There’s a risk in adapting a play for the screen. The typically confined nature of the source material can lead to a stage bound feel in the movie. That locked, static aesthetic is anathema to an art form that’s known, after all, as motion pictures. (Take a look at many movies made in the wake of noisy, bulky sound equipment being introduced to the process in the early 1930s if you don’t believe me. The worst of them look like filmed plays.) One of the best examples of a director and movie that thrillingly breaks free of the source material’s stage roots is Miloš Forman’s dazzling Amadeus. Chicago, too, adds a cinematic spectacle feel to its musical number sequences.
Joe Mantello’s adaptation of playwright Mart Crowley’s seminal LGBTQ melodrama The Boys in the Band only breaks free of the source material’s stagy feel in a few key sequences. Each time it happens is thrilling; it injects the wider world into the hermetically sealed one of the story. While the rest of the movie could have easily taken place on a stage, Boys has plenty more going for it to make it an electric experience.
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Oliver Stone liberally blends fact and fiction to create his portrait of the NSA whistleblower at the center of his film Snowden. The director, who co-wrote the script with Kieran Fitzgerald, admits as much, confessing that the way Edward Snowden secreted highly classified information out of an NSA facility was stylized for the movie. “[W]hen he lifted these materials and helped get them out to the public, it is not done in the realistic way that it was done. It was—we gave it a little juice, because it’s a drama, and because, frankly, it’s probably much more banal than you think, the way he did it.”
Stone is a filmmaker who is famous for using creative license to bring a bold streak of drama to real-life events. With Snowden, his amalgamation of truth and Hollywood spectacle is a magnificent success. Stone humanizes Edward Snowden, making him a guy with whom we can all relate, while portraying his actions and the events surrounding them as the tense, establishment-shaking moments they are.
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Star Trek fans did a lot of phaser clutching back in 2008 when director J.J. Abrams said he wanted to make his iteration of Trek more like Star Wars. “All my smart friends liked Star Trek,” Abrams said at the time. “I preferred a more visceral experience.” For Star Trek Beyond, Abrams handed the keys over to director Justin Lin, and he took a more hands-off approach as producer. Of the three Star Trek movies under the Abrams banner, Beyond is the one most like a visceral Star Wars adventure.
Lin is most famous for the four Fast and Furious films he directed, and his gifts for staging adrenaline pumping action sequences are on full display here. He also directed two episodes of the cult sitcom Community, so Lin knows how to handle ensembles and comedy as well. Amidst all the action is a script by Simon Pegg – who also plays Chief Engineer Scotty – and Doug Jung that honors the ideals and ethos of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The end result is a movie that focuses more on the wow factor than it needs to, but is still immensely enjoyable because of it.
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