Word: screenplays
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...that time Damon had taken steps to ensure that Hollywood would take notice of more than his acting. With Stallone-like hubris, he and best friend Ben Affleck--another hot actor, who starred in Chasing Amy and grew up two blocks away from Damon--wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting, based on a play Damon had started writing as a Harvard student. (He still has two semesters to go for his degree.) Damon and Affleck attached themselves to the project as stars. The script--about the struggles of a young working-class math genius in South Boston--sold...
This nasty little film is veteran director Sidney Lumet's uncharacteristically amateurish attempt at medical satire. Its flaws lie not in the performances (the degree of talent represented in the picture is substantial), but in Steven S. Schwartz's misguided screenplay. Rather than tackle issues with wit and intelligence, Schwartz chooses to use insultingly phony characters to reveal the faults of the modern health care machine through their broadly drawn flaws. A painful exercise in unrealized potential...
First and foremost, there is the crisis of the script. Wendy Kesselman's screenplay (adapted from her own stage play) is remarkably schizophrenic, jumping from one storyline to the next with absolutely no transitions. At times, the absence of any logical bridge between scenes causes one to wonder whether a better movie was left on the cutting room floor...
Ultimately the third and most important act of One Night Stand comes off as completely implausible--despite Snipes's efforts to anchor the sketchy romance--because of the weak screenplay. In the opening sequence Figgis has Snipes directly addressing the camera as he walks through the streets of Manhattan on his way to see Charlie. This narrative device pops up sporadically in an effort to connect the sloppy narrative strands. The script was originally written by Joe Esterzhas (purveyor of such cinematic fool's gold as Basic Instinct and the infamous Showgirls), and it shows in some places (an especially...
...City isn't quite that glib and preachy; but it gets dangerously close. Director Costa-Gavras, whose much-Oscared filmography includes the 1982 Missing (Best Screenplay) and the 1969 Z (Best Foreign Film), taps into the nation's anxiety about the growing influence of the media--a strategy that is certain to pay off in the wake of the Princess Diana tragedy. Gavras is particularly concerned with the "personal responsibility" of grandstanding journalists like Mad City's protagonist, Max Brackett, who walks the fine line between reporting the news and creating the news. "We all move the line," Gavras says...