Word: screenplays
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Director Oliver Stone, who wrote Any Given Sunday's screenplay with John Logan, may be momentarily in a nonpolitical mood, but that does not mean he has given up his preoccupations with paranoia, greed and the brutality of American life. He sees his warriors as innocent animals, the purity of their violent athletic endeavors under constant threat of corruption by people trying to make a buck off their pain. Or, in the case of a particularly noxious sports reporter (John C. McGinley), a know-nothing who thinks he knows it all, just trying to make a name for himself...
...story like this could easily have become TV-movie-of-the-week material; but it's a strong script, and even stronger acting, that carry this movie to great heights. Based on co-writer Angela Shelton's childhood memoirs, the screenplay is honest, emotionally charged and surprisingly intimate in what it reveals about the very strong bond between a mother and her daughter. Each scene is believable and completely organic; it's very easy to forget that you're not watching a real-life story unfold, and that the main duo aren't really related at all. Gavin O'Connor...
...director, Alan Parker, worked with Laura Jones to write the screenplay, and the film is very faithful to the book--too faithful, perhaps. Like a complex organ hymn being plinked out on an electric keyboard, the film plays the same basic melody as the memoir but fails to bring out the nuances of McCourt's writing, while these nuances are precisely what made Angela's Ashes a great work rather than a mere string of anecdotes...
...Unfortunately, the plot and screenplay detract from the film's artistic merit. James Schamus' screenplay might reflect the language of the Civil War, yet the dialogue is entirely self-important and melodrama destroys any stake the viewer might have in the plot. Lee wishes to establish the North as a human presence, so Roedel reads some found union letters to the camp. Similarly, Lee has Roedel and Chiles talk under the stars to emphasize the characters' brotherhood...
...adaptation" of A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was so terrible, in fact, that Irving forced Disney to remove the original characters' names from the movie, leaving only a "loosely inspired by" credit. These films were missing one key piece: Irving himself. The Cider House Rules is the first screenplay he wrote himself, and it shows. He manages to capture the spirit of the novel without making caricatures of the main players. The people in the movie are drawn with attention to reality and complexity--plausibility never lapses...