Word: shadyac
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Directed By Tom Shadyac...
...Geisel was courted by half a dozen entities, including 20th Century Fox, whose team featured William Morris agent turned producer Dave Phillips (who had been pursuing the project for years), as well as producer John Davis ("Dr. Dolittle") director Tom Shadyac ("The Nutty Professor") and Nicholson (who had expressed interest). But Universal, which had already made a major investment in Seuss at its theme park, came out swinging. And though revenue would have to be shared, "it was [easy] to see the ancillary opportunities," says Universal Pictures chairman Stacey Snider. When the studio's pitch by Grazer and director Gary...
What's even sadder is the talent wasted. Director Tom Shadyac's other films (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; The Nutty Professor; Liar Liar) are bright, off-kilter farces; scripter Steve Oedekerk wrote Professor. It is a crime against humority that they and Williams (who in a chair next to Letterman is still our most brilliant word surrealist) renounce the work they've practiced with such abandon and invention for Patch's bullying sentimentality. Comics who want to do Hamlet often end up, as here, serving big, sticky slices...
...directed by Tom Shadyac, there's enough surrealism in Liar Liar to content all but the most exigent Carrey fans. But there's something worrisome about the film's attempts to socialize and sentimentalize the '90s' designated anarchist. It's wrong to push characters like Carrey's toward mainstream lovability. Danger, with just the slightest touch of lonely-guy geekiness, is his business. Maybe The Cable Guy was miscalculated, but one would rather see Carrey heading for those dark woods than toward sun-splashed suburbia and the cheerfully romantic ending of this film...
...with that scenario is the original scenario. The Nutty Professor was never really a comedy. Directed and co-written by Lewis in his "total filmmaker" phase, it mostly projected the comic's disastrous desire to morph his gloriously geeky anarchist into a soulful clown. Murphy, abetted by director Tom Shadyac and a whole raft of writers, cannot entirely escape the curious blend of aspiration and sloppiness that marked the earlier film...