Cast Away
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Bug rating: 3/5
When Hanks and Zemeckis last teamed up, for Forrest Gump, the
net result was six oscars, a box office smash and a film that has seemingly
become fashionable to rubbish ever since.
While this latest effort will unlikely win the six Oscars, it will (and
already has, in the US) prove to be a box office smash, if not a critical
success.
The plot? As fresh as yesterday's crab dinner and could just as easily been
called Treasure Island 2 - Sans Friday. There's just enough scripting
variety to keep the viewer amused and Hanks executes his usual virtuoso
performance.
In fact, he originally conceived the idea and produced it, along with four
others.
Which, in a quick but alarming sidebar, is becoming a bit of a concern.
You can picture the Oscars, a few years down the track, when the Best Picture
Oscar is announced, and 20 Miramax execs leap up and walk down to collect
the gold statuette. Shudder. Almost more unbearable than another Hanks thanks
to God, his potty-trainer etc etc.
But back to the matter at hand. Hanks is FedEx systems engineer Chuck Noland.
His life is ruled by express delivery and is largely spent in the air –
the movie begins in Moscow, for example, and his beeper is never, ever switched
off.
Of course, he has a neglected girlfriend, Kelly (Helen Hunt), whom he gives
a mysterious box (well, it's not that mysterious) the night he is called
away for the last time, on a flight. And, given that you know he gets stranded
and it is pouring rain at the airport, this plane just isn't going to make
it.
It doesn't and the crash is spectacular – probably the best crash in
a movie since the train in The Fugitive. Noland survives to find
himself on an uninhabited island, without food and, more importantly, television.
He does have a clock, and a picture of his wife, both sadly lacking in the
main food groups required for survival.
Over time, he works out a food source as more and more FedEx packages wash
up. It's his time of bleak solitude on the island when the movie - and Hanks
- win their brownie point. There is virtually no music and no dialogue –
except of course when Noland befriends a friendly volleyball from one of
the packages whom he calls Wilson.
After four long years, he escapes the island and returns to society. This
is the best part of the whole movie, as he realises his old life is gone
– his girlfriend is shacking up with his former dentist and they have
a baby. To rub it all in, the FedEx party for him serves – seafood!
Cast Away says plenty about life, fate and survival. And who knows?
Given its competition, it may come away with six Oscars yet.
Chicken Run
Director: Nick Park, Peter Lord
Bug Rating: 3/5
This wonderfully enjoyable film, by the same blokes who did Wallace
and Gromit, has to be the most innovative piece of film-making in the whole
of the doldrums that was 2000.
It may not be saying a whole lot, but Chicken Run is packed with
energy, humour and, let's face it, chickens.
Not since Babe (and definitely not the poor sequel) has a movie come
along where it is just accepted that animals speak to each other, as humans
do, as something that is natural and just happens.
Unlike Babe, and it really is nothing like it at all, the action
here is in live animation (clay motion, actually) and it works superbly.
In fact, it is the first clay motion, full length feature ever attempted.
And it should be done again, provided the script and direction can be as
good as they are here.
The action is set on a chicken farm, where the farmers, the Tweedys (voiced
by Tony Haygarth and Miranda Richardson) are brutal and the chickens live
their lives in constant fear – they must lay eggs, otherwise they are
plucked from their chicken friends and beheaded.
So they continuously try to escape, in more daring and funny ways, led by
bold young chick Ginger (Katja Schuurman does the voice). Each escape ends
in capture and hence Ginger is rapidly losing popularity and hope.
Hope is reborn again by the arrival of rooster Rocky Rhodes (Mel Gibson)
who crash lands in the Tweedy's farm. Rocky is from a circus and his claim
to fame is that he can fly, which gets Ginger thinking that going over the
fence is the way to go, not underneath it. Good idea, as time is running
out for the Tweedys determine that it would be more profitable to use the
chickens for meat.
Essentially, Chicken Run is a feathered version of the prison escape
movies of WW2 days, with Mrs. Tweedy the nazi, the chickens the prisoners
of war and so on. It all works rather brilliantly and who knows? Babe
got a best picture Oscar nomination – and this is better.
-Michael Gordon-Brown
The Cell
Bug Rating: 2/5
This is a movie where you leave the cinema thinking: what were the
writers on when they wrote that? What was the director drinking when he
thought, 'oh yeah, here's a movie that will work'?
What diet pill did Jennifer Lopez mix with the wrong substance when she
lent her curves... sorry, talent, to the movie?
The Cell is a very weird piece of film making. It isn't all that
bad, but leaves you feeling completely unfulfilled as if you must have dozed
off and missed a vital part of it.
Essentially the action centres around a comatose young boy, a completely
messed up man who likes to drown young women and Jennifer Lopez as surely
the best looking child psychologist in the history of human kind.
Interlacing these are scenes of virtual reality, as Lopez delves into the
minds of the young boy and the young man, trying to help them. She works
for a virtual reality company as their star recruit, and her job is to enter
the subconscious of patients and help them out.
Meanwhile, a serial killer (Vincent D'Onfrio) is on the loose, drowning
young women and dressing them up as dolls before dumping their bodies. Hunting
him down is the rugged, haggard and churlish Vince Vaughan, who never seems
to look at all comfortable in what is really a minor role.
Eventually, the killer breaks down and walla, Lopez enters his mind in a
race against the clock to find his latest victim, before she drowns too.
One explanation at to why The Cell does not work better is that while
it isn't unoriginal, the ending is standard Hollywood fare.
The distrubed scenes of the disturbed minds are also beyond description
and are far too weird to drive this movie down a positive pathway.
Lopez' character has a button she can push to remove herself from the mind
of her patients when things get a little hairy. Where was this reviwer's
button when he needed it?
- Michael Gordon-Brown
The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps
Bug Rating: 2/5
Sequels are always a very dicey affair, even when the first movie
is utterly brilliant. When the first movie is only decent, and is a comedy,
a sequel is usually a harbinger of disaster. Remember the Police Academy
Series?
So it is fair to say that expectations can be quite low for The Klumps and
these expectations of a fairly ordinary flick are well founded. It is entirely
predicatable and unfunny, a huge problem when the film is supposed to be
a comedy.
The story is very familiar - in fact, it is great, the first time you see
it. When it was called The Nutty Professor.
Professor Klump (Eddie Murphy, who also reprises all of his roles from the
original) is still hugely obese and is still tinkering with science at his
university. What is different is he is in love with a different colleague
(Janet Jackson, who effortlessly replaces Jada Pinkett in exactly the same
role) and they are set to marry.
Klump has also invented a pill to make people young again and the university
is set to receive a big grant, much to the delight of the insufferable dean
(who threatens to steal the movie again; yet more unoriginality!).
When, wouldn't you know it, Klump's alter-ego Buddy Love (Murphy again)
comes back into the picture and threatens to ruin everything that has become
good in Sherman's life.
And so on and so on, until you realise that you have watched The Nutty Professor
all over again, only with a different love interest and a different medical
discovery.
The story unfolds very smoothly and effortlessly and this should ordinarily
be a good thing. But here, it is only because the movie makers have just
rehashed exactly the same jokes for a second run.
And although fart and other bodily function jokes are hilarious and classy
and sophisticated, they don't always work the second time around and here
they just stink.
At least Police Academy eventually figured out when to quit –
let's hope the Nutty Prof decides to hang up his test tubes after this one.
- Michael Gordon-Brown
O Brother Where Art Thou?
Director: Joel Coen
Bug Rating: 3.5/5
Those crazy, crazy Coens really know how to take a bunch of character
actors, add one rapidly rising superstar and funky Bluegrass music to what
is a paper-thin story and somehow manage to make it all work.
After Fargo, the Coens missed the mark with The Big Lebowski,
which tried hard but didn't quite work despite Jeff Bridges' best intent,
and some people even whispered the Coens were finished, to be replaced by
the Farreleys.
But O Brother proves, at least in the short term, that the Coens
are not finished just yet. The quality may vary but the quirk is alive and
well.
Supposedly based on Homer's Oddsey – although I didn't see a can of
Duff beer anywhere – the action centres around three prisoners (George
Clooney, John Turturro and some other actor there for bug-eyed relief) who
escape from a rock breaking line in Southern USA, circa early 1900s. With
an evil sherrif on their trail, the boys take to the high road.
Along the way they meet a man who has sold his soul to the devil to be able
to play guitar well and using him, they record a song to get some quick
cash. That little song, by the foursome under the name Soggy Bottom Boys,
is soon a rampaging hit, unknown to our outlaws.
The adventures roll on quick and fast, including a mass baptisim, three
sirens by a creek and a cameo from a very mean John Goodman.
O Brother works well because it is quirky and kooky and original,
but meanders close to that thin line separating weird from too weird for
its own good, where movies of this type can fizzle out very, very quickly.
This one doesn't. It is not laugh-out-loud funny, but some of the scenes
bring a smile to the face long after you've left the theatre.
Most of the Coen regulars are here - Turturro, Goodman, Holly Hunter as
George Clooney's wife - and they do typically good work.
O Brother is not as good as the Raising Arizona it's probably
most similar to, but it is damn good. But one rather large question remains
– how could the Coens not find room for Steve Buscemi?
Hopefully that fruitful association is in a temporary hiatus.
- Michael Gordon-Brown
