Eyes Wide Shut (R)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Bug rating out of five: One.

Absolute shit.

- Don Gordon-Brown

Runaway Bride (PG)
Director: Garry Marshall
Bug rating out of five: Two

There's an adage in Hollywood that states you should never work with small children, animals or Joan Cusack.
Richard Gere and Julie Roberts break the last part of this rule badly in this middling, piddling romantic comedy about a woman who bolts at the altar time and time again, and the journo who travels to small-town USA convinced her fourth trip down the aisle will likewise end in doom for the groom.
What is it about that woman, Cusack? She can look handsome and ugly; innocent and evil, often in the same scene. Even when she's stuck in a mess like this she can still do good work. Not her best, but enough to have you wondering why co-stars bother sharing scenes with her when they could be having a Bex and a nice lie down in their trailer until she's finished.
Cusack is about the only thing making bearable this much-touted flick reviving the "wonderful chemistry" Gere and Roberts first showed in Pretty Woman, also directed by Garry Marshall.
The storyline struggles from the very outset, when famous newspaper columnist Ike Graham gets the sack for writing about Maggie Carpenter's propensity to get out of the church before time.
Everybody, it seems, reads Ike. The guy's famous and he got there never, ever, having to resort to the words, Loony Left. Maggie's lawyers threaten legal action so Ike's editor sacks him. Yeah, right! Even if she used to be his wife! Our congrats to screenwriters Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon: that scripting ploy hasn't been used since the last movie about a newspaper columnist.
It's the most unbelievable thing to happen in a newspaper office since that researcher chick in Message in a Bottle not only had her own office but could flit off around the country for days on end doing research.
Runaway Bride is typical of the genre pumped out of Hollywood: it drags on for another 20 minutes after the ideal scene that could have ended it all, and is made up of a whole heap of funny little jokes and sight gags that somehow all mesh together to make an unsatisfactory whole.

- Don Gordon-Brown

Thomas Crown Affair
Director:
Bug rating out of five: Three

Pierce Brosnan would make the perfect actor for a Remington razor ad, don't you reckon?
Handsome in an antiseptic sort of way. Strong jawline. Aristocratic air.
And could you possibly go past him for one of those fashion photos from Vogue, standing suavely beside a bench in Central Park in something autumny? Tweed jacket $845. Slacks $250.
Perfect. If insipid. So what on earth is he doing in the world of cinema acting? Worse still, making a motza out of it, especially with his recent James Bond outings, Golden Eye and Tomorrow Never Dies, and the upcoming The World is Not Enough?
Well, for starters, Brosnan is no fool.
Those who once claimed he had acting ability to match the good looks have fallen understandably silent since Dante's Peak, not surprisingly missing from his list of credits in the production notes for The Thomas Crown Affair.
And in the remake of the the 60s caper flick with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, Brosnin plays a character well within his range, making a fair fist of his role as Mr T. Crown, the strong silent type of legitimate business mogul who can't help going for the Monet shot - the perfect heist from a New York art gallery.
Rene Russo is Catherine Banning, the insurance company investigator who's onto Mr Crown in more ways than one. Comedian Denis Leary plays Detective Plod who keeps losing the scent while on the trail of our art thief because Ms Banning keeps criss-crossing it in her slinky black outfits with the Sonia McMahon side split.
While your humble reviewer is more than old enough to remember the original flick, Mr Fourex and pending old age have helped erase most of it, save for some scene involving fellatio of a chess piece, if memory still serves.
Whether the new version differs markedly is a moot point anyway.
Brosnin is solid semi-wooden, Russo smoulders as the femme fatale, director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Hunt for Red October) give us some good action bits, the lens of Tom Priestley finds some interesting angles, the music by Bill Conti is great and the film has that dead spot about half-way through that we've come to know and love in flicks of this type.
It's an unbelievable but energetic romp.
And we do get to see more of Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair then Tin Cup, Ransom and Lethal Weapons 3 & 4 combined.
As my mate, Teddy, in Sydney would say: "Ahhhhwooooooo!"

- Don Gordon-Brown

Life
Director:
Bug rating out of five: One

Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, you get your scrawny little black nigger asses over here right now!
What on earth did you mother-fucker niggers think you was coming at, getting involved in shit like this.
Stand dead still on those pop crates for the next five minutes as punishment, you crazy nigger sonovabitches, while I give you a proper dressing down.
Consider yourselves lucky that the brothers and sisters haven't horsewhipped your black asses into submission and stretched your scrawny nigger necks from the nearest sycamore tree for making a movie for laughs about niggers in a white man's penitentiary in southern America pre-World War 2.
You think those places would have been a rest home for wayward niggers, you crazy sons-of-bitches?
Playing it all for laughs while you make some token references to brutality inflicted on and from within the inmates. Token references to sodomy. Token gay inmate. Token hard-as-nails white guard with the token heart of gold. Token camaraderie between two lifers over a half-century of wrongful incarceration. Token Shawshank Redemption ending.
And that scene where the warden walks up and down the row of inmates with his daughter's chocolate coloured baby, looking for a family resemblance. And that token attempt at humour when the inmates step forward one at a time to confess their parentage.
I'll tell you about token, you niggers.
In those days, one nigger at a time would have been token out of the line and his worthless black hide beaten to within an inch of its sorry life until the offender stepped forward, to be token away for a slow and very unpleasant departure from this wretched Life.

- Don Gordon-Brown