Word: plotted
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...some glimmers of comic imagination. But if Shankman was aiming for The Princess Bride's mix of fantasy, facetiousness and romance, or even the meta-fable sprawl of Stardust, he missed it by a mile. Magic eludes the entire enterprise. Sure, there's potential in the kids-as-sorcerers plot, and game energy in the pan-Anglo cast. (Palmer, from Australia, is a standout as the Paris Hiltonish vixen, much more charming than the original.) And yet the movie doesn't move, because it is defined by Sandler's essentially static, grudging persona...
...Informants are common in drug and other criminal cases. But they pose a special challenge in terrorism cases, where the government cannot afford to wait for the plot to play out before making arrests. As a result, the prosecution relies heavily on the informants - who often have powerful incentives to keep the case going. "Obviously, the model worked to achieve a conviction," says Cipparone, the defense attorney for Shnewer. "But looking at it systemically, I have significant concerns about the payment of informants in this context--informants with these kinds of backgrounds, given this much free reign...
...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...