Film Fanatics: October 2001
by
News and Reviews
- Ouch! Apparently Pamela Anderson, former star of Baywatch, finally mustered up enough courage to approach her lifelong idol actress Goldie Hawn and ask her if she would make a guest appearance on her new television show V.I.P. Goldie 'politely declined'.
- Actor George Clooney seems to have been paying close attention to George W Bush's exhortation to 'shop for America' and thus stave off the threat of recession. Riding his motorcycle down Melrose Avenue, his eye was caught by an Andy Warhol print of Uncle Sam which he then went in to buy - a snip at $12,000.
- Hollywood is having difficulty deciding what to do with finished films that feature footage of the Twin Towers. Digitally erasing them from the New York skyline in upcoming films Serendipity and Zoolander has apparently caused audiences, who found their absence unpleasantly jarring, to feel a little uneasy. It's rather too late to alter the already released blockbusters A.I. and Final Fantasy, in which the Twin Towers appear even though both are set in the future. The Time Machine, a big-budget adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic novel that stars Guy (L.A. Confidential, Memento) Pearce and Samantha (Irish pop star) Mumba, has had its US release date moved back from Christmas to next February. This will allow time to replace a scene in which the moon reportedly explodes, raining debris down on New York.
THE PLEDGE (15)
Jack Nicholson gives an astonishing performance as cop Jerry Black who, just hours before his retirement, makes a pledge to the parents of a murdered eight-year-old girl that he will find her killer. He then spends his retirement trying to do just that, laying a trap with the unwitting aid of a single mother (Robin Wright Penn) and her daughter, whom he has provided with friendship and shelter. The general consensus is that the director Sean Penn has produced a remarkable film with a 'European ending of infectious bleakness' that, though it doomed it at the US box office, serves only to enhance its brilliance. A must see.
The Times (Part 2): "From being a movie about just another discredited maverick cop who turns out to be vindicated after all and gets the (much younger) girl, The Pledge evolves into a devastating psychological case study. Black may be right, he may be wrong, but he is clearly disturbed, uneasy in his own skin. ...The Pledge feels like a real story, not something based on a scriptwriter's overboiled imagination. The plot chugs along as untidily as real life, with no full stops where a comma would do. Most satisfyingly, this is an emotionally courageous work. Yes, Penn still seems to believe that the human condition is in bad condition. However, here he seems to be saying that we have no choice but to take it for what it is, every ugly, chipped, stained, stinking, agonisingly beautiful moment of it."
The Daily Mail: "The Pledge is bound to be misread as a failed thriller, but really it's a human tragedy, with a central performance of astonishing subtlety and intensity by the greatest screen actor of our time. The Pledge is Nicholson's King Lear, and he rises to the challenge with a mesmerising performance that has light and shade, humour and profundity, with a genuine sense of a descent into madness. ...The film is really about the investigator rather than the investigation, although it is through the investigation that Jerry reveals himself. It's a moving account of a man who has skills and integrity in a world where these are no longer held to be of much value. As a cop, he knows that the end can justify the means, but he's human enough to feel profound pity for the victims and their families, and love for the very child he is endangering. Jerry's greatest strength is his professional ruthlessness. But it's also his tragic flaw. ...The Pledge is a sad but also an exhilarating film, because it dares to tell uncomfortable truths about the human condition. Heroes don't always triumph. Love can be tested beyond breaking point. Fate can strike such cruel blows that there may be no recovery. Such truths are worth telling, even if they don't sell huge numbers of cinema tickets. The Pledge is one of the outstanding dramas of the year, featuring one of the finest screen performances of any year."
AMERICAN PIE 2 (15)
The main characters from the original hit gross-out comedy are back after their first year at college, this time sharing a rented beach house for the summer where all the expected embarrassing situations and raunchy high jinks occur.
The Times (Part 2): "...The new round of embarrassments begins more or less where the old one left off. A year at college has done nothing for the sex education of our five goofy heroes: Jim, Stiffler, Finch, Kevin and Oz. The lads are still monumentally hopeless at attracting girls, and still just as childishly obsessed. Will they or won't they find someone desperate enough to sleep with them by the end of the summer holidays? ...Of course it's crass, but hardly offensive; mainly because the girls hold all the cards, and because the men are perfect clowns. The moment the film sits down on the beach and tries to say something serious about relationships is the moment it goes pear-shaped and mawkish."
The Evening Standard: "It's not anything like so down-and-dirty as the first hormonal frolic. .Girls, as ever, are more mature, or, at least less shrinking, than the fellows: if they're not, then be sure they're mistaken for man-killing lesbians. The boys all behave like arrested cases of male virginity: all eager, but somehow unable, to get it up. ...The heat's kept down by the incompetence of the acting and film-making."
The Daily Mail: "In the first movie, the teenage characters, though initially obnoxious, matured to the point where you became quite fond of them. This time, they seem to have regressed. American Pie 2 is professionally made and well-acted by its confident young cast, but its appeal is more as soap opera for fans of the original than as genuinely uproarious comedy."
SOUTH WEST NINE (15)
The story, told by Freddy (Wil Johnson), follows a mixed group of characters through twenty-four turbulent hours in London's Brixton that lead up to the moment at which the film, directed by Richard Parry, actually opens.
The Evening Standard: "Brixton is a microcosm. But put its daily life under the laboratory slide and in it swim all the viruses of global protest - London's May day riot, Genoa's stand-off, the internet's call to arms, anarchy's nihilists. Here, idealism is a dead end, capitalism a spent force, religion an empty house, the United Kingdom a disunited anachronism. Parry draws on the street energies of multicultural Brixton and paradoxically portrays a waste land. As happens in Trainspotting, he dispatches his characters on a cross-community odyssey and charts their progress laconically, at times humorously, but ultimately with an apprehension that nothing will change for the better. ...'Everyone's guilty of the good they didn't do,' Freddy observes. If South West Nine doesn't actually draw up specific charges, it refuses to let its characters off with the benefit of the doubt. Few of those in it do good, and none is pardoned. Parry and his producer, Allan Niblo, have made a landmark film about the dangerous diversities alive and kicking in contemporary Britain... ...In spite of being hugely entertaining, this film will fill no one with comfort or complacency. It delineates with ominous clarity how wilfully everyone in it has mutated away from normal law and order, normal morality, normal British life. The new generation, white as well as black, has become a new genus. And one that we don't yet wish to understand or have the will to control."
The Times (Part 2): "[This film exposes] the apocalyptic atmosphere bubbling under the postcode. .A fistful of characters, observed mostly by Parry's Brixton narrator, Wil Johnson, provide keys not only into a loopy plot that ends in a churchyard rave but into a trippy, scary side of Brixton haunted by crack users, the lost and the crazed. The ghosts of Raleigh and Hogarth are invoked in the same breath as Ken Kesey and Leary. If not the most elegant experiment in recent weeks, it's easily one of the weirdest."
The Daily Mail: "Richard Parry, director of the Brixton-set South West Nine, shows a documentary maker's flair for social observation. Sadly, he doesn't know how to develop this and never finds a consistency of tone. He needs a halfway decent script, plus the ability to mould disparate actors into a winning team."
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):
- Which child star of the Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I. shot to stardom uttering the phrase 'I see dead people' to Bruce Willis in chiller The Sixth Sense?
- Which film in the Box Office Top 10 stars a pregnant Kate Winslet?
Less Easy (two points for each correct answer):
- Which actress appearing in both the original American Pie and its sequel also stars as Willow in hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
- Nicole Kidman's new film The Others is a psychological chiller but she is currently appearing opposite Ewan McGregor on UK cinema screens in which hit musical, directed by Baz Luhrmann?
Difficult (three points for each correct answer):
- Which character will John Cleese be playing in the soon to be released Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone?
- Which British star, perhaps best known for his portrayal of the eponymous hero, Major Richard Sharpe, in ITV's Sharpe and his appearance opposite Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye, will also appear in The Lord of the Rings, due for release a month after Harry Potter?
(Answers at bottom of page.)
Film chart
Obviously the audience figures only become available after the event so the film chart will always be a couple of weeks behind. Sorry!
UK BOX OFFICE (week ending 7 October)
- Moulin Rouge
- A.I. Artificial Intelligence
- Enigma
- Mike Bassett: England Manager
- Amélie
- The Score
- The Fast and the Furious
- A Knight's Tale
- Cats & Dogs
- Driven
Quiz answers:
- Haley Joel Osment
- Enigma
- Alyson Hannigan
- Moulin Rouge
- 'Nearly Headless Nick'
- Sean Bean
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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