It took place from, like, until yesterday, and it was terrible. At least David Sedaris was genuinely funny before he started writing thin allegories about, like, turtles smoking cigarettes or whatever he does now.
The whole memoir thing seemed to kind of track with the whole reality TV thing, as if our garbage television necessitated that we now read garbage books. Running with Scissors is based on the Augusten Burroughs memoir of the same name, and is about a young man named, wait for it, Augusten Burroughs, coming of age in the late s. His mom Annette Bening is a delusional, narcissistic, would-be poet and his dad is Alec Baldwin.
Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin fight all the time, which is hard for young Augusten, because he just wants to be a hairdresser. One night really? He starts giving her valium. Then he basically, like, forces her and Alec Baldwin to get a divorce. Oh, he is a real character, by the way. Meanwhile, Augusten is forced to move into his weird house with his weird family.
The movie ends with him saying goodbye to his mess of a mom, and the weird, down-trodden, dog-food-eating wife of the doctor giving him a tin can full of money and him getting on a bus to New York City to become a writer. The story of a young man being abandoned by his mother into the mildly eccentric family of a psychiatrist right as he is coming into his own is an interesting story!
It makes sense that Augusten Burroughs would write a memoir about something like that and that it would be successful. It follows that Hollywood would then adapt that memoir into a movie. Got it. What makes those in this position, which many aspire to, so unhappy?
The lead characters in Running with Scissors have psychiatric problems and are receiving treatment by a private doctor in his own home. Have they been cut back too? Are they even operating, and for that matter, are these psychiatric problems even properly diagnosed and treated by anyone? The director of the film, Ryan Murphy, was sought after to direct other projects, but declined until this opportunity occurred.
Plastic surgery is a complex and interesting topic, raising social questions of health, personal satisfaction and science.
In 59 episodes, the show has so far addressed malpractice four times, aging three times and obesity twice. Various appearance-altering diseases have each been subjects once. All of this is far outnumbered by the incidence of incest six times , orgies five times , hypersexuality and masochism each twice , and necrophilia, zoophilia, and pedophilia each once.
In this case, Murphy has clearly chosen to emphasize and exaggerate the unusual and shocking, while quickly skimming over the complex and substantial issues. The same happens in Running with Scissors. I had never met anybody else, other than me, who had polished their allowance, and things like that.
Yet these are given the same weight as childhood curiosities and an obsession with the superficial. Escape, when circumstances are so unbearable they must be left behind, is the response of Augusten in the film. In other words, out of tragic circumstances a few lucky ones might pull through, while the rest remain stuck. A certain cynicism is a trait of both the writer, Burroughs, and the director, Murphy.
The tendency to avoid the most complex and serious topics in favor of the exaggerated, the quirky, the odd—escaping any need to seriously delve into social life—is a common problem in filmmaking at the moment. Menu Search. Latest Profile. Contact About. Running with Scissors , written and directed by Ryan Murphy, based on the book by Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors is based on the memoir of the same title by Augusten Burroughs. Contact us. Related Topics. So how do you tackle these very interesting subject matters without alienating the audience?
I think they've done that very successfully. You keep it in the interpretation of the viewer, and you lead them through that without being too alienating. To some, watering down such sexually explicit moments may be understandable. To others, however, the two most stunning inconsistencies will be harder to explain. The first that arrives in the film version of "Scissors" is a tense scene that finds a crazed Bookman kneeling over Dr. Finch Cox while he sleeps.
Holding a pair of scissors over his head, Bookman nearly stabs the eccentric family patriarch, but he is stopped when Agnes Finch Jill Clayburgh discovers him. The moment not only establishes the kind of dramatic tension any good film needs, but it also explains Bookman's immediate, embarrassed departure from Burroughs' life.
There's only one problem, however: It never happened. It's very sexy, you know. It's actually probably exactly what was in the guy's head.
A second scene that Murphy "visualized" was another Hollywood necessity: the closing moment of a film when a character finally escapes his problems.
In "Scissors," a better tomorrow comes via a bus ticket to New York and a secret stash of money given to young Augusten to help pave his way.
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