Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...haven't got to the main contrivance of the plot, hatched by Matt Lopez and fleshed out by longtime Sandler scribe Tim Herlihy. Obliged to read the children to sleep with a bedtime story, Skeeter tosses aside his sister's PC books like The Organic Squirrel Gets a Bike Helmet ("Communist stuff," he opines) and invents a fairy tale of his own: a medieval frolic where he is Sir Fix-a-Lot and Kendall is Sir Butt-kiss. As Skeeter wanly improvs, the kids add impish twists of their own: that the sky will rain gumballs, a dwarf will ruin...
...Proper Stranger (1964), Natalie Wood is an Italian Catholic shopgirl who becomes pregnant in the one-night-stand immaculate conceptions familiar in movies of the '60s (and today; see Knocked Up). But since she had the good fortune to be impregnated by McQueen, true love is assured. The plot is Hollywood hokum with a patina of New Yawk grit, but Mulligan was always an ace at revealing the subtle starlight behind the Kleig lights...
...white man's burden of nobility betrayed a willful ignoring of Tom Robinson, the real person in peril. Atticus loses face; Tom loses his life, but his case is seen not as his or his race's tragedy but as one step on his lawyer's Calvary. Then the plot shifts to the Finches' eccentric neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his first movie role), and Mockingbird forgets about the black man, unfairly convicted by a racist society, to concentrate on the white man who is brought into civilized society...
...sets the top comedy star of the '90s against the top action and drama star of the last decade. Industry handicappers are predicting that Carrey, with a familiar role in an easy-to-sell story, will score a box office win over Smith, whose movie's central and unrevealable plot twists make it a challenge to describe. (They're saying it could be Smith's first film since the 2001 Ali not to break $100 million domestic.) But both films play to their stars' acting strengths, which means that you will probably laugh along with Yes Man, and in Seven...
...from this saccharine treatment of an action-movie star's adventures in charity, the writer might have been better served building a golden idol to Li. The story charts Li's noble endeavors with uncritical adulation - from plugging shamelessly self-flattering quotes to the strange implication that B-movie plot themes can lay down a foundation for morality. Li's case would have been helped had he received a less frothy and dripping paean. Instead of pushing forward a more thoughtful agenda, TIME used its eloquence to further entrench the celebrity worship that plagues the international humanitarian scene. Jawahar Joshi...