Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plans. The role of Dvornicek is necessary both to sketch and flesh out the lines this play keep crossing between a Noel Coward-style romp and a post-modern mockery. The first scene is the weakest and least lively, probably because it is the most "straight" and Stoppard's script seems confined at first by the boundaries he had set for himself. The show really begins in the second scene where the silly tunes become the perfect complement for the slippery dialogue. After a brief intermission the pace keeps up at a careless rate that borders on the chaotic...
Sounds promising, but Peter's Friends is awful, with glimpses of wit. The script is hopelessly schematic: one long, drawing-room chat in which people dish each other, then leave the room so they can be talked about. Kenneth Branagh's direction shows none of the care he lavished on his Henry V and little of the rowdy dazzle of Dead Again. He also misuses some wonderful actors, including his wife, Emma Thompson; she must put her radiance on hold to play a prematurely old maid who wants Peter to "fill me with your babies." Though the plot...
Hence Hoffa, an utterly externalized view of the corrupt, crusading boss of the Teamsters, James R. Hoffa. The R stood for Riddle, and David Mamet's lean script is content to leave him at that. Hoffa does stuff -- bullies management, connives with the Mob -- but who is he? The movie gives not a clue. Jack Nicholson looks eerily like his subject, and he has the abrupt gestures and staccato voice of a man who overcomes lack of eloquence by force of will. But director Danny DeVito, who also plays Hoffa's closest ally, gets way too fond...
Based on a moldering script by director Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, Toys is informed by a sensibility still more antique: 1960s peacenik. It posits a conflict for control of a family toy company between a near holy fool (Robin Williams) and his uncle, a retired Army general (Michael Gambon) who wants to convert the plant to military-weapons production. Both are predictable types. Their employees are so sweetly innocent one longs for Hoffa's Teamsters to come in and give them mean lessons. But everyone's main function is to trigger special effects and lend scale to production designer...
...spit, polish and bluster. Frank Slade is a piece of work, all right, and playing him Al Pacino is always an actor acting -- in love with his own prodigious technique. For which, thank heaven, it permits him to range boldly outside the conventional lines of Bo Goldman's script for Scent of a Woman...