Word: mamet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shira’s work as co-chair of the Hillel Dramatic Society brought two of her greatest loves together. During the past fall, the organization faced a difficult task as they were unable to retain the rights to perform a David Mamet play, and the director of the replacement show quit...
...older couple then arrive, and, after quite a bit of gab, steal the baby and proceed to convince the younger pair that the infant never existed. These kinds of mysterious mind games, of course, are old hat to anyone who has been paying attention to Pinter, Mamet or even Albee in his better days. But here's it's especially facile and inauthentic: The "power" this older couple has over the younger seems to be entirely manufactured by the playwright (could anyone but an old man have written this play?) rather than growing out of any psychological truth or reality...
...film Silence of the Lambs, for all its Oscars, only skimmed the lower depths in which Harris' novel swam with a spooky understanding of every bottom-dwelling creature. Hannibal, adapted by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, fiddles more with its source and reworks--improves upon--that novel's ending. Director Ridley Scott is nicely attuned to Harris' depiction of evil, of the strength and seduction in depravity. Each gargoyle gets his due: greedy detective Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), the venal official Krendler (Ray Liotta). Even Mason Verger, the pedophile with the skinless face (Gary Oldman, under a layer of Toussaud...
...fugitive, as bait. Lecter is up to his usual tricks: shopping, disemboweling, forcing a victim to eat his own brains, that kind of thing. Finally, in the novel Clarice apparently becomes a cannibal herself. Don't worry: we haven't given away the ending of the film; screenwriters David Mamet (State and Main) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List) have changed it, but it's still really gross...
...invading army of a movie crew occupies a Vermont town. Pinwheeling with the crackle and congestion of a Preston Sturges farce, Mamet's fastest, funniest script gives sharp lines ("That's not a lie; that's a gift for fiction") and wild invective ("I'm gonna tear out your heart and piss on your lungs through the hole in the chest") to a cast that feasts on the dialogue like an old-time studio boss on a starlet's plump naivete. Hail to Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Paymer and the other confectors...