Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They are something more than typists, something less than geniuses. Their names are rarely on the picture, but they carry big clout. Their job is to fix something -- a character, some dialogue, a plot perplex -- that the moguls think is broken. And to fix it quick. "When you're staring down the gun barrel of a release date," says Robert Towne, whose uncredited work on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather and other films has made him chief surgeon in the Script Doctors' Clinic, fixing a film amounts to "grace under fire...
...lucky predicament Joss Whedon found himself in with a script called, appropriately, Speed. It had, Whedon admits, "a great premise: a bomb on a bus, and if it goes under 50 miles an hour, it blows up." What it needed, he says, was "a gussying up of the plot and a total overhaul of characters and motivation." In two weeks Whedon turned the original bad guy (Jeff Daniels) into the buddy of hero Keanu Reeves. He wrote new characters to ride on the demon bus. He stayed on call throughout shooting and wrote dialogue for post-production looping...
...Grisham's attempt to distance his novel from The Firm's slick legal plot actually compromises the novel's success, Schumacher's pious adherence to the dramatic material of the novel--the Sway melodrama--significantly reduces "The Client"'s suspense potential. By the time Jones first appears (almost 15 minutes into the film as U.S. District Attorney Roy Foltrigg), we are beginning to wonder whether the "explosive secret" that Mark has learned is really important or whether the local authorities simply find the kid a good person to harass. With Jones on the screen as the ambitious and disgustingly smooth...
...part into "The Client"'s highlight performance, occasional showing the impressive depth she captured in "Thelma and Louise." Had Schumacher fully exploited Sarandon's hard-ball verbal confrontations, "The Client" might have succeed ed as a fast-paced courtroom drama; unfortunately, Schumacher fails to commit to the dynamic court plot, preferring to interstice the Sway family drama with a few dismally unoriginal mob scenes...
Barry "the Blade" Moldanno (Anthony La Paglia), the feared mobster whose knife inspires Jerome Clifford to commit suicide before Barry can kill him is, as his Mafia-kingpin uncle says, "stupid." Reducing criminal intrigue to a new level of sleaze and triteness, Moldanno adds almost nothing to a plot which pertains to him only in the murder he committed before the film begins...