Word: schrader
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Buying a book also allows the studio to sidestep all that messy artistic independence; the writer and the director have a blueprint they'd better stick to. "Studios don't like to take chances with something that hasn't been validated in another commercial form," says screenwriter-director Paul Schrader, whose sleek, sere new movie, The Comfort of Strangers, was adapted by Harold Pinter from Ian McEwan's novel. "A film like Silence of the Lambs would have never hit the screen had it been original material. It's just too raw. It could be filmed only because...
...Mean Streets and Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and The Color of Money, he has made his own kind of buddy movie. Two men are bound by love or hate; one must betray the other and thereby help certify his mission. In the Nikos Kazantzakis novel and Paul Schrader's script, Scorsese has found a story vibrant with melodrama and metaphor. This Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is not God born as man. He is a man who discovers -- or invents -- his own divinity. And he is both tormented and excited by the revelation. This Judas (Harvey Keitel) is a strong...
...purloined heiress was in town to promote Paul Schrader's oneiric docudrama about one of the century's most notorious kidnapings. Like Bird, Patty Hearst fails to explain a controversial public life. Rather, it displays her ordeal in the stark, uninflected images of a catatonic's nightmare. Natasha Richardson is nifty as Hearst, who came to Cannes to praise Schrader for creating something more complex than a "sex-and-guns-and-rock-'n'-roll epic." But the film could have used more of all three. By denying Patty Hearst a point of view, Schrader has taken a mug shot instead...
...Schrader is his own best publicist. He knows that in Hollywood movies may be the art of the deal, but in Cannes -- where thousands of journalists swarmed around Hearst, Robert Redford and Richard Gere -- movies are the art of the interview. So praise be to Director John Waters, whose catty ebullience suggests Oscar Wilde without the angst. And all hail to David Lean, emperor of the epic, who charmed with his bluff majesty and his tut-tutting about Britain's new "miniature" film industry...
Light of Day, like many of Paul Schrader's scripts (Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Cat People), uses a strong, simple story to anchor a metaphor for social, familial or sexual relationships. But here he is so true to the characters' desperation that he deprives his film of the electric juice rock 'n' roll lends to much more routine movies. And he is so keyed into the cliches ordinary people use, both to express and to hide from their feelings, that he presses all irony out of the dialogue. This does pay off in two climactic hospital scenes where the raw exposition...