Word: scriptful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...family in the vise of the past, a haunted house and nearly three hours of running time, the Beloved film suggests a sultry cousin of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Demme, in working with screenwriter Adam Brooks on the final version of LaGravenese's script, found himself looking back further. "The more we focused in on 124 Bluestone Road, the more I thought, 'This is Ibsen, this is Chekhov, this is Morrison...
...from a film with such a unanimously powerful opening, with two pitch-perfect supporting turns from Jeremy Davies (the milk-livered translator) and Barry Pepper (the born-again sharpshooter), and an attention to history that is emotionally edifying and alive. Still, the connecting material by which Robert Rodat's script moves from the opening battle sequence to the last is less than wholly compelling, and the framing device of the ex-soldier in the cemetery is maudlin and cumbersome; Spielberg hasn't gotten an ending right in at least ten years. As I said, disputation seems insolent in the case...
Though Antz has both a plot and a passable script, the feeling that the movie exists primarily to demonstrate schnazzy new animation technology is inescapable. Only the second full length movie to be entirely computer animated, the makers of Antz seem particularly interested in demonstrating their ability to depict water and human movement, even if the plot must make some rather forced detours in order to accommodate these animated showpieces...
Along the way, everybody falls off the script, dead and gutted, so that you are basically left with two suspects between whom you may choose your culprit. The suspense is weaker than baby shampoo. Unless you are stripped of imagination, you will find that you have solved the film long before the end, and get frustrated by the spunky and independent student as she plods dumbly through the conclusion...
Culpability, like loss, takes a while to absorb. As the parents, who turn out to be his neighbors, grieve, Dwight goes about his business with a sinking feeling, getting used to the role of villain in a script he can't remember writing. "Between the dense, mounded pectoral muscles there was the breastbone, thin and brittle, and I put my thumb against it, on the spot where the right front of my car would have...