Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Robert Bolt's eloquent, epigrammatic script traces Lawrence's career from mapmaking in the British army's Cairo headquarters to masterminding Arab nationalism. In Peter O'Toole's pensive, swashbuckling incarnation, Lawrence makes for a curious messiah. With his skin like a mandarin orange dipped in sand, his voice intimate and cryptic, his haunted eyes staring from inside his burnoose, O'Toole creates a towering, tragic, high-camp sheik of Araby...
...Criterion Collection, from the Voyager Co. in Santa Monica, Calif., turns out the most formidable disc library. Its version of Orson Welles' masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons contains, among other items, the entire shooting script, a full set of storyboards, and stills of crucial scenes deleted by the studio. The Criterion edition of Blade Runner has a lavish set of designs by "visual futurist" Syd Mead; the disc of 2001 was personally . overseen by Stanley Kubrick and includes almost a thousand pages of essays and production memos. "We're a significant part of an as yet insignificant business," says Voyager...
...biggest loser is Kanin. His script, considered an American classic, either has dated badly or was overrated to start. It is a political, moral and especially a rhetorical muddle; its most grandiloquent speeches sound like discarded first drafts for a lesser Frank Capra movie. At the end, a Senator gets away with taking a bribe and Brock apparently gets away with murder, all with the connivance of the supposed hero and heroine. That may echo how some spectators feel about the outcome of recent insider-trading cases, but Kanin seemingly intended a shout of triumph, not this cynical sigh...
Unfortunately for the actors, the script does not take any chances on the acting abilities of the cast. One predictable scene follows another. For example, in one scene Selleck takes Porizkova home with him but later wonders whether or not she is actually the murderer. Alone in his bedroom, he gets up to block the door with his dresser bureau. And then what? Well naturally, Porizkova walks in catching him in the act. What does Selleck reply? A better question is: what would Magnum reply? "Oh I was just exercising. Some people lift weights, I move furniture." Where...
...only is Beresford's script guilty of being mundane, it is also sloppy. In deference to U. S.-Soviet glasnost relations, the writers have deftly swayed away from any direct attacks on the Russian government. Porizkova's Nina does not come from the Soviet Union, but is rather supposed to be a native of Romania. But the temptation of using the KGB as an obvious foil to the good American guys seems to have been irresistible, and so we see it re-enacted again. Once more, in the spirit of James Bond and other spy thrillers, we see a plot...