN...
...nice mismatching of characters, the kind that movies have always wanted us to believe leads inevitably to love. It's a nice mismatching of star images too -- Ms. Sinuosity and Mr. Straight Arrow. And it works pretty well. Lawrence Kasdan's script gives Rachel a messy life: the band rehearsing in her living room, members of her entourage wandering in and out, a son lonesome and looking for a father figure. In contrast, Frank has no life at all: an underfurnished tract house with the mail piling up at the front door, no visible friends or light-minded interests...
...slot behind David Letterman from Monday to Thursday, the half-hour show is a literate oasis among the infomercial emetics of late-night TV. Three million insomniacs regularly catch Costas with many celebrities who Don't Do TV -- talking acting with Robert Duvall, say, or camera angles with Lawrence Kasdan. Costas can also be a gentle nudge, drawing a controlled performer like Mike Wallace into revelations of his bout with depression...
GRAND CANYON. The season's Nice Try Award goes to Lawrence Kasdan. As director and co-writer of this rambling comedy-drama, he tackles big issues (race relations, infidelity, mid-life malaise, crime) with some soaring ingenuity and the help of an attractive cast (Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Mary-Louise Parker). Grand Canyon goes all weird and wussy at the end, but for the first hour or so it addresses real issues and feelings -- the preoccupations of most people who work outside Hollywood...
...Mack, in fact, turns into a benign busybody, trying to pat almost all the lives that touch his into shape. His work comes out a little too neatly, but Kline's performance, like all the others, is engagingly soft- spoken. And well spoken. The screenplay -- by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan -- has a nice, unforced wit, and Lawrence Kasdan's direction has its jagged edges. If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities -- generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug...