Recently Seen Movies IV: The Return (After a Nap)

1. BANDITS Saw this at the cinema yesterday. Several good laughs. Good performances by Billy Bob Thornton and Kate Blanchett. It's difficult to know if Bruce Willis is giving a good performance, his always seem the same, but he did suit the role he plays here. The surprise ending was no surprise. Any time a movie has a stuntman/fx man as a character you know to expect a deus ex machina.

2. MOULIN ROUGE After it settles down a little from the frenetic pace of its first half-hour, you realise that this is a cinematic opera using modern popular songs. The tragic story is basically simple, the characters not unfamiliar. What makes this comedy-to-tragedy worthwhile are the sets, costumes, music, direction and editing, which are all quite audacious. If you can accept it on its own terms, this movie is excellent entertainment.

3. CHOPPER. A movie about a real-life Australian criminal, based on his best-selling (in Aust.) autobiography. Mark Brandon Reid got the nickname 'Chopper' after chopping off the toes of one of his victims. He is played, superbly, by Eric Bana (who played Sgt. 'Hoot' Gibson in Black Hawk Down). Reid was a standover man, a persuader, who was alleged to have murdered 19 people, and was rumored, mainly from his own mouth, to have had the implicit support of the police in his unofficial trash-removing activities. The movie shows his remarkable character which remained irrepressible despite the appalling circumstances of his life. Potential American viewers should be warned that the dialogue is spoken in a local accent and idiom and may be difficult to understand without subtitles or re-dubbing. Also, the movie is rated R for explicit violence.

4. THE SCORE This heist movie can hold up its head with the best of them. And look at this cast: Robert DeNiro (the safe-cracker), Marlon Brando (the fence), Edward Norton (the insider). Great to see DeNiro and Brando head to head, and Norton's no slouch, either. The way the safe gets cracked is particularly clever - just add water.

5. NURSE BETTY My mother was very displeased that one of her favorite actors, Morgan Freeman, plays a bad guy in this and uses the 'f' word. We told her: "He's an actor; he doesn't write the dialog", but she left the room anyway. My brother and I liked it; Renee Zellweger charms as usual, and somehow makes us buy that she can't tell fiction from reality. The scenes in which Betty becomes a nurse and is thought to be a really good actor are cleverly done. Not a brilliant movie, but well worth watching.

6. STAR WARS, EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES The word for this episode is SPECTACULAR. A visual feast; jaw dropping fx; action, action, and then more action...except when things come to a screeching halt for the chucklesome romantic bits between babyfaced "Anni" Skywalker and his teenaged 'senator' (do the writers know the derivation of that word?), but they are mercifully brief. All the Jedi get to light up their light-sabers in this one, Yoda included. Don't miss it at the cinema.

7. JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS The title Red Planet was taken, otherwise it would have been ideal for this gorefest. Iron oxide and blood feature prominantly in Carpenter's latest doomed attempt to achieve cult classic status. JC clearly has an ego as big as all outdoors: not only does he seem to think his name in the title will be an attraction, but also the plot contains what is surely an homage to himself: a reprise of the cops-besieged-in-a-cop-shop of Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. In JC'sGOM, Mars is a matriarchy and a squad of female-led cops are sent to an outlying settlement to bring back a captured murderer. They find half the townspeople slaughtered and the other half possessed by alien 'ghosts' that simply possess a new victim when their host is killed. The cops and their new allies, the murderer and his gang, battle their way out of town painting it red as they go. The movie does contain a classic put-down line by a female cop to a male colleague trying to hit on her: "I might sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth...but we're not on Earth, are we".

8. X-CHANGE Good, solid science fiction, based, like almost all the best sf, on the consequences of a single idea. The idea here is a new technology that allows body swapping. You can exchange bodies with someone or your mind can be installed in a cloned body created for special purposes (such as heavy labor). The story begins when a company executive in New York swaps into a body located on the west coast (it's a quick way of travelling) but when he goes to get back into his own body...[well, that would be spoiling]. This movie is very well made with excellent photography and occasionally imaginative direction. Oh, they threw in a few sex scenes, but they should have known that we sf nerds aren't interested in that sort of thing :-D

9. MEN IN BLACK II Will Smith carries most of the acting weight here, and does it quite adroitly. This is a very funny movie; I found it much funnier than MIB. And, of course, the fx magicians have upped the ante. But while you're gawping at the fx, be sure to keep an ear open for the dialog - there are lots of good throw-away lines.

10. THE LAST CASTLE I'm not devoted to computer games, all I have are Civilization and Age of Empires II: Age of Kings (no shoot 'em ups). The latter game I started playing only recently, and one of the weapons available in it is a fascinatingly effective seige engine called the trebuchet (it's a kind of catapult that uses a counterweight and leverage to hurl good sized rocks a good long distance). I had never heard the word 'trebuchet' before I started playing that game (I have a very good memory for words), and then the long arm of coincidence reached out and showed me a movie in which the word (and the weapon) is used. No, this is not a medieval movie, it's set in quite recent times, yet in it a castle is attacked by desperate men using a trebuchet. It's a prison movie starring Robert Redford and similar in some ways to Redford's other prison movie BRUBAKER. I found it quite good, and I recommend it.

11. OCEAN'S ELEVEN A good to very good heist movie. It makes the re-released Frank Sinatra original look very pale indeed (though it's probably unfair to compare movies made more than thirty years apart).

12. DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE The attraction here is that the lead role is played by John Travolta. But in truth this is a stock-standard cliche-ridden thriller with groan-worthy ending: you know, the one in which they get the better of the bad guy and then leave him alone to recover so he can come back for a second round. Forget it unless you're a huge fan of JT.

13. RAT RACE In '86 the Zuckers made RUTHLESS PEOPLE, which was allegedly based upon an O. Henry short story "The Ransom of Red Chief". But in truth RP is less like that story than it is like a British movie of the '50s called TOO MANY CROOKS. In 2001, the Zuckers made RAT RACE, which as any long-time fan of comedy movies will tell you is quite similar to the '60s American movie IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. It would be nice to know that the Zuckers have acknowleged these forerunners, but, as far as I know, they haven't. That aside, RAT RACE is a very funny movie in its own right. The Barbie Museum is a particularly funny joke among a moviefull of funny jokes. Recommended to comedy fans.

14. FROM HELL This film presents a bold and perhaps credible solution to the mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper. I say 'perhaps' credible because I don't know enough about the factual details of the Ripper case to say whether this solution is consistent with those facts. Excellent cast, including Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Holm, and Ian Richardson. It must be said, though, that the gloriously beautiful Heather Graham just isn't credible as a street prostitute. Another unfortunate aspect of this film is that when the identity of the Ripper is revealed, the director (or whoever) ludicrously gives him eyes like some demon out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Way to pander to the morons, Mr Director (or whoever). But the bitter-sweet ending is effective, though it too is a kind of pandering.

15. HEARTS IN ATLANTIS I would place this among the top five movies based upon a work by Stephen King. Too bad the book HIA is so overblown. But that's what happens, all too often, to successful writers: they develop literary elephantiasis. This film is superbly acted, and not only by Anthony Hopkins. The final scenes are very moving.

16. ROSE RED [a.k.a. Stephen King's Rose Red] This is a television mini-series, but I saw it on DVD so I'm counting it as a movie. A four and a half hour movie about a haunted house. But if you allow yourself to enter into the spirit, so to speak, you will not be bored. In a very real sense, the house itself (or the models and sets that represent the house) is the star of the show. Partly because of the mini-series format, we are treated to literally dozens of shots of the exterior of the house, and some of these shots are impressively spectacular and/or spooky. The interiors too are often impressive. The cast of human characters is various and interesting - and sometimes annoying. You'll have fun guessing which of them will survive their visit to Rose Red. Will this be the haunted house movie to end them all? Of course not, but it will stand prominent in the history of the genre.

17. TRAINING DAY Not just another 'crooked cops' movie. The script and Denzel Washington's fine performance elevate this simple-seeming tale to an almost mythical battle in the long war between Good and Evil. The character played by DW gradually reveals a Satanic quality as he tries to corrupt the trainee narcotics officer (ably played by Ethan Hawke), producing a string of plausible arguments in defence of theft and murder. The ending has a suitably mythic quality as the evil is recognised for what it is, is defeated, and is finally erased by another evil.

18. THE LIMEY Highly recommended. An aging English career criminal (Terence Stamp) has just been released from prison after a nine year stretch. While he was in, his daughter emigrated to California where she took up with a wealthy record producer (Peter Fonda) and then was killed in an auto accident. But the crim has also got a letter from someone who claims her death was no accident. The crim has flown from London to LaLaLand to investigate, and though he may be a fish out of water, this fish has the bite of a shark. I really enjoyed this, despite the sometimes annoying and pretentious editing.

19. A BEAUTIFUL MIND "Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom." - G.K. Chesterton

It seems that movie-goers want to be tricked these days. Witness THE SIXTH SENSE, THE OTHERS, THE GAME, to cite some of the most popular examples. Ron Howard has jumped onto the Mislead Your Audience bandwagon with this movie, and it did very well. To be fair, it also has going for it Russell Crowe's career-best performance (so far). But I'm concerned about the ethics of using the biography of a real person as a vehicle for MYA. Does this movie set an undesirable precedent?

20. PANIC ROOM Not to be missed. Great story, great performances from Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker. Fascinating special effects, from the 3D opening credits to the impossible wanderings of the camera through the rooms and walls of a large house, to a slow motion sequence that is one of the most effective and suspenseful I've ever seen. This is a film for fans of both the artistic and technical sides of cinema.