julie julia Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The somewhat tainted Writers Guild of America nominees were announced today. With at least nine disqualified screenplays - 4 or 5 of which happen to be major Oscar contenders - the WGA allowed a few films to be put into the conversation while swatting down a few more noble, interesting and challenging efforts in order to make room for one of the worst comedic screenplays of 2009.

With Inglourious Basterds and Up out of the picture in the Original Screenplay category, we expected and were delivered nominations for (500) Days of Summer (by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber), The Hurt Locker (by Mark Boal) and A Serious Man (by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen). Of all the impressive things the supporters of Avatar claim about the billion-dollar blockbuster, the last thing that rolls off their tongues is James Cameron's screenplay. Well now they can play the nomination card on us all as this WGA nod is at least one thing it has in common with Titanic. Our long weekend nightmare is over though in fearing whether Nancy Meyers would be rewarded with her second WGA nod (her first was Private Benjamin) for It's Complicated. Instead, the WGA managed to do even worse in nominating Jon Lucas & Scott Moore for their unbelievably popular hit, The Hangover. The esteemed Writer's Guild do realize that they have just christened the writers responsible for Four Christmases, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Full of It (anyone remember that one?) and the Martin Lawrence kids basketball film, Rebound, with a nomination right? Dave Eggers contributed to two screenplays in 2009 (Away We Go & Where The Wild Things Are) and you nominated one of the worst comedies of the year. Yes, I am aware it made $285 million. It still should have gone straight to video.

Stars must shine brighter than the material that surrounds them. Amy Adams certainly does that in Leap Year, which opens wide today. (See the Cinematical review by Eric D. Snider.) The creaky romantic comedy is not worthy of her talents, but you'd never know that from watching Adams in the movie. She's game for just about anything, whether it's stepping in cow flop, getting covered in mud, chasing a runaway car down a hill, or delivering lines that weren't funny when they were first trotted out in vaudeville 80 years ago.

It's a measure of Adams' abilities that you may be tempted to root for her sweet, clueless character anyway. Resistance is not futile; the film's charms are, sadly, very limited, and witnessing a supposedly modern adult woman act like a naive girl-child is quite frustrating. Still, Adams graces two quiet interludes with soul and warmth, and avoids becoming fussy and mannered in an attempt to oversell the comedy -- a trap that the great Meryl Streep fell into recently with It's Complicated.

Adams and Streep have appeared together in two films, so it's instructive to compare the two at similar stages of their respective careers. Streep began her screen career at the age of 28 with a supporting role in Julia in 1977. Over the next decade, she filled her resume with a range of high-powered dramatics and sorrowful tragedy. She became a fixture at the Academy Awards, earning two Oscars and five other nominations during that ten-year period. She rose quickly into the ranks of dramatic leading ladies, but it seems that it was difficult at the time for audiences to accept her as anything other than some variation of a cool, distant customer.