Word: smartly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that score, the producers can probably relax about The Client. Of the boys of this summer, Mark Sway is the most interesting. He's a sort of updated Huck Finn. Mark is smart, self-reliant and deeply suspicious of grownups ) -- with good reason, as it turns out. Out in the woods, smoking cigarettes stolen from Mom, he encounters a man in the process of committing suicide. Trying (and failing) to prevent it -- the sequence is good and scary -- Mark learns where a certain very interesting body is buried...
...movie does that. It is a smart, affecting, easygoing fable with plenty of talent on both sides of the camera. The key ingredient is Hanks, the one actor whom the mass audience trusts as an exemplar of quality. He can sell a tough subject to tough customers because they know the film will not be so much about issues as about the decency with which his character faces up to them. That goes for Gump. "The film is nonpolitical," Hanks says, "and thus nonjudgmental. It doesn't just celebrate survival, it celebrates the struggle...
Stillman cast these two actors directly after finishing "Metropolitan" and their characters do not seem to have progressed much since then. Nichols still plays the over-earnest philosopher and Eigeman continues to play the smart-alecky underling. It's as if Stillman moved the two of them from their New York high rises to the streets of Barcelona and told them to make the best of the locals...
...funny thing is that, with all these smart people exerting all their energy fine-tuning characters and dialogue, most movies are still junk. Perhaps Sturges and the other great writers-turned-directors of his era had it right: one good writer's vision needs no revision. And perhaps Paul Rudnick was onto something when, for the small, independent film version of his off- Broadway play Jeffrey, he put into his contract that he would not be removed from the project. "I felt that I wasn't going to be paid studio money for this," he says, "so in return...
...needs to remember to buy a good comforter, too. Because at Harvard, it really doesn't matter if you were valedictorian or not. It matters if you can keep warm during those frigid winter nights when the heat isn't working. If Paul Siemens is smart, he'll let college teach him how to put things in perspective. That is, unless he wants to be known as the "Sore Loser" for the next four years...