Word: script
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...young Seattle woman who goes away for a beer and never comes home, is a remake of a 1988 Dutch thriller. The original movies had their admirers, but neither property could be sold as is to the U.S. mass audience. Some expert renovation was in order. Cunning Hollywood script doctors had to approach the European originals not as finished portraits but as sketches in need of coherence, heart, pizazz. It's what rewriters do: refashion a boutique item so it will jump off the shelves at the mall...
...fair, most of the fault lies with the script itself, the most puzzling aspect being the decision to produce it in the first place. It attempts to bring us into the world of yet another "unnamed South or Latin American country," ruled by a dictator who embodies the nation's hollow state of greed and corruption. This El Commandante Gutierrez (Jonathan Fried) enters trailing a long tube of flickering lights behind him that conducts electrodes into his mechanical frame, operated by the real, unseen dictator in a far-off control room. His counterpart is Uyttersprot (Jack Willis), an embittered flunky...
...insulting level of metaphor is sustained not only in the script but also in some of the direction. Men in large white spacesuits wander in and out during set changes, accompanied by billows of mechanical fog. These creatures are the exterminators sent by the government to ward off the plague of red spiders that is reported to be approaching the city. Later, a large red spider is lit and throbbing above carnival dancers in a comical dance scene that probably was meant to be erotic. These and other elaborate ploys, while potentially meaningful, are more likely to make you giggle...
...italic, roman and handwriting-based types although the non-chronological arrangement of the pieces somewhat obscures the history. A 1526 book on display contains text set in a font Ludovico degli Arrighi designed after his own handwriting, and the French designer Robert Granjon used a hand-based script-complete with overstated ascenders and descenders and exggerated capital-in a 1558 publication...
Charlie Haas' script deftly twists three satirical strands together. There is, of course, the movie within the movie, a perfectly pitched and hilarious genre send-up, complete with a woman in perpetual peril (Cathy Moriarty, who is also wonderful as Woolsey's wearied girlfriend). The preview is a riotous muddle at which Woolsey's gimmicks -- Atomo-Vision, Rumble-Rama -- run out of control and literally threaten to bring down the house...