TITANIC (M)
Director: James Cameron
Bug rating: four out of five.

Clear the Titanic's stateroom mantelpiece for a bagful of Oscars come March!

There are more than two hundred million reasons why Titanic will out-Oscar those very average blockbusters of recent years, The English Patient and Braveheart.

All three share the big Hollywood treatment that Oscar voters love; the sweeping vistas, the intense old-fashioned romantic throughline, stereotyped heroes and villains, spectacular scenery, big moving scores, Hollywood legends at the top of their form in front of and behind the camera, those very serious spondulicks to recover.....

Titanic even has several other qualities missing from The English Patient and Braveheart.

They are: (the envelope please):

1. Titanic is far more moving. For three and a quarter hours, your reviewer moved constantly from one buttock to the other, determined that at least one half of his arse would be awake at any one time to fully appreciate the most expensive motion picture ever made.

2. The most amazing special effects ever put on film. Watch every now and then for director James "I'm going to start the camera way out in the north Atlantic in front of the Titanic and sweep right along and above the ship's side and then turn around to give you a clear picture of just how much money we're spending here" Cameron's artistry. Watch especially after the camera gets passed our two young lovers on the bow for the jerky computer-animated first officer walking about the bridge. The players in my sons' $50 Playstation basketball games move with more grace and continuity.

3. A much better song. That unforgettable Celine Dion number, My Heart will Go On, must surely take out the Oscar. This reviewer would go on and on about this magnificent, emotional tune except he's forgotten when and if it was sung at any time during the movie.

4. Two of Hollywood's finest young actors. They weren't available for this project so Leondardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet stepped in and do a thoroughly professional job. Winslet has borrowed Tina Arena's lips for the entire shoot but delivers all her lines faultlessly with them, while DiCaprio displays a sophistication and worldliness far beyond his baby-faced years. He cleverly lets the audience know through subtle hand movements and facial mannerisms that the iceberg or lung cancer will claim him before too long.

5. A new theory about why Titanic sunk. Forget the iceberg conspiracy theory. Titanic sunk because Billy Zane pumped a whole heap of bullets through the ship's bulkheads while chasing our young lovers in a fit of jealous rage. He couldn't believe that his high-falutin' and fancy fiancee would have anything to do with a scruffy, scrawny shitkicker from steerage, and, frankly, we can't either.

6. The most expensive end-credits ever made. They cost close on $23 million and take 23 minutes. They surely must win a special lifetime achievement Oscar at this year's ceremony for end-credits, too long a forgotten part of the industry.

7. Greatest piece of hyperbole from a film's PR department: that the producers recreated the ship at 90 percent real size. Well, a couple of rooms and a funnel or two, maybe. With all the greenbacks the producers did fork out making Titanic, perhaps it would have been wise to spend slightly more and rebuild the whole sucker to original size. At least they might have been able to recoup their outlay with the tourist dollar.

- Don Gordon-Brown

p.s. A confession. The above comments are highly coloured because Titanic comes from the Twentieth Century Pox movie stable of the Dirty Digger. Your humble reviewer rightly or wrongly felt an over-riding need to sink the boot as well as the boat after seeing Murdoch papers around the country give this flick an almighty leg-up through columns, features, posters and the like.

Your reviewer went into Titanic tired and emotional at 8pm and emerged three and a half hours mightily impressed by the SFX at the very least. The romantic sidebar to what is basically a big-budget disaster movie is quaint and the time does go quite quickly. It's true that at least half of his arse was asleep at any one time, but that could be more a fault of the reviewer's advancing years than anything else. Your reviewer would have given it the maximum five bugs except for the ludicrious saloon shoot-out scene. Hollywood just can't help itself.

THE ROAD TO NHILL (M)
Bug rating: three bugs out of five

The Road to Nhill proves yet again that local film-makers striving to emulate the dark and gloomy “European” look and style of storytelling should stop it before they go blind.

The film is set in the sleepy township of Pyramid Hill in rural Victoria where nothing much ever happens. Set in (almost) real time, its story revolves around a car crash involving four women lawn bowlers and the humorous chain of events it sparks.

It shows the bush telegraph isn’t always a reliable, well-oiled communications machine and that the self-reliance and endurance of rural dwellers may, after all, happen more by accident than design. The film also touches quite cleverly on gender issues - how could it not when it is written, directed, photographed and produced by women?

The female characters are strong, decisive and courageous. Most of the males are cast as well-meaning but ineffectual fools, incompetents, emotional cripples or adulterers. Because of this, the film manages to encapsulate an often unstated truism of country life - the men generate a lot of activity but ultimately do very little, while the women know what has to be done and set out to achieve it while battling the handicaps imposed by their male counterparts.

At times, The Road to Nhill cast appears like a Crawfords’ reunion. There are many familiar faces. Alwyn Kurts plays the doddering husband of one of the accident victims.Terry Norris portrays another bowler’s husband and the chief of the local volunteer fire brigade that rushes to the scene to lend only comical assistance. Bill Hunter reprises his role as Bill Hunter.

Road to Nhill could do without the laboured Voice of God commentary and to-camera “interviews” that top and tail the movie.They just don’t seem to fit and, in any case, the story itself is strong enough to carry their message.

That aside, Road to Nhill provides an entertaining and amusing 95 minutes with a distinctly Australian story and style. It proves that with a (relatively) low budget of $2 million, the local film industry can produce movies people not only go to see, but actually want to go to see.

- Lindsay Marshall

ALIEN RESURRECTION (MA)
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Bug rating: two bugs out of five.

This is by far the best Ripley outing of the entire Alien series to date, in this reviewer's humble opinion.

He didn't see the other three.

But as they say in the Mars mission control room in that Hewlett-Packard ad that was particularly funny for the first 7000 screenings: "Nice planet, but kinda boring!"

Not very scary either.

- Don Gordon-Brown

IN AND OUT (PG)
Director: Frank Oz
Bug rating: Three and a half out of five

If a packed review audience's reaction is any guide, In and Out is the best comedy to hit the screens since The Birdcage.

Or maybe Aussie audiences just like their poof jokes fairly simple.

Kevin Kline plays Howard Brackett, a high school English teacher in sleepy, rural America who is outed by a former student (Matt Dillon) at the Oscars. Is he or isn't he? He says no, but he does like Barbra Streisand records. Hmmm. Tom Selleck's gay reporter thinks he is. All the women in the audience hope he isn't.

Joan Cusack is Howard's long-time fiancee suddenly faced with the dilemma that, just maybe, her glory box might not be everything Howard might desire come their imminent wedding night. Debbie Reynolds is Howard's mum who sees the clothesline full of nappies dissolving before her eyes, while Bob Newhart is the old-fashioned principal feeling decidedly queer over the prospect of having a vegemite-drilling, shirt-lifting, pillow-biter on his staff, if you know what I mean.

Kline is in top form, even keeping to a minimum that thing he does with his teeth to make him look like a rabbit amok in the farmer's favourite lettuce patch.

A gay time is had by all, and we'll even forgive director Frank Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick for the contrived assembly hall scene where all of Howard's students end up rooting for him, one way or the other.

Does anyone really believe this Scent of a Woman, Dead Poet's Society, it's time for students to stand-up-and-be-counted-as-a-man stuff really happens in real life?

-Don Gordon-Brown

THE ICE STORM (M)
Director: Ang Lee
Bug rating: four bugs out of five.

I'll do this review later. In the meantime, I just had to run this picture of Sigourney Weaver with whip. Does it for me every time!

- Don Gordon-Brown

THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE (R)
Director: Taylor Hackford
Bug rating: three bugs out of five.

IT takes a professional actor like Al Pacino not to wink at the camera too much while hamming it up outrageously as the Devil in this moderately successful time-waster.

Pacino, taking a break from serious acting, draws on all his Oscar-winning wiles - mostly a series of smarmy, self-satisfied smirks and mad-edged monologues - to ooze comfortably into the role of Satan in what the movie's production notes describes as the eternal struggle between power and weakness, between temptation and surrender, between good and limitless evil, between a passable if slightly used script and a corny, tacked-on ending. Sure, we added that last bit. Why not?

Pacino plays Satan playing John Milton, head of a big Big Apple law firm with the meter constantly running for big-name clients from around the world. Canoe Reeves is Kevin Lomax, a Florida lawyer without a loss to his name lured by Milton to defend clients who are as guilty as sin.

Pacino's panache even rubs off on Canoe, who shows he can tackle a complex, layered role by delivering only his own lines throughout this visually splendid travelogue of New Yorkery.

Lomax is too busy smelling the leather and sniffing the $50 cognacs to see what his wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) sees: that Milton and his knockout female companions with the obvious lesbian tendencies are all members of that subterranean hot rock group, the Prince of Darkness and his Ladies from Hades.

Will Milton succeed in luring Lomax into his devilish plans for the destruction of the world as we know it. Will the ending be even a bigger letdown than The Game?

And how come the Devil can orchestrate his evil mayhem from within a church? Something in my childhood Sunday School studies tells me that even Satan is rendered impotent inside a church, quickly put into a sermonal stupor along with the true believers.

That small criticism aside, this is one of those movies that should be seen on the big screen. What is passable there might become quite passe on the idiot box.

- Don Gordon Brown