Word: scripting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mariachi to Sin City, but they're all in 2-D. His stereoscopic films, Spy Kids 3-D and this one, are pretty lame. Sharkboy has an especially frantic, amateur atmosphere, with a mostly maladroit cast (George Lopez lends some charm to the four roles he plays). The script, based on a notion by Rodriguez's 7-year-old son, creates a universe whose physical laws and narrative rules keep changing, thus sabotaging the film's internal logic. As Sharkboy says, "Looks like another dream gone...
...fairness, it must be said that the script (by director Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer) breaks with sobriety to give someone, usually Michael Caine as Alfred, Bruce's faithful, fussy butler, something smart to say. Eventually, however, Nolan, who directed the tricky, widely admired Memento, must oblige the conventions of the big-budget action movie: darkly improbable weaponry, pyrotechnics, car chases (the Batmobile is admittedly pretty novel), editing that edges toward incomprehensibility...
...movie-comes-on feeling," says Giamatti. "I enjoy being in those things." One of them, Duets, a 2000 karaoke-road-trip killing-spree film that the New York Times said "flops around like a carp on the kitchen floor," was actually not bad enough for his taste. "In the script there was bloodshed and incest and karaoke. I thought, This is great!" He sighs: "They ruined it in the edit...
...script, which was screenwriter Simon Kinberg's graduate thesis at Columbia University Film School, had been kicking around for months. Liman had already passed on it once. It's the story of a seemingly conventional suburban couple facing two very big problems. One, their marriage is arid and joyless. And two, they both, each unbeknownst to the other, are topflight assassins at rival agencies. When professional circumstances pit the Smiths against each other, a hilarious fire fight between two trained killers ensues ("I missed you, honey" becomes a double entendre), which somehow, mysteriously, becomes a portrait of a marriage rediscovering...
...Filming ran long on The Stepford Wives, causing Kidman to bow out and leaving Liman to scramble for a new Mrs. Smith. "Which is crazy," says Liman, "because now I'm trying to convince Brad to stay in the movie, when he's the one who sent me the script! I could just see the whole film coming undone." Liman wound up casting Jolie, who was in England doing publicity for Tomb Raider II, over the phone...