The Spirit Awards: Best Screenplay

The Spirit Awards: Best Screenplay.

The Spirit Awards: Best Screenplay

Here is a category where the players change ever so slightly and deliciously. Mr. Wes Anderson and Mr. Roman Coppola wrote a love story to both youth and nature, “Moonrise Kingdom.” These are forces we all hope to experience without the inevitable forces of those who want to end youthfulness and nature. Brilliant dialoge and love explained by two adorable teens in a slapstick style escape and chase for the better make this a script worth reading.

Mr. David O. Russell adapted  Matthew Quick‘s novel “Silver Linings Playbook” and made it his own. His son, Matthew Russell was featured in the film as the autistic neighborhood kid wanting to capture Mr. Bradley Cooper‘s manic moments via video camera and it was his son’s true journey growing up that ends up blended in the powerful story of this film. You can’t make this stuff up but yet he seems to and the film becomes like a capper comedy.

Mr. Ira Sachs and Mr. Mauricio Zacharias wrote a screenplay and made it a film that sadly just now could be made without fanfare or protestation, “Keep the Lights On.” The power of love combined with the dark side of love and addiction leap off the page and create situations that anyone with a romantic bone in their body can relate to either openly or secretly. We don’t have the capability of seeing relationships after the party or the concert or the gala. That show is a two person play and the characters who are at opposite ends either flame out or with less likely odds fail which doesn’t mean it ends.

Mr.Martin McDonagh was nominated for the film “Seven Psychopaths” a remarkable screenplay about a screenwriter and his accidental entrance to a bunch of seedy Los Angeles criminals listless lives. There is the need for the fictional screenwriter Marty played by Colin Farrell to get back in the swing of things and produce and with the secret plan and life of his buddy Charlie played by Sam Rockwell as his blood thirty muse the story unravels and writes itself and the most unlikely of characters wander in and out of scenes that make the few who ended up seeing this film hungry for the “right” ending. Scenarios aplenty.

Ms. Zoe Kazan also a well deserved nominee who wrote, produced and starred in “Ruby Sparks.” A tortured writer creates the perfect and literal girlfriend only to come to life and change for better or for worse the fate of Calvin Weir-Fields played by the reliable Paul Dano. Another love story that begins perfect on paper and ultimately turns into a literary Frankenstein creation gone mad. The performances made this story stick.

My heart says Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola and my head says David O. Russell.