Word: scripting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Crowe, despite his loutish rep, is forever surprising viewers by slipping snugly into the disparate characters he plays. This time he surprises by failing. Oh, he can do engaging as smartly as he does stalwart or tortured, but he gets sabotaged by the cloying script. Even before a long, agonizingly unfunny scene that Skinner spends at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, the film's desperate smile has turned into a rictus. Don't expect to be beguiled by A Good Year. That would be like trying to warm your hands at an artificial fireplace...
Stranger Than Fiction has a surer aim at getting through the brain to the heart. Zack Helm's script imagines a decent, solitary fellow named Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), then springs the notion that he may well be a fiction--a character in a work in progress by reclusive novelist Karen (Kay) Eiffel (Emma Thompson). And when Kay figures out how to kill off the character, Harold will...
...Finding Nemo (a small fish asking "Have you seen my dad?") and Monty Python & the Holy Grail (a mosquito that finds itself on Toad's tongue and shouts, "Run away!"). Roddy's groin takes quite a pummeling; that's less Wallace and Gromit than Larry, Curly and Moe. The script, like those of many a DreamWorks animated movie, seems assembled from a brainstorming super-session, in which bright guys spit out funny gags, and every one of them gets into the movie. With a barrage of these jabs, Flushed Away works you over and wears you down, until you surrender...
...that’s the story of how I met Beck. The lesson? If you’re ever interviewing your hero, don’t be afraid to go off-script. He might thank you for it later. But then again, don’t pass up the official suggestion to ask some “unprofessional” questions. Otherwise, you might miss an opportunity to sing some sex jams with a man who changed your life...
...partitioned with plywood into many small cells--at least 10, possibly more. His home for the next five weeks would be a dirty cell, 5 ft. by 4 ft., with a rough concrete floor. The plywood walls were unpainted and still bore the manufacturer's stamp in a foreign script he speculates was Korean. The walls didn't go all the way up to the ceiling, and that allowed for some air circulation. He was given a large, smelly quilt that had to serve as a mattress as well as protection from the cold. From time to time, he heard...