Word: writer-director
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...Elmer Gantry she had fallen in love with the film's writer-director, Richard Brooks, whom she married after divorcing Granger. She took a couple years off when they had a daughter, Kate (she and Granger had a son, Tracy - both children named in honor of Simmons' friends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn); and when she was ready to return to films, her moment had passed. Her enduring glamour, and the tang she put into every line of dialogue, would have made her a welcome presence in sophisticated comedies, but nobody was writing them. Not yet 35, she had become...
...signals to It's Complicated. A romantic comedy about a divorced woman (Streep) who gets chummy with her ex (Baldwin) while entertaining the attentions of another beau (Martin), the movie cost a high-ish $85 million to make; apparently veteran stars are still paid decent salaries, as is a writer-director (Nancy Meyers) with a solid track record (What Women Want, Something's Gotta Give). But a romantic triangle with three stars whose combined age is 175 has trouble appealing to teen daters. To make its money back, It's Complicated will have to lure the Red Hat Society...
Interviewing Grant on Wednesday's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mistakenly called the film What Happened to the Morgans? Stewart might have asked what happened to romantic comedy, once the crown jewel of Hollywood genres. At best, nothing new; at worst, it died of exhaustion. The Morgans' writer-director, Marc Lawrence, has no special gift for character nuance or witty dialogue. To him, rom-com is simply the recycling of a tired fugitive-couple premise from other bad movies (My Blue Heaven, Witless Protection) and the application of the genre's most formulaic shtick-in-trade: forcing an uncomfortable intimacy...
...with Crazy Heart, which features Bridges as a washed-up country-and-western singer? A low-budget affair made by Country Music Television, the film might have gone straight to DVD if ICM hadn't gone to bat for a theatrical release on behalf of first-time writer-director Scott Cooper. The agency's persistence is paying off in Oscar buzz for Bridges, who has been nominated four times in his career and has always gone home empty-handed. If the Golden Globe nomination he earned this week is any sign, it seems probable that he'll be recognized...
Almodóvar is cherished worldwide for his movies' brio and wisdom, but the Spanish writer-director, who turned 60 in September, has been preoccupied with death and mourning in many of his prime films. He killed off important characters in the first reels of All About My Mother and Volver, then examined how the survivors coped with their loss or the urge for revenge. An underlying love for the dead or near dead stokes the main figures in Talk to Her and Volver. In each case the grieving is natural, respectful, votive. Also volcanic...