Word: ripley
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...what's cool, they just follow the charts. By that rationale, Pokemon probably placed 6th in the Best Picture race.) So they nominate The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile and The Sixth Sense instead of the three real best pictures of the year--The Talented Mr. Ripley, Being John Malkovich and The End of the Affair (throw in Election or Toy Story 2 and I'd still be happy). To look edgy, they reluctantly toss in Spike Jonze for Best Director and omit Frank Darabont for The Green Mile even though the movie is nominated for Best Picture...
...feel I should take very little credit for that. It was funny because the decision to make the character Ripley a woman was made by David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll [producers], who bought Dan O'Bannon's script which was all male. They basically rewrote the script, and they were looking at it and thought, wouldn't it be great if the hero winds up being this girl you don't expect. They just kind of did that because they thought it would be a good plot surprise, it was written exactly like...
...starters, I have to say that The Talented Mr. Ripley's depiction of young Ivy Leaguers living abroad in the late '50s completely overlooks the role of pinball machines. Yes, pinball machines. In those days, every little cafe on the Left Bank seemed to have one. Americans were drawn to them. Someone whom Ripley's friend Dickie Greenleaf might have known at Princeton would wander into a Left Bank cafe, fully committed to behaving like a French intellectual. He'd be carrying a paperback copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. He would promise himself to spend most...
Also, we can't help noticing that nobody in The Talented Mr. Ripley ever discusses the exchange rate. At that time, European countries tended to overvalue their currency wildly in the official rate of exchange, so everyone exchanged money on a fluctuating black market. For a while, I worked in the TIME bureau in Paris, in a job only marginally more ennobling than the men's-room-attendant position Tom Ripley held down at the start of the movie, and the high points of everyone's week was the Friday-morning visit of a distinguished-looking money changer known...
...someone who enjoyed The Talented Mr. Ripley, I point all this out in the spirit of constructive criticism--some notes, you might say, for the remake. Next time, the tension between Tom and Dickie could be over how hard you can hit the machine without causing it to tilt, or whether you get more lire to the dollar in Zurich or Trieste. Gwyneth would be nowhere in sight...