Word: topor
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...Accused, screenwriter Tom Topor and director Jonathan Kaplan imagine a worst-case scenario that poses all of these questions and plays them out in a moral twilight zone where ambiguity gives way to atrocity. The movie boasts a daring, acute performance by Jodie Foster as Sarah, the coarse-mouthed waitress with the SXY SADI license plate, who can fist her face into a pugnacious sulk or vamp persuasively enough to steam your specs. In the process, The Accused has defied Hollywood odds to become an autumn hit, earning $18 million in its first 24 days of release. It has also...
...room together. It's not inhuman, which is why it's so scary." By then, the moviegoer -- a witness-voyeur, just like the bystanders -- is ready to have his prejudices twisted from compassion to horror. "We wanted to lull the audience and then turn things around," Topor explains. "We were saying, 'As a spectator, you're part of the problem. What would you have done...
...best, Nuts is a picture that has much to say about the corrupting power of possessive love. But as adapted for Streisand by Tom Topor and veteran Screenwriters Darryl Ponicsan and Alvin Sargent, it too often surrenders to the banalities of its genre. For Nuts exemplifies one kind of Hollywood high-mindedness: the "I'm O.K. Because Society Says I'm Not O.K." movie. The protagonist is not insane, merely misunderstood by those who impose rules she refuses to play by. Every time an authority figure declares she is incompetent, her sanity is supposed to be affirmed. This...
...Cyrano is the major casualty of this approach, though, to be fair, some of his wounds are self-inflicted. He seems to drone endlessly, eyes glazed and fingers fidgeting, in a voice that ought to earn him the name Cyrano de Sinusitus. But once he's roused from this topor by the approach of a good joke, Roe becomes an adrenalin-charged humor dynamo, leaping and cavorting about the stage. His mad attack upon the lascivious Comte de Guiche (Jeff Rosen) and his introduction to Christian (Ted Dane) are both superb, hinting at a potentially brilliant performance that got sidetracked...
...success as a playwright out here, but who cares?" laments Kitty Felde, a playwright and actress at the Deja Vu. One of the rare examples of a play that was not a success in New York but has been a hit in Los Angeles is Tom Topor's courtroom drama Nuts, which has proved a financial salvation for Susan Dietz and her L.A. Stage Company, a pioneering theater midway in size between the tiny outposts and the big commercial houses...