Word: script
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...least 45 languages, and now The Vagina Monologues has officially arrived in China. After a successful run in Beijing in March, the Chinese production of Eve Ensler's famous play swept into Shanghai this past weekend. Wang Chong, the play's Beijing-born director, translated Ensler's script from English for a three-woman cast, taking care to closely match the meaning of hard-to-translate words like vagina and its less anatomical synonyms...
...call from Sam Mendes, who said, "I just read the script, and I'm only thinking of you for the part." I know everybody reading this is like, "The dude from The Office got a call from Sam Mendes?" I know. It's insane. The script is one of the best I've ever read...
Director Todd Phillips made the agreeable Ferrell film Old School, and he can frame catastrophe with a comedic elegance, but he's hamstrung by another reductive script from hot writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Four Christmases, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past). Virtually every joke either is visible long before it arrives or extends way past its expiration date. Even the welcome presence of Heather Graham and a deeply weird cameo by Mike Tyson can't save a bromance so primitive it's practically Bro-Magnon...
...script, by Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas, honors most of the show's favorite tropes. There's the monkey-man Chaka (Jorma Taccone), a sort of humanoid Cheeta from the old Tarzan movies; the Altrusian lizard lords Enik (John Boylan) and the Zarn (voiced by Leonard Nimoy); and a huge army of the zombie-like Sleestaks - as Will sagely observes, "That's how zombies get you: volume." If fans of the TV show want a Tyrannosaurus rex to chase Rick into a cave, as in the old days, they'll get their wish. The difference is in the care taken...
...script, written by Brian Helgeland, who won an Oscar for his L.A. Confidential, does try to put a stethoscope to the current national malaise when it alludes, toward the end, to the toxic duplicity of insider trading. There's also a superrich mayor (James Gandolfini) who could be Michael Bloomberg with a bigger gut. But most of the film takes place in a fantasy present, where the Dow is at 11,000 - a relic of that halcyon era of 2008, when the movie was shot. And by emphasizing the cop-killer relationship, the picture loses the original's busy fresco...