Word: screenplays
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John Hodge's screenplay is an uncomfortable mix of romantic-comedy cliches, botched-crime scenarios and sudden outbursts of violence that come across as neither funny nor appalling, but merely silly and misplaced. In Trainspotting, Hodge demonstrated his mastery of a technique wherein cartoonish, exaggerated characters interact with frighteningly realistic characters to great comedic and dramatic effect. Here, though, all of the characters are cartoons, and with no contrast (and no reason for the audience to care about them), the film becomes reliant solely on Ewan McGregor's big smile as a lure for audience involvement. McGregor is a handsome...
...combine black humor, wit, romance, violence and pathos in a story about Scottish heroin addicts marked it as one of the best films of the year, if not the decade. The team embraced their incredibly risky subject matter with energy and vigor, and managed to make commercially palatable a screenplay that Hollywood execs would have (and did) run from screaming...
...general rule, writers of fiction are flabbergasted when they read their first screenplays. The dialogue is eye-strainingly self-conscious, the characters flail about with disingenuous emotions and the "stage" directions describe less than clues on a treasure map. Geoff Nicholson's newest novel, Bleeding London, is a book that should have been a screenplay...
...think that your family is dysfunctional? Do you dread going home for Thanksgiving? Welcome to The House of Yes: you're probably not this bad off. With a screenplay adapted from Wendy MacLeod's acclaimed play, the film touches with a brilliant but subtle hand on complex issues such as mental illness, family relationships, upper class apathy and sex. This beautiful movie has a quiet, dream-like quality that lends an appropriate surrealism to the entire set. In this world, nothing is real or logical; everything is permissible and negotiated, from identity to familial relationships...
Essentially, The Matchmaker is a pleasant yet hackneyed film in which a young American leaves America to find herself, community and, yes, undiluted love. As might be expected, the screenplay is no chef d'oeuvre, nor the acting heart-stopping. But it fulfills its purpose as a genial love story with an exotically back-to-one's-roots setting for its never-never land...