Word: writer-director
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DIED. BO WIDERBERG, 66, Swedish writer-director of trenchant films about young outsiders; of undisclosed causes; in Angelholm, Sweden. From his smart, sensitive Raven's End (1963) to the Lolita-in-reverse All Things Fair (1995), Widerberg sympathized with kids who valiantly and vainly fought the system. His 1967 hit Elvira Madigan, a lusciously limned story of love on the run, put Piano Concerto No. 21 on the charts. Mozart never sounded so sexy as when he underscored the doomed nuzzling of Pia Degermark and Thommy Berggren...
...also know that we are in for a very long day's journey on writer-director Bruce Beresford's endlessly predictable Paradise Road. Do we know that the ship carrying the women and children to safety as Singapore surrenders will be sunk, Red Cross markings or not? Can we predict that the well-spoken Japanese officer some of the survivors meet when they stumble ashore on Sumatra will turn out to be a sadist? When the commandant of the camp where they're interned appears, are we not instantly certain he studied penology with Colonel Saito over on the River...
There are essentially two ways of handling this hot stuff. Gingerly--oh, all right, "sensitively"--as writer Ken Hixon and director Pat O'Connor do in Inventing the Abbotts. And raunchily--oh, all right, dirty-mouthed and in your face--as writer-director Kevin Smith does in Chasing Amy. On the whole, Smith's is the better way--funnier, smarter and a lot more truthful about the whole experience of being led around by your...er, base instincts...
...Japanese advance, the colonial swells party on, unconcerned. They don't know that disaster looms. But we do; this is the same familiar war-movie territory we've seen in countless other films. "We also know that we are in for a very long day?s journey on writer-director Bruce Beresford?s endlessly predictable 'Paradise Road,'" says TIME's Richard Schickel. "Do we know that the ship carrying the women and children to safety as Singapore surrenders to the Japanese will be sunk, Red Cross markings or not? Can we predict that the well-spoken Japanese officer some...
Unless he has adapted to the new era, as has the one who calls himself Juvenal in writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's Touch. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts...