Film Fanatics: December 2002
by
News and Reviews
- Well, it's official at last - the hit US sitcom Friends will indeed be back for a tenth series, for which each of the six stars will be paid an astounding £800,000 per episode! This £175,000 pay-rise means that, with twenty-two episodes in the series, David Schwimmer (Ross), Matthew Perry (Chandler), Matt LeBlanc (Joey), Jennifer Aniston (Rachel), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe) and Courtney Cox (Monica) will each pocket almost £18 million pounds over the course of the series. Nice work if you can get it!
- Hollywood weirdness continues apace - it seems that US actor and comic Adam Sandler, star of such films as The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy and Little Nicky, is apparently in negations with media giant Sony to secure a record deal for .wait for it. his pet bulldog Meatball!
- Following the success of the first Scooby Doo movie, it appears that a number of other children's favourites will soon be making the leap from the small screen to the silver one. As well as the recently announced adaptation of the children's classic The Magic Roundabout, it now seems that both Tintin and that chubby, lasagne-loving cat Garfield will also be Hollywood movie stars before too long!
- The readers of top British entertainment magazine Heat have spoken - in the 'Reader's Poll 2002' they have named 'snazzy, sexy casino-heist flick' Ocean's Eleven the 'Best Film' of the year. Red Dragon, featuring Anthony Hopkins's third appearance as the gruesome Hannibal Lecter, came a close second, followed by M Night Shyamalan's Signs in third place, Nia Vardalos's surprise hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding in fourth and, in fifth place, Nick Hornby's About a Boy. Ocean's Eleven stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt also took first and second place respectively in the 'Best Film Performance' category. Anthony Hopkins occupied third place in the poll, while Tom Hanks's performance in British director Sam Mendes' latest film Road To Perdition earned him fourth place, followed by Hugh Grant in fifth place for his role in About a Boy.
And now we move from the old film year into the new - and there's really only one film that people in the UK are talking about at the moment:
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (12a)
The second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy follows the three parallel stories of the now separated fellowship. Frodo and Sam continue their lonely trek towards Mordor, Merry and Pippin escape the Orcs and meet a group of giant walking trees, led by Treebeard, while Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas join forces with the King of Rohan in his desperate fight against the armies of Uruk invaders. With only a couple of exceptions this film has received extremely complimentary reviews across the board.
Heat: "The story takes off at a thrilling pace and never lets up for the three-hour duration. The battle between the men of Rohan and the armies of Saruman's Uruks for possession of fortress Helm's Deep takes up close to an hour at the film's finale and is relentless, bloody, violent and loud - maybe too much for sensitive viewers. It's more of an action movie than the fantasy of the first film. [Despite these quibbles, however,] on the evidence of the first two movies Lord of the Rings looks set to become the greatest film trilogy of all time. Ripping along at a cracking pace, The Two Towers stands apart from The Fellowship. with a furious energy all of its own. The special effects and the scale of the finale are awesome and there's more character development. By the end of this one, you'll be left breathless and panting for The Return of the King next Christmas."
The Mail on Sunday: "The Two Towers is a long film and [the audience's] interest [may] flag somewhat, particularly at the scrappy start to the final third. But there are some powerful contemporary messages mixed up with the cod mythology - about heroism, about standing up to be counted and, thanks to Treebeard, even about preserving the environment. The action sequences and the New Zealand landscape (even more spectacular here than in the first film) will probably linger longer in the memory than any of the acting but if you enjoyed The Fellowship of The Ring, The Two Towers will certainly not disappoint."
Evening Standard: "This is probably the greatest battlepiece composed for the screen since Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. With The Two Towers, Tolkien's tapestry of Middle Earth's battle for survival has achieved a majestic proportion, chivalric and quixotic, earthly and magical, an experience that reaches beyond the dimensions of the cinema screen and somehow reflects the global unease of the world in the first years of the 21st century."
The Times: "Like most trilogies, The Lord of the Rings sags in the middle. Jackson's middle episode is a vast schematic piece of action with large damp patches of wooden acting. The camera seems forever on a horizon, gazing across distant plains at humourless armies of yodelling orcs. At times it feels like a giant game of toy soldiers. The computer-generated armies are staggering technical feats, and the axe-on-orc-skull action will thrill young boys, but the grim business of war makes the violence feel far more taxing than the thrills of The Fellowship."
The Observer: "These Tolkien films have a weight and seriousness that very few sword-and-sorcery pictures of the past 30-odd years have attained. .The Two Towers can even stand the self-referential speech at the end by brave, honest hobbit Sam, about the force of mythic tales of good against evil, in which he wonders whether he would be worthy of figuring in such a saga himself. There is, along the way, as you might expect from a legendary tale, much topical resonance with references both fortuitous (two towers under attack) and expected (the belief that evil is abroad and that there are things worth fighting for) to current concerns. The movie, with narrative justification and commercial canniness, concludes with a cliffhanger that aims to have us sitting in the same seats a year hence to see how it all turns out in the concluding episode, The Return of the King. This is likely to be happier, more decisive and infinitely more satisfying that anything that will happen to our world in the next 12 months."
Although Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers seems to be dominating the cinematic landscape at the moment, there are a few other little gems worthy of note, chief among which has to be:
DIRTY PRETTY THINGS (15)
This critically-acclaimed British film, directed by Stephen Frears, manages to be simultaneously 'a gritty drama about London's illegal-immigrant community' and an 'audacious thriller about the grisly global trade in human organs' which comes to light after Nigerian immigrant Okwe (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) successfully extracts a blockage from one of the lavatories in the hotel where he works. and then identifies it as a human heart.
Evening Standard: "Every character [in the film], those enduring exploitation as well as those employing it, represents the polyglot, multicultural population existing below eye-level in the capital. Most are illegally working in jobs the Brits won't do. As the film's awkward title suggests, they make the dirty things that other people do look pretty in the morning. All exist at the mercy of insecurity and imminent discovery. It's an unsettling film, also a gripping one. .This film will make [disconcerting] viewing for white Anglo-Saxon Brits, seeing "their" metropolis as a sort of illegal "jobs centre" for an underclass whose readiness to accept any dirty job may lead to a Helot economy and compromise irretrievably the meaning of national identity. But simply to say that Dirty Pretty Things possesses this political dimension makes it a valuable film in the debilitated state to which indiscriminate cultural subsidies dished out by the incompetent to the untalented have reduced the British film industry. Here at last is a movie with a social heartbeat that pumps new blood into our anaemic cinema."
The Times (Play): "This thriller must rate as the finest polemic of Frears's career. Rarely has a British film spluttered with so much topical venom yet sustained such terrific suspense. .The script does lurch into zealous excess, but the acting is first rate. [Audrey] Tautou is light-years away from her Amélie persona as a shy Turkish cleaner with chocolate-box dreams of New York, and Ejiofor is outstanding as the gentle Nigerian [medic fleeing persecution in his native land]. Their fight for survival might be too idealistic to swallow in one gulp, but this is a film that gives you plenty of other things to think about."
The Observer: "One of Frears's skills is his ability to give his movies an appropriate dramatic weight. They're rarely forced and only occasionally slack. Here he strikes a perfect balance between social commentary and melodrama while nudging his actors to turn potentially stereotypical figures (eg, a virginal waif, a golden-hearted whore, a philosophical Chinese) into three-dimensional people. He's assisted by a good script, an excellent production designer (Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski), Mick Audsley's razor-sharp editing, Nathan Larson's unobtrusive score, and outstanding photography by Chris Menges, who gives London a gleamingly seductive surface; he makes it a cold touristic place of consumption, its chilly reflections inviting and repelling a sense of belonging."
The Quiz
Just how much of a film fanatic are you? Answer these questions, add up your scores and find out!
Easy (one point for each correct answer):
- Jennifer Lopez, currently to be seen on UK cinema screens portraying a battered wife in Enough, has recently become engaged to which clean-cut, all-American actor?
- Jamie Bell, the young star of the British World War I supernatural thriller Deathwatch, shot to fame playing which Northern boy with a penchant for ballet dancing?
Less Easy (two points for each correct answer):
- Which US actor is back in the big red suit for The Santa Clause 2, presently doing great business at the UK Box Office?
- Which actor, whose previous work includes George of the Jungle and The Mummy, stars opposite Michael Caine in The Quiet American?
Difficult (three points for each correct answer):
- Dominic Monaghan, best known as the hobbit Merry in the Lord of the Rings movies, found fame on British TV screens as the young sidekick to a middle-aged female private detective played by Patricia Routledge in which television show?
- Meera Syal, author of the semi-autobiographical Anita and Me, appears in which UK comedy sketch show?
(Answers at bottom of page.)
Film Chart
Since the figures are not always available until after the event, the Box Office chart may occasionally be a couple of weeks behind. Sorry!
UK BOX OFFICE (Week ending 15 December)
- Die Another Day
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- The Santa Clause 2
- Like Mike
- Deathwatch
- The Quiet American
- Dirty Pretty Things
- Anita and Me
- Enough
- 28 Days Later
Quiz Answers:
- Ben Affleck
- Billy Elliot
- Tim Allen
- Brendan Fraser
- Hetty Wainthrop Investigates
- Goodness Gracious Me
How did you do?
0-4 points: Who needs film when you can listen to the radio, eh?
5-8 points: You're a fan all right, but you're not a fanatic yet.
9-12 points: Move over Spielberg, there's a new man in town!
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