Mister Tee wrote
I’ll agree with Italiano that The Prince of Tides is a terrible nominee (I’d have to do a full review to decide it was absolute worst of the decade, but it’s in the running).
Returning to this conversation, it really might be.
I took a quick glance back. The Adapted nominees I’ve yet to see are Enchanted April and Shadowlands. I should probably watch Europa Europa again, but it’s hard to imagine any of them matching the wild shifts in mood scene for scene in The Prince of Tides, the disjointed narrative always starting and slowing down, and it’s awkward flashbacks. There’s nothing anywhere as wacky as the fade from Nolte crying in Babs’ unprofessional arms to a slow motion shot of her son in football gear running towards the camera. What do those images have to do with each other?
The only other cases I can think of are cases of outright hatred, like if someone just despises Forrest Gump more. Or perhaps dislike for a different tearjerker like The Green Mile (I would just say it’s a far more competent piece of storytelling). I suppose someone could make the case for Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet being a worse offender, but at the end of the day if it isn’t broke don’t fix it, and Hamlet works.
This is all without taking into account what an unconscionable adaptation The Prince of Tides apparently is. I think it’s the worst of the decade in its category, and although there are a handful of nominees I’ve yet to see under Original (Alice, Green Card, Passion Fish) I don’t see anything to rival it either.
Big Magilla wrote:Per author Fannie Flagg they are not the same person.
Here's a further explanation from IMDb.:
No, they are not the same person. Idgy is first seen as the little blonde girl wearing the white dress w/blue hair bow and sash for her sister's wedding. She is later seen attending the wedding in a yellow pantsuit, and is also with Ruth when they witness Buddy's death.
I think the IMDb. writer meant to say "Ninny" (Jessica Tandy's character), not "Idgy" (Mary Stuart Masterson's character). "Ninny" grew up and married Idgie's brother Buddy after the time covered by the flashbacks had passed. That's the way Fannie Flagg wrote it and that's the way it was filmed although there is so much detail in the film most people miss it and make the erroneous assumption that Ninny and Idgie are the same person.
Per author Fannie Flagg they are not the same person.
Here's a further explanation from IMDb.:
No, they are not the same person. Idgy is first seen as the little blonde girl wearing the white dress w/blue hair bow and sash for her sister's wedding. She is later seen attending the wedding in a yellow pantsuit, and is also with Ruth when they witness Buddy's death.
Could be. It's been awhile since I've seen it. My grandmother used to watch it all the time...probably because it's one of the few movies set in (generally) the same time and place where she grew up.
dws1982 wrote:It didn't make much sense to have this prolonged "flashback" narrated by Jessica Tandy when her character doesn't, if I remember right, even appear in said flashback scenes.
SPOILER ALERT FOR FRIED GREEN TOMATOES
Isn't it implied at the film's ending that Jessica Tandy is the older version of Mary Stuart Masterson's character?
The Prince of Tides gets no consideration, and Europa, Europa doesn't either. I'll never understand how someone who began their career working with great filmmakers like Zanussi and Wajda (as Agnieszka Holland did) could turn into such a poor filmmaker. Holland does have writing credits for some great films, but many of them bigger names associated--Danton had Jean-Claude Carriere; Blue had Kieslowski and Piesiewicz. (Korczak is a great film, and she's the sole credited writer there.) Anyway, as for Europa, Europa, I felt the premise was intriguing, but it was also kind crass (will someone see his penis or not?) and clunky. Fried Green Tomatoes would be a very nice movie without those present day scenes. Or, if the present day scenes had at least been better. It didn't make much sense to have this prolonged "flashback" narrated by Jessica Tandy when her character doesn't, if I remember right, even appear in said flashback scenes.
One interesting thing about JFK is that, if you look at the DVD extras, one of the deleted scenes shows that the Donald Sutherland scene was actually two completely separate scenes in the movie, and filmed that way. The second scene was the end of the film (and included a bit more information--for example "General Y" is only mentioned briefly in the movie, but the deleted goes into more detail about him), as in, the very end. It faded out on a shot of Kevin Costner walking away from Donald Sutherland with a shot of the Washington Monument in the background. In the commentary, Stone said it didn't play well because it amounted to a lot of new information coming after the climax of the movie, so they reshot it as one scene. I like JFK, but as a student of history, and someone who has researched the Kennedy assassination quite a bit (and I think it's clear that Oswald was not guilty), I think it's pretty problematic. The stuff debunking the Warren Commission is solid, but the Garrison/Shaw trial was a farce, and it's kind of silly to see Stone presenting it as some great miscarriage of justice doesn't set well. I think Silence of the Lambs is definitely the tighter, more controlled work. It certainly rewards multiple viewings, and even if I think it's more of a director's movie than a writer's movie, I think it deserves my vote here.
Like Sabin, I would have cited Beauty and the Beast in this category as well -- yes, the beauty of the songs and animation are highlights, but the writing carries the movie along pretty splendidly too.
The Prince of Tides is an atrocious movie, and a pathetic nominee in this category. Somehow the script managed to feel both overstuffed and reductive at the same time, throwing in every possible excuse for Nolte's psychological afflictions, and then, at its climax, switching gears entirely to highlight the one definitive event that forever messed him up. It's a mess, with some BAD scenes -- like Nolte holding the violin over the balcony -- that were irritating when they weren't downright dull. It may or may not be THE worst screenplay nominee of the decade, but it's definitely down there.
The flashback scenes in Fried Green Tomatoes are pleasant enough, though they feel very much like Hollywood's idea of the mid-century South than anything realistically lived-in. (Not that I was in Alabama during the Depression to know.) But what clearly disqualifies the movie are the appalling contemporary sequences -- moments like Kathy Bates ramming her car into another in the parking lot, or singing "Stop in the Name of Love" on the trampoline, left me stupefied. These scenes were supposed to be funny? YIKES. Furthermore, this entire section of the movie struck me as utterly pointless from a structural standpoint -- it barely had a narrative of its own, and seemed only to exist to show the characters telling the story we were already being shown in flashback. So, another big no from me. (Apropos of nothing, when I was in Georgia last year, I visited the actual Whistle Stop Cafe. And, of course, I ordered a side of the fried green tomatoes, because how could I not?)
Europa Europa is a very thoughtfully written movie that gets at some interesting things, most notably the inner conflict that a member of an oppressed group must go through when attempting to hide among oppressors. Are the survivalist, self-preservationist rewards of essentially signing up with the enemy worth the moral costs, particularly when it requires you to become a de facto cog in such a destructive regime? That the movie explores these issues in a manner that is both complex and quite gripping makes it a thoroughly deserving nominee, and far more than simply a default-to-Holocaust-movie mention. But it's not quite as splendid as the remaining two nominees.
I came to vote in this poll torn between JFK and Silence, and saw that Silence was winning in a landslide, without a single vote for JFK...so JFK it is! But that's not a slight on The Silence of the Lambs, which I think is a very strong piece of writing. My first encounter with any portion of this movie was in junior high, when my theater teacher showed us the first meeting between Hannibal and Clarice as part of an acting instruction. Even at this young age, I was struck immediately by the precision of the writing, the way the dialogue from both characters landed so sharply, and revealed so much about the characters at the same time. Several years later, when I saw the movie in its entirety -- and every time I viewed it after that -- I have always been struck by how tightly the plot was wound, how Clarice's relationship with Lecter informed her hunt for Buffalo Bill to such an inextricable degree, and how this added such a complex thematic layer to the main suspense plot. That narrative was pretty terrifically handled in sheer craft terms, too, with scenes like Clarice knocking on the door intercut with the FBI house raid functioning like a master class in narrative slight of hand. I certainly don't begrudge all of you who voted for it, and I come very close to doing so myself.
But I was leaning JFK before I wrote this, and given that I think it certainly deserved at least one vote here, I have to give it mine. It's a sprawling piece of writing, covering so much ground narratively and historically, focusing on so many characters, full of so many chaotic and even contradictory theories, that it coalesces to form a portrait of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath that feels just right. It's not that Stone presented the "correct" solutions to unanswered questions about the assassination's loose threads. But he brought to life the confusion, the anger, and the just plain bizarre nature of this narrative's turn of events that characterizes the ways in which this horrific incident has come to be viewed by America's collective memory, and did it in a way that was thought-provoking, enraging, and paced like an avalanche barreling down a mountain. And though I think the movie's technical achievements are hugely notable, I find much of the writing dazzling as well -- in fact, I think that Donald Sutherland monologue is one of the high points of the movie, a thrilling and emotional speech that contextualizes much of the narrative up to that point while propelling it forward into the trial sequence. I don't think anyone would deny that some kind of madness informed the writing of this script -- I certainly wouldn't. But I think what Stone and Sklar came up with is hugely potent as filmmaking (whether or not I'd always vouch for its veracity as history), and it's my winner here.
The Original BJ wrote:Was Bugsy, as the only Best Picture nominee here, seen as a legitimate threat to win?
Not only a legitimate threat, but the only way to bet, if you knew anything about how the Oscars had always worked. To that point, in the 35 years since the establishment of the two-category screenplay awards, this category had never seen a film not nominated for best picture top one that was. This had held true even when the best picture nominee was demonstrably lame, as had happened in the two years just prior. (I won Oscar polls by knowing to ignore good taste and predict Dead Poets Society and Ghost)
As you can tell by what I wrote below, I desperately WANTED Thelma and Louise to win, but I thought its chances were slim -- I was sure the many people I knew who were predicting it (especially women) were setting themselves up for disappointment. I was delighted to be wrong.
It of course marked the end of that ironclad screenplay/best picture correlation. Over the next decade or so, The Usual Suspects, Sling Blade, Gods and Monsters, Almost Famous, Talk to Her and Eternal Sunshine all won, over films on the best picture slate. (And, had we not had the expansion, her over American Hustle would have been another case)
If the Academy was going to cast off WGA nominees, The Commitments was the wrong one to pick. The film is absolutely buoyant – funny and touching, probably the best movie Alan Parker ever made – and the script is one of its most notable elements. Another possible substitution under adaptation might be the Cronenberg version of Naked Lunch (which won at the critics’ voting). And, under original, Barton Fink would be a worthy choice.
I’ll agree with Italiano that The Prince of Tides is a terrible nominee (I’d have to do a full review to decide it was absolute worst of the decade, but it’s in the running). The novel was a huge piece of cheese (I had been recommended to it by people I soon came to distrust), and I don’t know anyone could have done enough to make it truly palatable. But even on the page the love story between Nolte and Streisand was clearly the least interesting element, and it’s astonishing to me that’s what they chose to emphasize (while leaving out passages that would have been far more dramatic, if not necessarily edifying).
Fried Green Tomatoes is two movies: a pleasant enough nostalgia piece with Masterson and Parker, and a godawful present-day framing device where two fine actresses (esp. Bates) are forced to plow through some of the lamest, allegedly-comic material I’ve ever seen. The first movie might have barely merited a nod, but the second disqualifies it from the get-go.
JFK definitely moves like lightning, but I’ve never felt it made all that much sense – it deconstructs the lone assassin theory well enough, but the alternate theory it proposes is batshit insane. And I think what value the film has is considerably more in the directorial/technical area…a lot of the writing (particularly the Tommy Lee Jones/Joe Pesci scenes, and Donald Sutherland’s lunatic rant) borders on the outright bad.
Foreign films had been a bit in recession in the U.S. during this period – from the early 70s through to about Fanny and Alexander, there’d nearly always been at least one or two titles that broke through to become conversation pieces, but that seemed to stop in the late 80s (only cuddly movies, like My Life as a Dog or Cinema Paradiso, much connected with audiences). Europa Europa was a happy exception, and I’m glad it was noted via this nomination. Though the film covered Holocaust territory, it did it from a fresh angle: its central character a man literally defined by (and trying to escape being identified by) the state of his sex organ. This created a borderline-comic but also frightening situation: as someone said at the time, the organ threatened his survival, but might have been the only thing that kept him from losing his true self entirely. The film explored this existential dilemma in fascinating terms.
But I, like most so far, have echoed the Academy’s choice of Silence of the Lambs. I think when you can quote multiple lines from memory – whether gaudy, like “Fava beans” or "I’m having an old friend for dinner”, or a throwaway like “Love the suit” – it’s some sign the writer has done his work well. But Tally’s script is also a model of precision – maintaining both a taut manhunt thriller and that off-center Clarice/Lecter relationship, making them feel like the same, seamless story. We remember the film as incredibly suspenseful/exciting, but we carry away with us the pas de deux between the two lead characters. This is, to put it mildly, not an easy balance to achieve, and Tally was lucky to have scored Demme as director; but he deserves an immense amount of the credit, as well.
Under original, I see Boyz n the Hood as the weakest link. It’s a likable enough film, but distressingly mundane; it always seemed to me it became popular within the Academy in a way Spike Lee’s films never had because it was so familiar, and in some ways so obvious (the sibling rivalry between the brothers is mentioned often enough, mouth-breathers were probably able to pick up on it). There are some potent moments – I love Ice Cube’s bewildered “I guess I have to do something about this” near the end – but on the whole it’s unexceptional work.
I think all the other nominees are at least worthy. It’s true that, by the time Bugsy opened, most of us felt we never needed to see another mob movie. But that shouldn’t blind us to the nice work James Toback did, first in delving into an area of history about which I didn’t know very much, and then in writing such clever dialogue for multiple dimensional characters. I think at this point the film is a bit underrated.
I think the people who made both The Fisher King and Grand Canyon probably figured they had great shots at winning the original screenplay Oscar – and, had either opened in 1990, they might well have triumphed. The Fisher King is a bit lumpy in execution, but for that I mostly blame Terry Gilliam – he brings some visual panache to the film, but also rather too much gaudy imagery for the simple story. The writing looked at in isolation is extremely solid – a thematically rich piece about coming back from catastrophe, with four (or more) well-drawn characters speaking sharp dialogue.
What I like about Grand Canyon is how it didn’t seem to have read any of the standard screenwriting books – it took off in the directions it chose, and tried to give an honest perception of life in the early 90s without tying it to anything like an airtight plot. Such an approach risks banality, of course, and I can’t say Grand Canyon 100% avoids that pitfall – Danny Glover’s character especially teeters of the edge. But the film has a higher batting average than you might expect, and earns most of its emotions honestly (also with humor, which helps).
But I, like most, am voting the Academy exacta this year. Thelma and Louise was my favorite movie of 1991 – the movie that came closest in years to recapturing the zest and daring of the best 70s films – and its script is its most exciting element. Khouri sets up a wonderful “it all started so innocently” situation, watches as it escalates out of control, and lets us see that, for the two main characters, the spiral is not horrifying (as it might be in a noir with the same outline), but exhilarating – exhilarating because it frees them from lives they may not have realized till this moment were keeping them in cages. For all that, Thelma and Louise are not blemishless heroines -- Louise shoots the boor not because she’s afraid of him, but because he’s pissed her off; and Thelma’s idea to do the robbery is incredibly reckless (and, it turns out, stupid). But the film gives us enough rooting interest in the two that we’re on their side in the final reel, even though we suspect it will come to a no-good end. And that end had to be special, to complete the film: the two ladies could have been taken into custody, or escaped through some miracle, and neither would have been fully satisfying. The finale we got was perhaps the greatest stroke in the entire film (and, I’ve heard, somewhat to Ridley Scott’s credit: early drafts supposedly had the car magically make it across the canyon). The leap into the void, followed by freeze frame, was beyond perfection – it fit a definition of great art I once heard from Sondheim: fresh, but inevitable. This is great filmmaking, great screenwriting; Callie Khouri winning the Oscar was one of my top Academy highlights, and I do my bit to replicate it here.
The Original Screenplay field doesn't feature any egregious nominee, though I think the best candidate stands pretty clearly head and shoulders above the rest.
Boyz N the Hood is a pretty raw piece of work, in both the strongest and weakest implications of that word. It's hard to deny that there's an urgency to Singleton's text -- he's got ideas, for sure, and enough justified outrage that the piece has an energy and power to it. But it's also fairly unpolished, and a lot of its speechifying tendencies reveal the work of a newbie writer who hasn't yet learned to convey as much of his themes through subtext rather than dialogue.
In its series of racially charged, interconnected LA stories, Grand Canyon feels a bit to me like a more thoughtful, less shrill version of Crash. Kasdan script is far more insightful about actual human behavior, and far less reliance on ridiculous contrivance than Haggis's, and it manages to tap into the chaos of life in Los Angeles in a far less heavy handed manner. I think Grand Canyon has its own schematic missteps -- pretty much everything having to do with the title of the movie, especially the last shot, reeks of symbolism with a capital S -- and it was absolutely dwarfed a couple years later by Short Cuts. But there's solid writing in a lot of the scenes, and I don't begrudge its nomination.
The Fisher King is kind of a mess, but such a pleasingly ambition one, full of such a weird mash-up of tones, and bursting with plenty of originality, that I have to admire it even if I don't think every moment works as well as others. It has moments of shocking violence alongside warm romantic comedy, scenes of dramatic human sensitivity alongside wild flights of fancy, and as the movie went on, I felt like I had no idea where its narrative was heading. It's rare to be so consistently surprised by a movie's energies, and I credit the writing, even when entire sequences (like the last act Holy Grail quest) seem to be more bizarre than necessary. Too uneven to be the winner, but I wish a lot more movies were more like it.
Was Bugsy, as the only Best Picture nominee here, seen as a legitimate threat to win? I'm very glad it didn't, because it would have cost a splendid piece of writing the prize. This isn't to say that Bugsy was severely lacking in the writing department, though -- it isn't a bracing mob drama, but there's a lot of wit to the writing, and the movie is quite well-crafted at a structural level. It's a more classical piece of writing, sure, lacking in groundbreaking innovation in virtually any respect. But the details of the milieu are well-articulated throughout, and thematically there are some interesting ideas about the nature of mobster as celebrity that give the movie some resonance. I find the movie a perfectly respectable effort.
But Thelma & Louise is a terrific piece of screenwriting, fully deserving of the award it won. The two central characters are richly drawn -- they're two women with major differences in sensibility (I love the efficiency with which Khouri establishes this in the opening packing scenes), and yet you understand completely why they are drawn to each other, how the dynamic of their friendship relies on the way their differences ricochet off one another. The plot kicks into high gear as soon as the murder occurs, and barrels along with marvelous tension along the way, as Thelma & Louise's situation goes from bad to worse to far worse. Along the way, there are plenty of unexpected laughs, thanks to the sharp dialogue and the darkly comic tone Khouri maintains throughout. And that ending is smashing -- this was another movie whose conclusion was spoiled for me before I saw it, and yet, even knowing how things would turn out, hearing Thelma's "Let's not get caught...let's keep going..." gave me goosebumps, so thrilling and moving did I find this exchange. So many writers I know consider this to be a hugely influential screenplay in their own lives, in terms of the things it taught them when they started learning about writing. I'd consider myself among that group, and vote with ease for Thelma & Louise here.
Well, this is an easy year for me, as I can’t vote in either category. I’m missing Grand Canyon in Original and Europa Europa and Fried Green Tomatoes in Adapted.
I'm glad - for once I CAN vote like the Academy did. In both categories.
It's easy, actually. In Original, there are three absoultely forgettable screenplays - and for example Grand Canyon has completely vanished from my mind, and I swear that I HAVE seen it (isn't there a baby at some point? I seem to remember that). The Fisher King is better - it is "bizarre", yet human, "warm". But it's also, structurally, a bit on the messy side. Thank God there's Thelma and Louise - not as edgy as some thought back then, but inventive, unpredictable, humorous AND sad; and most importantly it cares for its two central characters with genuine, unforced empathy, which doesn't happen always.
As for Adapted, Prince of Tides is dreadful - MY pick for worst nominated script of the 90s. Europa Europa has an interesting (true) story, and succeeds in telling it in the most uninteresting way - a pity. Fried Green Tomatoes isn't the most profound movie ever - yet you feel that it has a heart, and an emotional generosity which can be sometimes more effective than pure technical perfection. But it's clearly between JFK and The Silence of the Lambs. JFK is undeniably exciting - even more exciting in 1991 because, after those inert 80s, it reminded many of those great political movies of the 70s. It's actually not as strong as those - it's more self-indulgent, less rigorous, and the whole theory maybe not always convincing. And of course there's that unpleasant homophobic side. But, I mean - it's still a brilliant, dynamic, provocative piece of film writing. The Silence of the Lambs, though, is the best of these - and a thriller, and thrillers are nominated so rarely by this Branch that this is a good chance to vote for one of the best examples in recent memory.
I have a huge problem with Thelma And Louise that nobody seems to mention, along the lines of what Roger Ebert would call the "idiot plot," where if someone had not acted like an idiot the entire rest of the movie would not have been necessary. I cannot believe that Thelma, as naïve as she was, would have made the mistake she did with the Brad Pitt character in the motel room. If she had not done that, the entire rest of the movie need not have happened.
