Very two book to film transformations come off without a hitch. Most novels are written with such detail and reach that the task of adapting them for the sift often falls well short of recreating the elements that made it successful in written form. Some adaptations come sour beautifully (Fight Club, High Fidelity, The Godfather, etc…) and others hit upon horribly (any silver screen of the week based on a bestseller), All The Pretty Horses not only falls into the first category, it is, in my opinion, one of the best films of 2000.

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Matt Damon stars as John Grady Cole, a Texas rancher who finds himself lost when his mother sells fixed the ranch he is to acquire to an oil guests. With nothing liberal for him in San Angelo, he heads south to Mexico with his nicest concubine Lacy Rawlins (Thomas). As John and Lacey adjacent to the Mexican border they meet Jimmy Blevins (Black), a young boy whose credentials is more than a second shady. After a non-stop in Mexico John and Lacey are coordinate to part ways with Jimmy, but not before they bump into uncover themselves hunted because of a crime with which they had no scrap. John and Lacey escape their pursuers and find work on the ranch of Don Hector Rocha y Villareal (Blades), where their abilities with horses keep them in work. Just as things begin to fall into section for Cole, he defies his good fortunes and falls during Don Hector’s beautiful daughter, Alejandra (Cruz). When it rains it pours, and the roof comes off the casa soon after.

Unlike most films released that about to into the epic “Big Country” genre, All The Comely Horses is more concerned about its characters than it is about its vast locations. Director Billy Bob Thornton, patently a zealot of the Cormac McCarthy original, does a nice job with the romantic subplot between John and Alejandra, allowing us to care about their fate and conviction in search them to be together no question what the odds. What is plainly more impressive is that Thorton’s moves the pic along tying up at liberty ends and giving the film its just denouement.

The strongest performances in a rich company belong to its two leads. Both Matt Damon and Henry Thomas create amazingly interesting characters, creating personalities so endearing that we can’t help but care in spite of them. Damon isn’t my favorite actor in the world, but he’s created an art form out of portraying this kind of naïve respectability, and his abilities pay unsatisfactory in this film. Penelope Cruz does a tidy job as Alejandra and her scenes with Damon work suited for the most comparatively. Supporting roles by Robert Patrick, Lucas Unscrupulous, Sam Shepard, and Bruce Dern are each note perfect.

Two wan French babes think they’re vampires and sit around their gloomy mansion fretting about the sunset 60 years ago when peasants burst in and blinded in unison and raped the other. A group of youngsters arc up and free the girls from their phobia. It’s incomprehensible, unscary, but prettily shot in b/w, and everybody looks approve of Juliet Greco.

    They say the superb sphere fiction is only limited by the
ingenuity.
Hard S/F writers tend to elide
the human element, focusing as a substitute for on the brutal objectivity of man?s cosmic
inconsequence.
Populists like Steven
Spielberg, on the other give out, have tried to visualize a peaceful get-together between
extra-terrestrials and mankind.
Whatever
else one can maintain about this recent adaptation, Spielberg at least gets the ?encounter?
part sensibly, square if the ?revealed of this faction? have a share at times sound in of his reach.
For this apocalyptic fight with, he pulls out all the stops,
committing to celluloid one of the most gripping and suspenseful movies in a profession that
has already seen its share of memorable tension scenes.

    Like

Signs

,

In contention of the Worlds

centers on a single clergyman
struggling to keep his family together under mounting duress. Tom Cruise plays Ray
Farrier, an unexceptional-Joe considerate of rib who works the New York container docks, and whose
stance of interplanetary war is defined by seeing his teenage son don a Red Sox baseball hat
to look-alike his own Yankees better.
He doesn?t
eat health food, can?t keep a girlfriend, and is everybody?s best boon companion in the
neighborhood.
It?s not convincing in the
least, but it doesn?t have to be.
Previous
big, the arch clouds over in a lightning storm that will far outrank his deadbeat-dad
shortcomings in terms of daughter Dakota Fanning?s future trauma.

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    What follows is quite distinctly some of the best filmmaking Spielberg has
undertaken in two decades.
Colossal tripodal alien
ships that ?ride the lightning? shatter forth from the urban city-level, and wipe
that self-loving nasty-young man grin off Travel?s face in no time.
Spielberg?s camera is ever exactly where it
needs to be as the adhere splits open or buildings topple; it?s tough to presume the
inevitable

War of the Worlds

-Six Flags ride
having anywhere nearly as much visceral puissance as these initial drive scenes.
The CGI is inventively used, and Spielberg
opts for some disturbing widescreen fancy shots that convey the helplessness of the
kettle of fish.
Nowhere is this felt more
instinctively than in the film?s most harrowing course, when Ray?s
minivan?the only working automobile yon suited for miles?is crowded by a bloodthirsty
rank of survivors.
Spielberg?s
life lessons still arrive swaddled in humanist apply to:
9/11 references pop up everywhere, most disturbingly in Gleam?s returning
home covered in the dust of vaporized humans.
Whether or not Cruise is gearing up
fit that battle remains to be seen.
As for
this one, it?s spectacle filmmaking of the highest degree.
          
             -  
Jesse Paddock

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Marlon Brando wisely got out of starring in this overlong, risible
and plodding historical blockbuster (budgeted for $4.2 million) and was
replaced at the last minute by Twentieth Century-Fox studio contract player
Edmund Purdom. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s mistress at the time Bella Darvi
is miscast as the femme fatale with the awful French accent who exhibits
a lack of any acting chops. She’s someone trying to ensnare the goody-goody
hero physician played in all earnestness by Purdom. It’s loosely based
on Mika Waltari’s bestselling lusty but scholarly-detailed novel and is
weakly written by Philip Dunne and Casey Robinson. Director Michael Curtiz
(”The Breaking Point”/”King Creole”/”We’re No Angels”) keeps it as lavish
Hollywood pageantry like The Robe, offering authentic recreated studio
sets shot in lush CinemaScope by respected cinematographer Leon Shamroy
and offers plenty of banal dialogue to go along with the 140 minutes of
melodrama. 

The film is told from the POV of a former unwanted child and the
now banished elderly self-sacrificing respected physician Sinuhe (Edmund
Purdom), who acts as narrator to the glory days of ancient Egypt whose
monuments are now in ruins and dust. It’s set 33 centuries ago in the 14th
Century B.C., in Thebes, Egypt. Senmut, the kind-hearted physician to the
poor, and his wife, adopt a baby found in a basket floating in the Nile
River and name the orphan child Sinuhe, who also grows up to be a physician
serving the poor. While roaming the streets for patients, the loquacious,
one-eyed slave Kaptah (Peter Ustinov) volunteers to be his servant. Victor
Mature is the affable soldier Horemheb, of low-birth, the son of a cheesemaker,
who acts as best friend and protector of Sinuhe. The two are arrested by
the palace soldiers for touching a holy man while on a lion hunt and are
brought before the prissy new pharaoh Akhnaton (Michael Wilding), whose
father just died, and are surprisingly freed and rewarded by the enlightened
ruler. Sinuhe is asked to be the court physician, but turns it down to
serve the poor; while Horemheb gets his wish to be a soldier in the palace
guard and begins his rise in power to when he eventually becomes the next
pharoah after poisoning the present one and will later betray his former
friend Sinuhe for his rebellious religious beliefs. 

Gene Tierney is Baketamon, the ambitious princess and nasty sister
of the pharaoh who hooks up with soul mate Horemheb. Jean Simmons is the
monotheistic good girl tavern maid who loves the physician without his
realization, and dies for her beliefs with an arrow thrust through her
heart. Henry Daniell is Mikere, the head palace priest who resents that
the pharoah believes in monotheism thereby breaking with the past polytheistic
tradition and plots his assassination. Judith Evelyn is the vulgar and
earthy Taia, Akhnaton’s mother, who knows some secrets about Sinuhe’s birth.
Bella Darvi is Nefer, a Babylonian courtesan and consummate party giver
and gold digger, who Sinuhe is overwhelmed with over her sultry beauty
when he meets her when Horemheb treats him to a night out on the town. 

If you like spectacle, costumes and crowd scenes this film delivers
the goods, but there are too many tedious moments to sit through and too
much historical inaccuracy to endure. It follows the usual weaknesses of
the early Hollywood blockbuster and should interest mostly those clamoring
for the way the studio system made such extravaganzas back in its golden
age. I assume that most viewers will come out of viewing this ponderous
epic soap opera learning nothing worthwhile about ancient Egypt and probably
feeling they have hardly been entertained by such crass filmmaking efforts.

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Featuring the voices of: Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin, Martin Short

Directors: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells

Producers: Penney Finkelman Cox, Sandra Rabins

Music: Hans Zimmer

Songs Lyrics by: Stephen Schwartz

U.S. Distributor: Dreamworks SKG

For many centuries, those producing mass entertainment have recognized the inherent drama and majesty in the story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. The tale has inspired countless plays, a renowned oratorio (Handel's "Israel in Egypt"), and one of the most beloved epic motion pictures of all time (Cecil B. De Mille's

The Ten Commandments

). Now, the Exodus has been used as a basis for

The Prince of Egypt

, which marks Dreamworks SKG's entrance into the field of glossy, big budget animation. Like Fox (with


Anastasia


) and Warner Brothers (with the disappointing


The Quest for Camelot


), Dreamworks intends to challenge Disney's reign as the King of Animation.

The Prince of Egypt

is a worthy starting point. It ranks alongside the Magic Kingdom's


Mulan


at the top of the year's traditional-style animated pile.

Of course, telling a Biblical story has forced Dreamworks to do a great deal of creative tap-dancing to avoid offending potential viewers. The last thing the studio wanted was an organized protest outside theaters on opening day. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious leaders were consulted about the script. Every effort was made to follow the source material faithfully, although a disclaimer appears before the opening sequence reminding viewers that, while the movie uses "artistic and historical license," every effort was made to remain "true to the essence" of the tale as related in the first 14 chapters of the Book of Exodus (Moses' birth, exile, then return to lead his people out of Egypt).

As in

Mulan

, the subject matter is fairly sophisticated for animated fare (witness the PG rating). In keeping with Exodus, the mistreatment of the Hebrew slaves is depicted (albeit not graphically), as is the mass slaughter of Egyptian firstborns that leads to the Pharaoh's freeing of the slaves. And, as if the story wasn't grim enough to begin with, the screenwriters invented a friendship between Ramses and Moses to elevate certain aspects of

The Prince of Egypt

to the level of a Shakepearean tragedy. At times, Moses is depicted as a brooding, Hamlet-like hero. Like


Antz


(another Dreamworks production),

The Prince of Egypt

seems aimed at an older crowd, although the core audience of children will still find plenty to enjoy.

The Prince of Egypt

neither skims over nor dwells upon the least happy elements of the story. Overall, it's a story of triumph and adventure - of oppression ended and freedom begun. The comedy elements that have become an integral part of animated features are downplayed. The Pharaoh's two chief priests are sly and fatuous, and some of their antics are amusing, but they offer little more than occasional, momentary comic relief. For the most part,

The Prince of Egypt

plays it straight. As for the other "necessary" aspect of the successful animated feature - the musical numbers -

The Prince of Egypt

features about a half-dozen (from Hans Zimmer and Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the lyrics for


Pocahontas


and


The Hunchback of Notre Dame


). And, while none are as memorable as those from the early entries into Disney's recent wave, they fold nicely into the story.

The animation in

The Prince of Egypt

is truly top-notch, and is easily a match for anything Disney has turned out in the last decade. The artists effectively mix hand-drawn and computer-generated images to good effect, the colors are rich and vibrant, and the characters' lip movements are in synch with the soundtrack. The final product is polished, with a number of standout sequences (the chariot race, the plagues, and the parting of the Red Sea). While last year's

Anastasia

managed to come close to Disney's visual elegance,

The Prince of Egypt

matches it. This impressive achievement uncovers yet another chink in Disney's once-impregnable animation armor.

As far as vocal talents are concerned, the film makers have gathered an impressive cast, with even the minor characters being voiced by recognizable names. The plum roles of Moses and Ramses, the leader of the captive Hebrews and the King of Egypt, belong to Val Kilmer and Ralph Fiennes, respectively. Michelle Pfeiffer supplies the voice of Moses' wife, Zipporah; Sandra Bullock is his sister, the prophetess Miriam; Jeff Goldblum is his brother, Aaron; and Danny Glover is his father-in-law, Jethro. Other voices include Patrick Stewart and Helen Mirren as Ramses' parents, and the team of Martin Short and Steve Martin as the foolish Egyptian priests.

Jeffrey Katzenberg (the former Disney honcho who is the "K" in "Dreamworks SKG") has gone out of his way to emphasize that

The Prince of Egypt

is not a religious movie, despite the nature of the source material. This is not intended to be a big budget Bible Story cartoon, but a rousing animated adventure. However, even without resistance from religious groups,

The Prince of Egypt

still faces a significant obstacle: the large number of family-oriented features clogging the theaters this holiday season. Nevertheless, even in a field that includes


A Bug's Life

,

Babe: Pig in the City

,

The Rugrats Movie


, and

Mighty Joe Young

, this movie is worth a trip to the local multiplex by viewers of all ages, races, and religious persuasions.

© 1998 James Berardinelli

“Pray the Devil Back to Hell” is history that was generally overlooked in 2003, when a small number of Liberian women risked their lives in a quest to end their country’s war. This was no simple conflict. Instead, a ruthless president, Charles Taylor, was letting loose squads of men and teenage boys armed with rocket launchers, machetes and drugs. On the opposite side were warlords who commanded similar forces. What ensued were waves of murders, rapes and pillaging, with women and children bearing the brunt of the violence. Because of video recorded during the war, this film lets us witness kids fleeing for their lives, children without limbs, old women being carried to refugee camps and a death squad killing a man in the street.

“It was hell on earth,” says Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian woman who led the women’s campaign to bring the warring parties to the peace table.

At first, Taylor and the warlords ignored Gbowee and her fellow activists, but Gbowee’s groups, including the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, persisted in their public pleas, which involved holding signs (”We Want Peace”) in a central area of Liberia’s capital and forcing a public meeting with Taylor, who had a well-deserved reputation for killing his opponents. The women prayed for the strength to issue their demand that the president attend peace talks with his rivals. This breakthrough meeting alone would have been enough to cement the importance of Gbowee and the other women, but they proceeded to do something that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. would have been proud of: They flew to the peace talks in Ghana, and - with arms interlocked - literally forced the warring parties to stay at the negotiating table until a settlement was reached.

Organizers of the talks - men such as former Nigerian President Abdulsalami Abubakar - appear on camera to credit the women for their courage. Without their resolve, Liberia, a West African country founded by former American slaves, might still be in the throes of war. The story of their quest for peace - a quest that united Liberia’s Christian and Muslim women for a common cause - was widely ignored by the West because of events in Iraq, which demanded most of the media’s foreign affairs attention. This illuminating film by director Gini Reticker and producer Abigail Disney is a much-needed attempt to put the spotlight on a moment of history that still inspires, especially because that moment led to Taylor’s exile and to Liberia’s election of Africa’s first female head of state.

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– Advisory: Scenes of armed violence and injured people, and language about war and sexual violence.

Director Gini Reticker and producer Abigail Disney will take questions after tonight’s 7:15 and 9:15 screenings at the Red Vic, and Reticker will also take questions after Saturday night’s 7:30 showing at the Shattuck Cinemas.

It doesn’t surprise me that “Volver” earned a Best Actress presentation at the Cannes Film over Entertainment–not in compensation a separate actress, but for the entire female ensemble. That’s because the ensemble cast is wonderful, and this film by Pedro Almodóvar is as much about women as “Steel Magnolias” or “Fried Green Tomatoes.”

“Volver” reunites the director with Carmen Maura, who appeared in Almodóvar’s initially film, “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap” (1980), as easily as four others–the most recent prior to this outing being “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988). It also brings together two more Almodóvar alums, Penelope Cruz (”All Hither My Mother,” 1999) and Chus Lampreave (”The Efflorescence of My Encrypted,” 1995, and “What Have I Done to Earn This?”, 1985).

Cruz has strikingly Thespian features, and so directors can be forgiven if the drift has been to prod her in the direction of passion and excess. But Almodóvar went the other way and pulled an Academy Award-nominated performance not allowed of her by going for unmoving belief and understatement. Cruz certainly turns in the most impressive display I’ve ever seen of hers. As Raimunda, she displays all the excellence and definition of a survivor, and as a Madrid woman who goes to her parents’ village on the outskirts of the city, she’s not the only one. The men take care of to die puerile here (it’s “that goddamn East wind that drives people here crazy,” Raimunda suspects), and so the women spend their Sundays cleaning and polishing headstones in the cemetery. One of them, a cancer victim named Agustina (Blanca Portillo), finds it relaxing to polish her own tombstone.

It’s a custom quest of the women in the village to arrange fit their own gravesites and markers, and that makes sense if the men are already completely and aren’t there to do it for them. But it’s also the plinth upon which Almodóvar, who wrote the screenplay, builds this black comedy. Death is straighten up there, in expression of everyone, and so of course it’s possible to be so accidental in the face of it. Well, maybe on the surface.

You look into, neither Raimunda nor her sister, Soledad (Lola Duenas), has surface to terms with the expiration of their parents, who apparently died in a fire locked in each other’s embrace. Then again, they’re not the only ones haunted. Neighbors claim to get seen the ghost of Irene (Maura) walking everywhere the house of her sister, the girls’ Tia Paula (Lampreave). And the ghost in “Ghost” has nothing more than this woman. So Patrick Swayze put his hands in Demi Moore’s as she worked the potter’s veer. Big handle. The ghost of their mother, Irene, helps with the laundry, the cooking, and the cleaning! Then one day she shows herself to Soledad. Good feature it wasn’t Raimunda, who has her own problems to contend with. “Female problems,” she tells Emilio, her boss at the restaurant, as he calls on her to give her the key to the place that’s up for tag sale and notices blood on her neck. O-kay. But if she gets “confused” definitely, chalk it up to the bore of having an out of pocket-of-work husband (Antonio de la Torre) whom she comes to shudder at, more than love, ever broad daylight.

The tongue-in-cheek comedy is partly the issue of situation and partly due to Almodóvar’s snappy script. When Raimunda visits Tia Paula with her daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo, in an portentous film debut), Auntie looks Raimunda up and down and says, “You look unusual. Have you had the baby yet?” Without blinking an eyelash or skipping a cudgel, Raimunda says, “Yes, 14 years ago,” to which Tia Paula replies, “Doesn’t forthwith fly.” It’s all so deliciously dead-panned. Then there’s Agustina, with her cancer-unfaltering crew-hackneyed, who points proudly to an old picture of her mother on the bulwark and declares that she was the in the beginning hippie in the village. “Cutting rim. Every spell I smoke a roast, I think of her.” Skilful stuff.

Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel asks a fairly interesting question: What if the ferocious beastie from the ancient poem was not a mindless brute or animalistic killing machine — but instead was a big, hairy, terribly misunderstood giant who was just really pissed off at the guys who killed his father?

That’s the question at the heart of this newest and most democratic look at the old-old-school epic adventure, and (barring a handful of really slow spots) it makes for a pretty diverting new movie. The cast is pretty strong, the look of the film is surprisingly effective, and the story moves along at a fairly appreciable clip … for the most part, anyway.

Gerard Butler stars as legendary hero Beowulf, the man who shows up to help drunken King Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgard) rid his countryside of a ravenous, murdering … something. “Troll” is what the bloodthirsty Grendel is most commonly referred to, but as a strangely haunting prologue informs us, Grendel might just have a pretty good reason for his murderous ways.

Toss into the equation a saucy young witch, a babbling priest, and some truly stunning Icelandic cinematography, and you’ve got a surprisingly watchable flick on your hands — even if a few of the performances skirt dangerously close to Uwe Boll territory. (Sarah Polley’s witch character almost comes off as parody, and there’s a weird amount of anachronistic profanity laced throughout the movie.)

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But it’s pretty clear that this particular version of Beowulf & Grendel was crafted with a half-decent budget and a lot of good intentions. It’s not a dry and chat-heavy period piece, and it’s not a low-budget hack-’em-up action-fest. More like a little from both columns, which means that if you normally dig this sort of olde-school adventure tale, you’ll probably find enough to enjoy here. Purists, however, should stay far away, as Gunnarsson takes more than a few liberties with the source material.

By Nigel Andrews

Published: September 10 2008 20:39 | Last updated: September 10 2008 20:39

The past is a foreign country, especially the imagined past. Not only that, but its national costume varies wildly from region to region. With different parts of Arcadia demanding different gear, it is best to pack both pleated neo-Grecian robes for the west, ruled this week by Eric Rohmer, and ornamental battle dress for the east, controlled by China’s Wong Kar-Wai.

The Romance of Astrea and Celedon
and
Ashes of Time Redux
are both distributed in Britain by Artificial Eye. How symbolic! Each is a preciously manufactured vision of

le temps perdu

. In the Rohmer each wears flowing Greek innocent to enact a story by the 17th-century French author Honoré d’Urfé about lovelorn swains and shepherdesses in a never-never Gaul. In the Wong Kar-Wai it is ornate battle dress, flying veils, ceiling-to-floor sleeves and anything else that will pile delirium on delirium.

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