Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem with Barfly is that it has a mission. This is to glorify the life of the Los Angeles beat poet Charles Bukowski, who wrote the semi-autobiographical script. Now Bukowski has a terrific literati-on-the-skids persona; more downwardly mobile than Kerouac or Burroughs, more degenerate than Ginsberg. He came of age as a writer in the same kind of desolate, marginal, flophouse and seedy bar milieu that Schroeder evokes so effectively in the film. And he's a fine writer--the problem is that you'd never know it from the script, which struck...
WHAT CAN one really say about Harvey, that good old adorable 1940s comedy about a rich, eccentric family whose bachelor uncle thinks he sees a giant rabbit? This play is it--the absolute warhorse of warhorses, a cuddly, cute and utterly innocuous script which hit its peak 30 years ago with a Jimmy Stewart movie and has since been relegated to the position of favored stand-by for a hundred thousand suburban high schools...
Bobis does not tamper with Zindel's script, preferring to heighten the psychological tension of the family's fights. If the performers (particularly Duffy) stumble a bit on their lines or technical problems plague their delivery, they nonetheless manage to make the eccentric premise of Zindel's play seem convincing...
...perspectives of their inhabitants, Jake and Beth. The houses are built on a superhuman scale, with the doorways, windows, walls, and even the floors at bizarre angles to each other. The houses are placed far enough from each other that they seem hundreds of miles apart--which, as the script suggests, they are--yet they are close enough for Jake, imagining he sees Beth, to actually look over to her house...
...Deans at Cambridge University. A group of young men are gathered to engage in pretentious debate over the relative worth of music, conversation, and a veal cutlet, It's a nice start but it also turns out to be one of the very few moments of humor in the script. The rest of this solemn movie follows the next five years of Maurice's life as he transforms himself from a callow undergraduate into a cultivated city stock-broker, all the while guarding his secret from the Dean, the police and London society...