Leo S. Lo

August 6 – August 12

Films watched:

1. Doc Hollywood (1991)
2. The Prizer Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005)
3. Cemetery Junction (2010)
4. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
5. Conversations with Other Women (2005)
6. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
7. Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing) (1988)

Books Read:

1. Button, Button – written by Richard Matheson

Screenplays read:

1. Dinner for Schmucks – by Andy Borowitz. Revisions by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio, Jon Vitti. Current revisions by David Guion & Michael Handelman. Based on the original French film “Le diner de ” by Francis Veber. February 27, 2007.

Films

Some 80′s and early 90′s movies are kind of like comfort food, they are just easy to watch when you don’t feel like trying anything new.  Doc Hollywood fits that bill perfectly. This Hollywood’s fantasy of an American small town is charming enough to overcome its many clichés. Michael J Fox is likable (c’mon, he walks his pig!), and Woody Harrelson and Bridget Fonda are fun and entertaining.

Written and directed by Jane Anderson (adapted from Terry Ryan’s book), The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is based on a remarkable true story of a mother who kept her 10 children fed by entering and winning  jingle contests in the 50′s and 60′s. Julianne Moore carries the picture as the saintly wife and mother. Woody Harrelson (once again!) gives a great supporting performance as the flawed husband. Though the ups and downs of the family may seem a bit repetitive after a while, the 3rd act climax still manages to be quite moving.

After several rather forgettable Hollywood movies (Ghost Town is an exception) for Ricky Gervais, he and Stephen Merchant make their big screen directorial debut in Cemetery Junction. There are laughs but this is essentially a drama, which might explain why it did not even get a theatrical release in the U.S. and went straight to video. It’s a shame. The duo set out to make a British coming of age film, and they largely succeeded. The film is warm, feel-good, funny, and it captures the sentimentality of the time – exactly the qualities you would expect from a good Hollywood coming of age movie.

I have a soft spot for the movie because it is about a small town in the Reading, Berkshire area, which is where I went to school some time in the previous century.

While adaptation studies have moved away from concerning too much about fidelity or literal adaptation, some literary works are still more problematic to adapt than others. David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which is a collection of short stories and transcripts of interviews) may be one of those.  It is probably too ambitious a project for first time director John Krasinski. The result is more like a play than a film. Well, it’s actually more like a series of interviews (you see why it’s difficult to adapt) than a film. There isn’t a strong enough narrative engine to the protagonist’s story to power all the interviews. But with so many pros in the business take the easy and lazy roads, I admire Krasinski’s ambition to go for the challenging project.

The conversations in Conversations with Other Women are authentic and the relationship between the two main characters feels real. It even has a bit of the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset feel (and this is a very high compliment). So it’s unfortunate that the split screen presentation so overshadows the actual content of the film. The split screen takes a little bit of time to get used to, but it is used effectively after the story gets going, so I don’t think of it as a just gimmick. However, I would still prefer to have it presented the conventional way.

The Hudsucker Proxy, despite its stunning visual and art direction, is a lesser Coen Brothers work, especially when compared to what comes before (Barton Fink) and after (Fargo) it in the brothers’ filmography. The characters are caricatures and lack depth to make them sympathetic.

The Vanishing begins with a suspenseful sequence in a tunnel which plays with the viewers’ knowledge of the title. The real story then unfolds in a non-linear, matter-of-fact fashion and concludes with one of the most chilling and disturbing endings I have seen in any film. It still gives me the chill whenever I think about it. A true psychological thriller. A masterpiece.

Book:

The stories in this Richard Matheson short stories collection have a very Twilight Zone feel to them. One of the stories, Button Button, is the source material for The Box (written and directed by Richard Kelly) which I have not seen yet. It’s also been adapted to a Twilight Zone episode, also called Button Button, which apparently Matheson hated. Then I discovered that Matheson was a writer for several Twilight Zone episodes. Okay, now that explains why his stories are so Twilight-Zone-y.

Screenplay:

This draft of the screenplay is quite different from the movie which suggests that it’s an early draft. The Steve Carell character in this draft is not fully developed yet, and neither is the “dinner” nor the supporting characters. But I can see the appeal of the story here already. I found the movie (unexpectedly) well written, so it’s interesting to read an earlier draft to see the creative process of polishing the script to that final version. No fewer than six writers have worked on this draft already.

Pick of the Week:

Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

2010:

Total films watched: 212 (in 224 days)

Total books read: 13 (11 to go)

Total screenplays read: 23 (29 to go)