CurtisHanson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you like classic French movies like I like classic French movies -- and get a kick out of modern-day interpretations of same -- then check out the clips below. (Go ahead, I'll wait.) In their original incarnations, neither Curtis Hanson's 8 Mile nor John McTiernan's Die Hard: With a Vengeance scream out "50s!!! 60s!!!" or "France!!!," but, nonetheless, they're the type of clips, courtesy of Buzzfeed, that set the imagination soaring,

Fair warning: the fairly lengthy clips (almost four minutes each) are part of a viral campaign for Stella Artois beer. The marketing message is kept to a minimum. With 8 Kilometres, it's the idea of a rap battle taking place in a beatnik bar between two hepcats with a cool jazz band in the background, filmed in black and white. Instead of a heated war of words, it's more like a rather cordial exchange of philosophies. The lead actor is no Eminem, but who is?

Dial Hard moves the action to a colorful coastal city in 1963, with a perky tune playing in the background. Instead of Bruce Willis as McClane and Jeremy Irons as the evil bomber Simon, we get "Inspector Jean Meglain" playing a game of cat and mouse via telephone with "Simone." In this version, Inspector Meglain has a different set of priorities

After the jump: Dial Hard.

Putting together last week's list of my favorite screenplays of the 2000's was relatively easy. I came up with about ten worthy candidates and narrowed from there. When I started putting together this week's list -- my favorite screenplays of the 1990's -- things got a lot more complicated. I had a much larger list of worthy candidates to choose from. It made me realize that a) the 90's, particularly the late 90's, was a genuinely incredible time for film, and b) I was going to have to split my list into two halves: 1995 -- 1999 and 1990 -- 1994.

So, in support of all the great screenwriters currently on strike, what follows is my favorite screenplays produced between 1995 and 1999. Read that last sentence carefully! If you've got movies you'd add to or subtract from my list, I would love to hear them, but make sure your choice fits the criteria. On my 2000's list, I was getting comments like "How DARE you not include Citizen Kane, you freaking idiot?"

Now then, with all apologies to the scripts it killed me to leave off (Office Space, A Simple Plan, As Good As it Gets, Chasing Amy, Lone Star, Three Kings, Swingers, Jackie Brown, Kingpin, I could go on and on), here is my alphabetical list:

Those who go to Lucky You expecting a Drew Barrymore performance that is, at long last, devoid of her half human/half sunflower kitsch will be disappointed. The role is more or less straight drama, but much like Bruce Willis has a writer on standby whose job is to inject "Bruceness" into the scripts he likes, someone seems to have shoehorned in a number of cutesy Shirley Temple-style comedy moments for Drew, and downgraded the maturity level of her character to late teens, as opposed to thirty-something. At one point, sitting beside her boyfriend Huck (Eric Bana) at the poker table, she tells him that it was only right that he lost a hand, since he won the last one -- the other guy should have a turn to win. Huck is a semi-pro whose lifelong attempt to chisel a living out of cards has left him broke, and the film opens with him pawning a family heirloom for a couple hundred bucks. You get a feeling from the start that Matt Damon and Ed Norton dream of this guy.

Hopes rise early on with a funny cameo from Robert Downey Jr. as a friend of Huck who runs some kind of one-man telephone scam. He keeps several cell-phones in front of him on a table and is continually picking them up and putting them back down like three-card monte. Once he makes it clear that he has no money to lend, Huck moves on and we meet some of his less colorful friends, including a compulsive (male) gambler who agreed to get breast implants if he lost a bet, and did just that. Charles Martin Smith is an interesting choice for a mobbed-up loan shark, but the film sort of lets his character die on the vine after one sharply-written early scene with Huck. It also becomes weirdly obvious early on that the film was intended to be titled Lucky Town, since that title makes more sense and since we hear an extended sampling of Bruce Springsteen's Lucky Town. Lucky You sounds more like a lost Matthau-Lemmon comedy from the early 70s.

If you're someone who grew up in the 1970s and early '80s, then you definitely know who Jackie Earle Haley is. If only for his performance as Kelly Leak in the Bad News Bears trilogy (and his great turn as Moocher in Peter Yates' Breaking Away), Jack Haley made for a memorable little character actor. After co-starring with a then-unknown actor named Tom Cruise in 1983's Losin' It (which was directed by none other than Curtis Hanson), Haley kind of fell off the Hollywood radar -- in a big way. Aside from a few quick moments in Murder, She Wrote and MacGyver episodes, Jackie Earle Haley could be seen in titles like Dollman, Nemesis and Maniac Cop 3. And unfortunately he didn't work often enough to gain much of a Campbell-type cult following.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I sat down to watch All the King's Men and noticed that -- hey, isn't that Jackie Earle Haley playing Sean Penn's ultra-tough bodyguard dude?!? How cool to see him back in a movie again! Granted, he didn't have many lines, but it was still great to see an old pal after so many years. And then I headed off to see a dark comedy / suburban drama called Little Children ... and there was Jackie again, this time with a much meatier role: He plays a convicted sex offender who moves into a cushy suburban neighborhood that most definitely doesn't want him around. And the guy gives a great performance in a really difficult role.

So who knows what's next for Mr. Haley? This New York Times article does a fine job of summing up the guy's comeback, and I think that both of the directors involved (Steven Zaillian and Todd Field) deserve a hearty round of praise for pulling Jackie Earle out of obscurity and giving him another shot in the spotlight. Based on the two performances I just witnessed, I suspect Haley will be popping up a lot more frequently in the near future.