Word: scenarists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Maybe, just maybe, it is. Jane Wagner, the film's scenarist and director, has long been one of Tomlin's most able comedy writers. At some point, perhaps, she conceived Moment by Moment as an extended stand-up routine or as a screwball romance along the lines of the old Carole Lombard-William Powell comedy, My Man Godfrey (which is quoted in the film). But the movie's subject, a liaison between a bored Beverly Hills matron and a younger man, is too provocative to be entirely laughed away. Wagner deals with this dilemma by switching...
...director and his co-scenarist Bob Gale also take pains to show the rebelliousness that the Beatles unleashed in their audience. Along the way we are casually reminded that the Beatles upended parent-child relationships, destroyed the Brylcreem market and supplanted the Kennedys as teen-age-culture heroes. One girl is so shaken by Beatlemania that she breaks up with her fiance; she suddenly senses that life has more possibilities than she had previously realized. A loud mouthed boy (Bobby DiCicco) tries to chop down the Sullivan show's transmitter because he knows that the Beatles mean the death...
Watching the film is often like staring at a confounding blur: Pretty Baby's narrative often seems to be languishing somewhere in the film's hazy background. That's a shame, because the screenplay is built around an exciting idea. Malle and Scenarist Polly Platt have hypothesized a romance-and eventual marriage-between Heroine Violet (Brooke Shields) and E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine), the legendary photographer of Storyville's glory days. This couple's bizarre March-December affair, like the equally promising relationship between Violet and her prostitute mother (Susan Sarandon), is described only intermittently. Instead...
...statement of Coming Home. The movie starts to lose its grip on you after about the first hour, but it is nevertheless an excellent film. Perhaps its problems lie in the fact that there were too many cooks. Gilbert and Fonda took their original idea to the then untried scenarist Nancy Dowd, who has since won critical acclaim for her original screenplay of Slapshot. Over a year later, Dowd came up with a long, ultimately unusable screenplay. Next they approached Waldo Salt, an Oscar winner for Midnight Cowboy, who ended up writing the screenplay. He suggested producer Jerome Hellman. Hellman...
...times exhilaratingly funny. But Ritchie still doesn't know how to use actors--he should hope six-foot eight, 275-pound Doug Atkinson, the prototype for Jenkins' defensive end T.J. Lambert, doesn't see this movie. Ritchie's biggest mistake might have been firing Ring Lardner Jr. as the scenarist. Lardner's credits include M.A.S.H. and he probably genetically knows more about pro athletes than Ritchie. Kristofferson is woefully in need of direction; his lines are often on the order of "Sounds good, B.J.," delivered in his nasal "Me and Bobby McGee" tones. Kristofferson played college football at Pomona...