Dave (1993)
Directed by Ivan Reitman
A sweet-natured Temp Agency operator and amateur Presidential look-alike is recruited by the Secret Service to become a temporary stand-in for the President of the United States.
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What critics compared Dave to
With a gentle, affectionate mocking, director Gary Ross (making his directorial debut after writing Big and Dave) lampoons the quaintness of such TV programs by rigorously building a model that adheres to the formula, then slowly pulling it down over the course of two hours.
As he did with Big and Dave, writer and director Gary Ross uses comedy to deal with the value conflicts which continue to divide Americans.
Ross wrote the screenplays for "Big" and "Dave," which were long on warmth and short on complexity and, by that measure…
Written and directed by Gary Ross, who wrote those other delightful fantasies Big and Dave, Pleasantville is like a flip slide to The Truman Show , to which it has been vociferously compared.
Pleasantville marks the directorial debut of Ross, though as the much-praised writer of Big and Dave, he knows his way around imaginative fables about switches in identity.
Although the director, Gary Ross, makes his feature debut with this picture, he's the guy who also penned the hit movies, "Big" and "Dave," two films that not only delivered high concept plots in an entertaining fashion, but also added nice layers of dimensional humaneness to them.
Just like the movie Dave with Kevin Kline, we love our fictitious politicians to shoot from the hip, confess the truths and truly make the world a better place.
The film's overseer, comic giant Ivan Reitman ("Ghostbusters", "Twins" and "Dave" among others), probably came up with just the odd suggestion.
No surprise that this adaptation comes from the sure hand of director/writer Gary Ross who keeps this theme fresh, from Dave to Pleasantville to Seabiscuit and now, to The Hunger Games.
That said, does writer/director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit and Pleasantville – not to mention writing credits on Big, Dave, and Mr. Baseball) ultimately deliver a Hunger Games film adaptation that accurately transports fan-favorite characters and events onto the big screen – as well as offering up an entertaining movie experience for audience members who haven’t bothered with the books?
He wrote “Big” and “Dave,” then saved his next killer script for the woefully underrated “Pleasantville” (his directorial debut), and followed it by adapting and directing “Seabiscuit,” a film which won no Academy Awards but was nominated for seven of them.
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On this point, Reiner & Co. would have done well to take a page from Ivan Reitman's subtler and less partisan "Dave."
Perhaps because of the 2012 Presidential election season, Warner Bros. released two movies on Blu-ray dealing with the U.S. Presidency: "The American President," the Rob Reiner film with Michael Douglas and Annette Bening (1995), and the film under review here, Ivan Reitman's "Dave" (1993) with Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.
Directed by Ivan Reitman, who after years of whiz-bang entertainments like Ghostbusters and Kindergarten Cop now reveals an unexpectedly gentle side, this agreeable flight of fancy features Kevin Kline in a dual role.
The director of some of the most successful commercial comedies of the last decade-"Ghostbusters," "Twins," "Kindergarten Cop"-and now the immensely entertaining "Dave," Reitman is invariably dismissed by the critics, as if a talent to amuse were something to take for granted.
One could argue that the advantages of "Dave" lie in director Ivan Reitman's ("Ghostbusters," "Twins" and "Kindergarten Cop") clout in Hollywood.
And while director Reitman ("Ghostbusters," "Kindergarten Cop," "Twins") has not been known as the most subtle of filmmakers, the combination of his sure commercial sensibility and Ross' fastidious writing has resulted in a smoothly professional comedy that has an appealing air of low-key ridiculousness about it.
Directed by Gary Ross (the writer of Big and Dave; writer/director of Pleasantville, Seabiscuit and The Hunger Games) and scripted by Ross and Olivia Milch, Ocean’s 8 begins with Debbie getting released from a long stint in prison after Claude, a former boyfriend (Richard Armitage), betrayed her to the police.