Word: playful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...settled in for a screening of the year's first big prestige picture: State of Play, a political thriller starring Oscar laureate Russell Crowe as a crusading newsman and Ben Affleck as a prominent Congressman whose career is threatened by a sex-and-murder scandal. This is my kind of cinema sirloin, organic and artfully prepared. Yet something in me anticipated leftovers. The film is a distillation of a 2003 BBC miniseries, also called State of Play; and I'd recently seen and revered that show. Not that the American movie couldn't have improved on the British series...
...Traffic and Little Dorrit in Britain, are deft where feature films, even the highly hyped Oscar contenders, can be coarse - one a whispered revelation, the other a shock-therapy harangue. For a handy compare-and-contrast, check out the small- and big-screen versions of State of Play. You'll see the difference between a vital work of popular art and a patched-up retread. It's almost enough to make a movie critic wish he could watch television - good television - for a living. (See TIME's top 10 TV series...
...names is on a script, you can guess that each worked consecutively on the material, trying to slim it down or punch it up; and that each was employed to fix the "improvements" the previous man had made. It's been reported that Brad Pitt had been signed to play Cal, but departed the project after difficulties with the script. Pitt was right: none of the writers had solved the adaptation...
...texture. The TV show's director, David Yates, sometimes erred on the side of camerabatics, but he lent the enterprise pace and flair, and assured that each of the story's 20 or so major characters had a life of his or her own. (From State of Play Yates graduated to the Harry Potter franchise; he will have directed four of the final eight Potters.) The film's director, Kevin Macdonald, who did The Last King of Scotland, is not a flair fellow. The chase scenes interpolated into this version have no special oomph; the encounters no residual kick. Paging...
...Harvard baseball team heads down to Providence to play a four-game weekend set against Brown, the squad knows that it controls its own destiny—just barely that is.The Crimson (10-22, 8-4 Ivy) currently sits three games behind first-place Dartmouth in the Ivy’s Rolfe Division, with the team desperately trying to make up the ground in the two remaining weeks of the season.What makes this weekend so intense? The Bears (14-15, 8-4) are in the same position.Harvard and Brown are knotted at second in the standings, and each team knows...