Gabriele Muccino
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I'm thinking of movies like Bertrand Blier's "Going Places" and "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," along with his almost unseen "Mon Homme."
Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
Directed by Robert Bresson
influenced Seven Pounds (2008)
Characters
You might have to go back to Claude Laydu in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest to see an actor undergoing such exquisite anguish as Will Smith does in Gabriele Muccino’s Seven Pounds.
(Remember Bill Murray in "The Razor's Edge"?)
Grant Nieporte’s first produced feature film script is an aborted attempt at the seasonal inspirational genre that films like The Bishop’s Wife and especially It’s a Wonderful Life and The Miracle on 34th Street aced.
But Muccino and screenwriter Grant Nieporte (a TV scribe from 8 Simple Rules ...) go for the mawkish gotcha at every opportunity, turning what could have been a touching portrait of loss into a morbid collision of It’s a Wonderful Life and Love Story .
The debut screenplay from Grant Nieporte, whose previous credits includes three combined episodes of TV�s Sabrina the Teenage Witch and 8 Simple Rules, maintains its mysterioso Pay It Forward-like mentality for the first few scenes, but once those restraints are obviously lifted (no later than Ben signing a particularly titled form) it is still under the impression that its hiding from us in an effort to hammer home a resolution that is absent of any poignancy whatsoever and would be laughed off an episode of ER.
Smith’s reunion with director Gabriele Muccino (the far more tolerable “The Pursuit of Happyness”) is basically “Pay It Forward” meets “Babel.”
I am reminded of a film you should see some day, Melville's " Le Samourai ," about a man who lies on a bed in a dark hotel room and smokes, and gets up, and pays meticulous attention to his appearance, and goes out into the night, and we have no idea who this man is.
The movie starts in the vein of a ruthlessly intelligent drama like “Michael Clayton” before racing through adversity, running a couple of unearned victory laps and landing just shy of a mawkish Will Smith vehicle like “Seven Pounds.”
The film rather started to remind me of Zhang Yimou's To Live, a 1994 film about the endless hardships endured by a Chinese family as their fortunes plummet.
We're left with a queasy mix of "Working Girl" (1988) and Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" (1948).None of these problems can be laid at the door of the actors.
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
influenced The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Characters
It reminded me of the same sweet spot between movie star and regular person that Julia Roberts was able to hit in "Erin Brockovich."
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
Directed by David Zucker
influenced Seven Pounds (2008)
Music
Besides being inextricably linked to 1988's spoof extraordinaire "The Naked Gun," the lyrics don't exactly lend themselves to an elementary school choir ("I walked her home and she held my hand/I knew it wouldn't be just a one-night stand").
Set in San Francisco during the early 1980s (there's a Raging Bull poster tossed in, if you don't believe me), the film has Smith's Gardner lugging around useless medical props, watching over his kid (Jaden Smith, Will's son) after his wife (Thandie Newton, again playing the shrew -- where's the lyricism that Bertolucci and Demme mined?) leaves him, and attending a competitive stock-broker internship while sleeping in subway restrooms.
All but Emily prove to be minor figures in the story which, in the end, hews closer to the beats of a conventional Love Story -type romance than an unconventional drama.
But Muccino and screenwriter Grant Nieporte (a TV scribe from 8 Simple Rules ...) go for the mawkish gotcha at every opportunity, turning what could have been a touching portrait of loss into a morbid collision of It’s a Wonderful Life and Love Story .
Hart has said in interviews that he wants the film to be a nuanced portrayal of Black fathers, and it succeeds modestly, so put it up there with Will Smith drama The Pursuit of Happyness .
The screenplay comes with the second worst cinematic use of jellyfish ever (the worst forever belongs to Will Smith’s “Seven Pounds”), where Collet-Serra’s most wrongheaded directorial tendencies come spilling out.
It also features the worst/best appearance of jellyfish as a climatic storytelling device since the movie “Seven Pounds” (thank you, writer Anthony Jaswinski).
An extended episode of "Secret Millionaire", Seven Pounds transforms a Melvin and Howard conceit into the story of an undercover Samaritan intent on changing the lives of seven worthy strangers.
As an eternally angelic waif, the script gives Lilly little room to move simultaneously through the murky martyrdom of her romantic predicament and her impending end, especially as she’s about as maudlin as Rosario Dawson in Seven Pounds (2008).
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Directed by Ben Stiller
influenced by The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Themes
Not surprisingly, screenwriter Steve Conrad ("The Pursuit of Happyness," "The Weather Man") has again updated the daydreaming elements while maintaining the themes and eventual transition to real-life adventures for the character that occurred in both the story and original cinematic adaptation.
It is a well-intentioned and personal concept undone by a poorly developed script by Steve Conrad (The Weather Man, The Pursuit of Happyness).
Luckily, the CGI-marred moments flood only the first 30 minutes of the film, allowing for a loaded, inspiring experience familiar to other serious Conrad works like ‘‘The Pursuit of Happyness.’’
The screenplay is by Steve Conrad whose scripts include Will Smith's The Pursuit of Happyness and Gore Verbinski's The Weather Man .
The screenplay is written by Steve Conrad ("The Pursuit of Happyness," "The Weather Man").
American movie audiences don’t like movies about “these sorts of people”; we prefer it when the poverty line is something to be crossed, and then crossed back the other way, the way Will Smith did on the road to bootstraps fame and fortune in “The Pursuit of Happyness.”
The film’s campiness might then pull in a different sort of aficionados—those who celebrate films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”—Kirk…