I find it misleading and even unethical, that you failed to mention that Paul Thomas Anderson was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay because of his script for BOOGIE NIGHTS. It obviously doesn't help prove your point does it? Also, even though No country for old men is adapted, you seem to say that that is the only reason why it is good. i beg to differ; the book was mediocre at best, and had any other director/s been at the helm, it wouldn't have been as great as it turned out to be. As Roger Ebert said, "flawless."
SPONSORED BY:
When Two Heads Really Are Better
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
But a forceful co-writer might have pointed out to Anderson where his script is too ambitious and breaks apart, and how to repair the fractures. Just as Samuel Beckett was not the ideal director of his own plays, Anderson need not do it all. He has proved himself supremely caring about actors and suave with a camera. But narrative structure is not his strength in "Magnolia," "Punch-Drunk Love" or "There Will Be Blood."
The cult of the writer-director with his or her uncompromising vision deserves more skepticism from film critics. The economies of scale that come from putting one's own words up on the screen can just as easily result in one function or both being short-changed, or in cinematic solipsism. I am not the first to suggest that Woody Allen, whose best films were collaborations with Marshall Brickman, should perhaps slow down and take on a colleague to help with a few rewrites. John Sayles might let someone else realize more of his gritty scripts. And maybe Lynch should stop trying single-handedly to find plots in the streams of images that bubble up during his TM sessions. Time to bring back Mark Frost, his co-author on the pilot for "Twin Peaks"?
The release later this year of "Synecdoche, New York" will allow audiences to judge the directing debut of Charlie Kaufman. The most daring screenwriter of his generation, responsible for both "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," his movie (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman) is guaranteed to be out of the ordinary. Whether its visual assurance will match its verbal and metaphysical audacity is another matter.
Uncompromised vision, when unchecked, can be as much of a waste of time as dumbed-down, audience-tested appeasement. It was parodied to devastating effect on HBO's "Entourage" in the episodes where monomaniac writer-director Billy Walsh almost destroys Vincent Chase's career in the stink-bomb "Medellín." We also saw it for real back in 1980, when Michael Cimino gave us "Heaven's Gate."
The finest wines, more often than not, are blends of the finest grapes.
Richard B. Woodward, who has directed and produced two documentary films, is an arts critic in New York.
© 2008
Discuss