Film Fanatics: May 2003
by
News and Reviews
- Fans of E. Nesbit's classic children's tale Five Children and It should be delighted to hear that a £14 million film adaptation of the story, set in 1902, is scheduled to begin shooting in July. Kenneth Branagh is set to play the uncle with whom the five youngsters are sent to stay, while Eddie Izzard will be voicing 'It', the sand fairy!
- The Lord of The Rings, which has already found huge success as both a best-selling book and an Oscar-winning film trilogy (the final instalment of which will arrive in UK cinemas this December), is soon to be made into an £8 million musical - the most expensive production ever seen in the West End. There will apparently be a nationwide search for actors to play such popular characters as Frodo Baggins, Gandalf, Sam and Gollum. Producer Kevin Wallace has said that the project is already eighteen months into development and should première some time in 2005. Given the huge popularity of both the book and the films it seems hard to imagine that the musical will be anything other than a huge hit.
- Carry on, Carry On! Despite the rather less than lukewarm reviews that 1992's Carry On Columbus received, the Carry On franchise is soon to be revived for a second time, forty five years after the first of the films hit the screen in 1958. Pre-production has apparently already begun on Carry On London, which will be shot next year at Pinewood Studios, the same location used for the previous thirty-one films. The new film centres around a spoof movie awards ceremony - the 'Herberts' - and the accident prone limousine-hire company that is responsible for transporting the celebrities safely to it. The cast has not yet been confirmed but Burt Reynolds, David Jason, Graham Norton, Dale Winton, James Fleet, Robert Lindsay and Gary Wilmot are among those who have been linked to the project.
THE MATRIX: RELOADED (15)
Love it or loathe it, this is the film that everyone is talking about. In the Matrix trilogy's second instalment Keanu Reeves returns as Neo, 'The One', alongside his mentor Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and his lover Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). He is the only hope for both the beleaguered inhabitants of Zion, the last stronghold of the few remaining human beings who have not succumbed to the might of the Machines, and the rest of the human race who are, albeit unknowingly, enslaved by them. So have the Wachowski brothers pulled it off again, or might they have been better off deciding not to reload the Matrix?
The Times (T2): "The Matrix: Reloaded isn't a bad movie. Indeed if you loved the first Matrix and its mix of comic-book angst, martial arts, virtual reality, video-game punch-ups, pop philosophy, biblical subtext, romance, tragedy and pathos, then you won't be disappointed. Except that second time around, it could never be quite so fresh. What we have instead is a tirelessly stylised (marvel at the most effective use of sunglasses since Top Gun) fast paced, lovingly crafted piece of filler that didn't really need to be made, but we only have to wait until November to get the real deal. Start training now."
Heat: "The meticulously conceived action set-pieces, including a much-hyped sequence of freeway carnage, set new standards for blockbuster spectacle. [but the many] pages of portentous dialogue - about destiny and choice, cause and effect - fail to enrich the narrative with the depth anticipated by the film-makers. While The Matrix had a unique look, its sequel's realisation of Zion is an uninteresting blend of technology and jagged rock. ...The positives do outweigh the negatives in Reloaded, but it's a shame that a sky-high budget and year-long shoot have translated into something less distinctive than the original."
The Observer: “What the film lacks, among other things, is anything truly human. The planed, pristine features of Keanu Reeves seem as computer-generated as the creatures he fights. Once the wonder of the designs has worn off it's difficult to care about anything - the people, the story, or the ideas with which the Wachowskis flirt the way a pole dancer flirts with her audience."
The Daily Mail: "By the end of its 138 minutes you will have witnessed amazing special effects, the most elaborately acrobatic fights in screen history and, at 17 minutes, the longest car chase ever. ...No one could fail to be impressed by the craftsmanship and the money that has been invested. It's all, as they say, up there on the screen. But some awkward questions remain. By the end, will you have felt in any way involved with the story or the characters? Will you even have been able to make sense of them? Anyone who hasn't seen the first Matrix film will find this second episode incomprehensible. But then so will anyone who has seen it. So keen are the writer-directors, the Wachowski brothers, to press on with their fights and chases that they leave no room for coherent plot development or characterisation. This is an intensely violent movie and the aggression is both extreme and sanitised. We don't see the after-effects of violence, only the joy and excitement in committing it. The Matrix: Reloaded captures all too well the casual brutality and self-congratulatory superficiality of our times."
The Evening Standard: "Hardly five minutes pass without some spectacular trick of camerawork or computer wizardry enhancing what is basically comic-strip material. ...There is so much of this that the best description of the film, in the not overly modest words of its makers, is like "putting a picture frame around a flash flood". Ultimately, of course, it gets a teeny bit wearisome but it has the good sense to end with a cliffhanger. Will Neo, Morpheus and Trinity be in time to save Zion? All will be revealed in the third and last part of the Matrix trilogy, already scheduled to open on 5 November. On the strength of today's experience, it leaves you wondering how they are going to find anything left in heaven, hell or Hollywood to top it..."
THE SON OF THE BRIDE (15)
Directed by Juan José Campanella, The Son of the Bride introduces us to restaurateur Rafael (Ricardo Darin), who is struggling to deal with a girlfriend, a teenage daughter, a mother with progressively worse Alzheimer's, 'a shoal of sharks who want to buy him out of his business', and a father who is desperate to give his wife the church wedding she missed out on while she is still healthy enough to enjoy it.
The Observer: "This is a comedy that touches sensitively and truthfully on tragic matters in a kindly, sympathetic way. The performances are uniformly excellent. The veterans Hector Alterio and Norma Aleandro are magnificent as Rafael's parents and there's a lovely turn by Eduardo Blanco, a Roberto Benigni lookalike, as Rafael's boyhood friend, a minor movie actor. The wonderful climactic sequence elicits laughter and tears and carefully skirts sentimentality."
Heat: "South America may be a cinema hot zone right now, but this Argentine family drama is no match for Nine Queens or Brazil's City of God. Affecting and subtle - but not really that special."
Times (T2): "The warmth and affection with which the director. treats his characters make up for the film's rambling nature. It's so determined to delve into every cranny of Rafael's world, including his business woes and his rekindled friendship with his wacky childhood friend, that the film drags somewhat before the incongruous zany comedy takes over towards the end. ...Tender and funny but with its sentimentality too cunningly spiked with winsome jokes and deflating ironies to fully engage, the film wins you over with its appealing cast - and stay for the end credits, as half way through there's a pay-off to the movie's running gag..."
The Evening Standard: "At heart, [this film] is as conventional as a Richard Curtis picture. .Like every ho-hum comedy of the past two decades, it places assailable obstacles in front of its characters as the plot progresses towards a wedding-scene conclusion of aggressive sentimentality."
FULL FRONTAL (18)
Steven Soderbergh, (Traffic, Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) indulges in a little art house experimentation with this movie which follows a number of 'self-obsessed Hollywood types' (characters played by, among others, Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, Catherine Keener, David Duchovny and Blair Underwood) around for a day. Keep an eye out for cameo appearances by Terence Stamp, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, Brad Pitt and Soderbergh himself.
The Observer: "...A messy, narcissistic movie about movie making, starring a bunch of actors from [Soderbergh's] earlier films. Over a single 24-hour period, some tiresome showbiz people in Los Angeles are variously pitching a move, shooting a movie, preparing to attend the twentieth birthday party of a successful producer at a Beverley Hills hotel, rehearsing a terrible play called The Sound and the Führer, and so on. There's a film within the film, and another within that; the texture of the film stock varies from the home-movie fuzzy to Hollywood glossy; and Soderbergh invites the audience to do work that isn't worth doing. At the end of this self-indulgent farrago, one takes some consolation in the thought that it's probably better that stars should be appearing in this than coming over here to go slumming on West End stages."
Heat: "As pretentious art films go, it's good fun. Once you stop trying to work out if you're watching a film within a film, or a film within a film within a film, you can enjoy the A-list stars having a good time and a fun cameo from Brad Pitt. [At times, however,] the self indulgence gets a bit much, and it looks pretty shoddy even for a low-budget effort."
The Times (T2): "The cast, seen mostly in one-on-one encounters, sound as if they're doing acting-class improvisations. This seems to be the point. In relationships, the film implies, we are all actors playing roles. Remove the mask and you reveal another masquerade. Yet we're constantly reminded that what we're watching is only a film. Soderbergh not only sneaks in references to his past work.and commentaries on his actors' own movies but also turns up playing himself (with his face blacked out by a box). All of this is perhaps his absurdist way of commentating on just how cut off Hollywood is from the rest of the world. But the film also seems to be poking fun at the solipsistic movies made by the generation of indie navel-gazers he helped to breed with his calling-card film Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989). It seems a joke too far from a director who was once a Tinseltown outsider but who can now corral his Hollywood mates for some home-movie indulgence. By the time someone resembling Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein (the film's executive producer) turns up, Full Frontal, a chaotically wiggling can of worms, reeks of an in-joke that only a handful of people will get."
Film 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):
- In which of the more recent James Bond films did X2's Famke Janssen appear opposite Pierce Brosnan as the villainous beauty Xenia Onatopp?
- Currently starring in the spy spoof Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson may always be best remembered as the infamous Edmund Blackadder. Can you name the actor who played his hapless sidekick Baldrick?
Less Easy (two points for each correct answer):
- Emma Caulfield, appearing as 'Caitlin Greene' in Darkness Falls, is still best known for her portrayal of which character in the recently-concluded hit show Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
- Which young American star can presently be heard in cinemas providing the voice for 'man-cub' Mowgli in The Jungle Book 2?
Difficult (three points for each correct answer):
- Can you remember the name of the villainous character that Matrix star Keanu Reeves played in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing?
- Kiefer Sutherland, who revived his career in spectacular fashion with the role of 'Jack Bauer' in the hit US television series 24, plays 'The Caller' in which of the current UK Box Office Top 10 movies (see the list below)?
(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 25 May)
- The Matrix: Reloaded
- X2: X-Men United
- Kangaroo Jack
- Johnny English
- Old School
- How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
- The Hot Chick
- Darkness Falls
- The Jungle Book 2
- Phone Booth
Quiz Answers:
- GoldenEye
- Tony Robinson
- 'Anya Jenkins', Xander's girlfriend
- Haley Joel Osment
- 'Don John'
- Phone Booth
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!
Post to del.icio.us
