Word: plotting
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...whacked around by Donnie, the inbred ingrate. When she complains to a cop about him, the cop offers this blithe appraisal: "He's high-strung." No more so than the script, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson; it is given to violent outbursts amid its sullen patches, and plot twists that don't strain plausibility so much as ignore it. By the end, the movie has gone goofily gothic - more Wes Craven than Truman Capote - and you may be convinced that director Raimi meant "The Gift" to be a deadpan postmodernist horror comedy. The sole evidence to the contrary...
...path of emotional evolution in the film seems forced, each of its extremes a protest against the brusque and wry tendencies that Connery has honed for so long. Thus, when Forrester rails against his life’s misfortunes, his attitude seems unreal, an instrument of the plot. When he cries, he’s positively painful to watch. And when he shouts at Jamal to “Punch the keys, for God’s sake!” as he types, it’s a meaningless snatch of adrenaline meant to look snazzy in his Oscar...
...it’s galling to resort to heaping such faint praise upon the film when it makes so resolute an effort to stay superficial on every level. It spells out themes and motivations with exasperatingly banal clarity, with the odd obliquely stated plot point tossed in for variety. Time after time, the filmmakers mistake blunt musings for character depth and obvious platitudes for sage utterances. Most insultingly, the film has an annoyingly high “tired scenario” quotient, squeezing in a Big Game, multiple teacher-student confrontations, and a half-serious flirtation between Jamal...
...first two pages of the huge catalog to "Made in California" tell you the essential plot line. On the left, a detail from a tourist poster, ca. 1930, showing two women chatting under a palm on a crag, with a luxuriant view of golden mountainside behind them: California as Promised Land, an earthly paradise, Eden without the snake. On the right, a photo of a suburban slide area in Los Angeles, where earthquake-stricken bungalows teeter on the edge of a muddy chasm at whose bottom lies an upside-down car. The heaven of nature, the hell (or at least...
...plot is borrowed from the book of Genesis, but the musical might be controversial even by secular standards. A wealthy white woman, feeling undesirable after a breast-cancer operation, pays her black maid $15,000 to sleep with her husband. Only after much trouble and prayer does a righteous resolution ensue. Yet the co-author, composer and producer of Behind Closed Doors, which just opened in Chicago, is a man of the cloth: Bishop T.D. Jakes. Doesn't he fear failure? "My definition of success," says Jakes, 43, "is to be able to birth out every creative thought...