Word: novels
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...David Weigel of ReasonOnline.com, in an astute piece about Death of a President piquantly titled "Other Than That, Mrs. Bush, How Was the Film?", mentions Nicholson Baker's 2003 novel Checkpoint as one of many novels about a plan to kill Bush. The novelist Richard Condon never lacked for poli-scifi cojones - in Emperor of America he blew up the White House - but his specialty was death-of-a-president fantasies. In The Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959 and filmed three years later, he postulated the assassination of a presidential nominee by a Joe McCarthy type (the right-wingers...
...East European traditions. More recently, big beauty conglomerates such as L'Oréal and Estée Lauder have been shopping for new, innovative brands in old, familiar places like France, Spain and Germany. Even mass-market retailers like Walgreens are looking to capitalize on the niche market for novel, pharmacy-distributed products...
...operative, dreamed up the idea of making this picture and is credited as one of its executive producers. But the movie, All the King's Men, is not a cheesy, made-for-TV biopic. It is, in fact, a conscientious adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer prizewinning novel, which was also the basis of a much more rambunctious movie by Robert Rossen, which won the 1949 Best Picture Oscar...
...writer-director of the new film, Steven Zaillian, says he has never seen Rossen's very good film, and that probably makes sense. Zaillian's movie is much more a reimagining than a remake, and it's much more faithful to the tone of the novel, which is by no means easy to duplicate. Warren was a prolix and poetic writer, and a man torn between conflicting loyalties. He began his career as a Southern conservative, celebrating the agrarian traditions of the region, but found himself fascinated by the vulgar, driving (and possibly transformative) energy of Huey Long, Louisiana...
...film, as in Warren's novel, Burden is Stark's equal, and the restoration of that balance is important to the movie's success. Commentators on Warren's work often say that it's a study in how power corrupts, and that Willie is essentially a good man ruined by dictatorial depravity. Sean Penn strikes that note, playing him with a kind of bantam-rooster energy--and good-ole-boy charm. But something else is present, thanks in part to Zaillian's alertness to Warren's nuances. Willie has what Huey Long surely did not: a primitive sense of original...