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reviews in brief.
The Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) and Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) are caught off-guard at a Christmas pageant in Richard Curtis' romantic comedy Love Actually.
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Love Actually
R. 129 minutes, Southwind 12
Who can argue that love in all its splendor isn't a wonderful thing? A movie dealing with love is not at all a new idea, try and think of a film that doesn't include some aspect of love. However films that deal with it directly often run the cheesy route, so when one gets it right it's hard to contain a girl's enthusiasm.
Director Richard Curtis is the scribe behind Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary. In Love Actually he looks at love in all its glory and forms. He finds 10 interweaving love stories during Christmas in London.
One finds the new Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) falling for the woman who serves him tea. In another, his sister (Emma Thompson) deals with a cheating husband (Alan Rickman). And in yet another, their friend (Liam Neeson) is a recent widow left to deal with his love for his young stepson. I could go on — and I would if space permitted — but alas I am left with the simple fact that this movie is fantastic. The cast is phenomenal. The film also features Colin Firth, Keira Knightly and — randomly — Billy Bob Thornton.
Aside from the cast, the film hits all the right notes. It is charmingly funny, heartbreakingly sad and undeniably cute in a way that makes single people want to slit
their wrists. Either way, the film is brilliant. I am only giving it an A minus because some will think it is a bit long but I wouldn't have cared if it was two hours longer.
Lindsey Ramsey Grade: A-
In the Cut
R. I18 minutes, AMC Studio 30 (Olathe)
The explicit shock value suggested by the title to Jane Campion's bizarre erotic thriller is no lie. In the Cut obsesses over nude bodies and severed limbs in the same way its heroine, Frannie Avery, obsesses over the English language.
Frannie (Meg Ryan) is a creative writing professor who compulsively memorizes quotes from Dante's Inferno and Federico Garcia-Lorca. She begins an affair with Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), a homicide detective trailing a serial killer.
Despite all the high-minded language floating around, the characters live by a decidedly lower maxim: Everyone does everything for sex. Campion could care less about her thinly conceived murder mystery. She just wants to see people screw in jittery shots that practically bleed with "significance." Ryan gives a fearless performance that's completely wasted in this pointless howler.
—Stephen Shupe
Grade: D
DVD REVIEWS
28 Days Later
R. 108 minutes,DVD
The zombie movie reinvented? Not quite, but 28 Days Later is a fun, inyour-face attempt to bring a zombie movie to a younger audience.
Jim, a London bike carrier, wakes up from a coma to find that he is one of a few remaining survivors of a plague that turns its victims into rage-ridden zombies. The survivors must find a way to stay alive and hopefully rebuild what has been lost.
The commentary by director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland gives you plenty of information about making the film and why they chose the ending they did. The DVD extras include all the standards plus, speaking of endings, three different endings of the film, one in storyboard format that takes the film in a completely different direction. Everything here is fun to watch and makes watching the realistic nightmare of the film that much more terrifying.
Lindsey Ramsey
Movie Grade: B+
DVD Grade: B
Hulk
Brother Bear
G. 85 minutes. South Wind 12
Universal's biggest movie ever got a bad rap last June. The film's power is easier to appreciate on the small screen, where all that computer-generated green fits as seamlessly as a video game.
PG-13, 138 minutes, DVD
Lessons are learned, friendships are made and a new generation of children falls in love with a new generation of Disney characters.
It would be easy to point out all the trite formulas directors Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker used in Brother Bear. The same formulas that Disney has employed since Snow White met seven little people. But these formulas work, and Disney is able to create an entertaining family movie.
In this opus Kenai (Joaquin Phoenix), a Native American boy, loses his oldest brothers to a bear, so Kenai decides to kill the bear. Kenai's actions have consequences. To learn this lesson the great spirits turn Kenai into a bear. To turn back into a human Kenai must go on an adventure where he meets a lost, lonely bear cub.
No other comic book movie has spent more time on character development, an artistic decision by director Ang Lee that obviously alienated audiences who just wanted to see the Hulk smash stuff. The oedipal duel that pushes much of the action to the end pays off in a great finale that unleashes some of the most spectacular movie happenings of the summer.
Seen sporting a KU sweatshirt in one of the DVD's making-of documentaries, Lee discusses Hulk's tendency towards Greek tragedy on a literate commentary track. Other extras include deleted scenes and an interview with writer/director James Schamus, who sounds just as geewhiz as he did when I met him at a screening of Lee's The Ice Storm in 2001.
Stephen Shupe
Movie Grade: B
DVD Grade: B+
-Cal Creek Grade: B-
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As a result of his unlikely alliance with Koda (left), Kenai comes to question everything he knows and learns many important lessons about the true meaning of brotherhood in Brother Bear.
thursday, november 6, 2003
jayplay 21