Watching Movies: DOWN WITH LOVE, CITY OF GHOSTS, THE SHAPE OF THINGS
May 10th, 2003
(What the critics have to say about the screenwriting for new releases:)
DOWN WITH LOVE
"Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, the screenwriters, have shaken together a canny cocktail of period vernacular and deliberately labored double entendres, some of which extend for entire scenes. The best moments have a glorious, hectic artificiality, emphasized by split screens, gimmicky editing and the obviously cardboard three-quarter moon that bobs in the ersatz Manhattan sky." -- A.O. Scott (New York Times)
CITY OF GHOSTS
"Dillon wrote the screenplay with neo-noir novelist Barry Gifford (''Wild at Heart ''), so the dialogue is brittle and wise and the air thick with menace. But the ''mysterious Orient'' cliches run thick too, from the sodden expatriates at the Bangkok Belleville Hotel to the pedicab driver who becomes the hero's selfless Sancho Panza (Sereyvuth Kem, himself a survivor of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge) to the self-reliant babe who becomes an adoring love interest (Natascha McElhone in a role that's like a third leg)." -- Ty Burr (Boston Globe)
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
"LaBute uses his Adam and Eve template to reiterate notions of gender collision that he'd shown in ''In the Company of Men'' and ''Your Friends & Neighbors.'' But ''The Shape of Things'' feels less like LaBute's usual unmitigated excoriations and plays more as a hard satire of weak men, cold-blooded women, and the transparency and elasticity of art." -- Wesley Morris (Boston Globe)
"The most vexing thing about the story in between -- set mainly on campus lawns, in two apartments, in the lobby of a theater, and at a Starbucks -- is that it comes across as two intertwining love stories, even though all the participants wind up single at the end, bereft of lovers and friends alike." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)
DOWN WITH LOVE
"Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, the screenwriters, have shaken together a canny cocktail of period vernacular and deliberately labored double entendres, some of which extend for entire scenes. The best moments have a glorious, hectic artificiality, emphasized by split screens, gimmicky editing and the obviously cardboard three-quarter moon that bobs in the ersatz Manhattan sky." -- A.O. Scott (New York Times)
CITY OF GHOSTS
"Dillon wrote the screenplay with neo-noir novelist Barry Gifford (''Wild at Heart ''), so the dialogue is brittle and wise and the air thick with menace. But the ''mysterious Orient'' cliches run thick too, from the sodden expatriates at the Bangkok Belleville Hotel to the pedicab driver who becomes the hero's selfless Sancho Panza (Sereyvuth Kem, himself a survivor of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge) to the self-reliant babe who becomes an adoring love interest (Natascha McElhone in a role that's like a third leg)." -- Ty Burr (Boston Globe)
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
"LaBute uses his Adam and Eve template to reiterate notions of gender collision that he'd shown in ''In the Company of Men'' and ''Your Friends & Neighbors.'' But ''The Shape of Things'' feels less like LaBute's usual unmitigated excoriations and plays more as a hard satire of weak men, cold-blooded women, and the transparency and elasticity of art." -- Wesley Morris (Boston Globe)
"The most vexing thing about the story in between -- set mainly on campus lawns, in two apartments, in the lobby of a theater, and at a Starbucks -- is that it comes across as two intertwining love stories, even though all the participants wind up single at the end, bereft of lovers and friends alike." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)
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