/ 22 December 2000

New on screen this holiday

102 Dalmations. She’s back. Cruella de Vil (Glenn Close) re-emerges with a social conscience that lasts a full 10 minutes. Representing us dull, ordinary good folk is the pretty probation officer who will keep an eye on Cruella but keeps Dalmations. Her boyfriend looks like a male version of her and keeps dogs, too, but they’re strays and mongrels. He also has a parrot, wonderfully voiced by Eric Idle, who thinks he’s a Rottweiler. How he resolves that identity crisis is chokingly funny. Meanwhile, Cruella meets up with a tyrannical French designer (Grard Depardieu), and together they want to make a coat of shock! horror! Dalmation hides. Wonderfully surreal, it’s a pity that Cruella’s comeuppence takes so long, because by then the kids are too restless to care. The other thing is: don’t expect full social acceptance if you’re a spotless Dalmation. Neil Sonnekus

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Back in the Sixties Rocky and Bullwinkle were the cream of TV cartoon characters. Now they’ve fallen out of favour and a trio of nasty Eastern European caricatures have trans-formed themselves into real people and plan to take over ze world. Robert de Niro plays the Fearless Leader with about a bottle’s worth of gel on his Nazi haircut. Jason Alexander (the short, fat, bald, obsessive-compulsive guy in Seinfeld) and a not-so-funny Rene Russo play the two bad sidekicks. They are going to get America to watch their Really Bad Television and become zombies. The president, as usual, is at a loss for ideas. Our two broke heroes must come to the rescue. Some of the jokes are good in this dated-looking cartoon-vs-reality interplay, but they’re more for the tired parents than their alert children. NS

Autumn in New York. Will Keane is a 48-year-old restauranteur who is the king of bachelors in New York. Struggling to emerge from him is Richard Gere, who continues his long and abiding love affair with Richard Gere. But into his life comes Charlotte Fielding, played by Winona Ryder, who will teach him the value of commitment, etcetera. But he is such a louse that he fucks his “ex” while at the same party as our Emily Dickinson-quoting Fielding, who incidentally is dying; and he just never bothered to contact that little girl who is now his pregnant, twentysomething daughter. For some or other reason these two women will humanise this spineless oxygen thief, who could sleep in a bucket. Deftly directed by Joan Chen, who should have known better, this is for those who want to perv the handsome Gere, regardless, and Ryder, who is quite beautiful. And talented. NS

Bossa Nova. Any film that starts off with a dedication to the likes of Franois Truffaut and composer Tom Jobim, creator of the sensually rhythmic dance form of the title, had better live up to that dedication. And so we start off with Brazilian director Bruno Barreto’s real wife, a mellowed Amy Irving, playing a widowed English teacher in Rio de Janeiro. Pedro Paulo (Antonio Fagundes), a divorced, middle-aged lawyer, decides to learn the international language of commerce, while soccer star Accio (Alexandre Borges) must learn how to swear in that tongue because he’s sold out to, of course, Manchester United. It may not be perfect or funny ha ha for under-17s, but it’s warm, wise and ironic enough to justify its dedication. Moreover, it has a wonderful supporting cast of quirky (and sexy) characters, and it comes from a country that plays poetic football and names its international airport after a composer rather than a politician. NS

Children of the Century (Johannesburg only). It’s a bit difficult trying to decide what possessed Diane Kurys to make this film. Based on poet-playwright Alfred de Musset’s autobiographical version of his affair with woman writer George Sand, this film seems to be about their inability to give each other up. Though they are well and passionately played by Benot Magimel and Juliette Binoche respectively, after more than two hours of to-ing and fro-ing one wearies of them, their Romantic Age and its mal de sicle, especially with a soundtrack that reeks of Richard Clayderman. Sand, who smoked cigars and wore men’s clothes to protest male dominance, was way ahead of her time and deserves better treatment than this. NS

The Family Man is another second-chance movie, this time about a Wall Street wheeler and dealer, Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) who abandons his college sweetheart, Kate (Tea Leoni), for an upmarket, New York lifestyle and money, money, money. He brags to a poor black thief (Don Cheadle), but the guy’s a fairy godfather, and before you can say “strike a deal”, the nonplussed Jack (and the audience) finds he’s married to Kate, has kids and lives horrors! in the suburbs where he works as a tyre salesman. He has to learn to be human, that money isn’t everything, that wives are preferable to gorgeous one-night stands, and all the usual moral claptrap Hollywood brings out when it wants to honour simple folk (that is, the lower classes). Still, it’s not too bad for Jack. His wife’s attractive, the kids are sugary-sweet. The movie would have been different had Kate been frumpy, the kids ugly and his job dead-end the ingredients of a major box-office flop. But this movie’s too pretty, too snowy, to much like an over-decorated Christmas cake, to be that. William Pretorius

Little Nicky. The thought of Adam Sandler playing Little Nicky, the mixed-up son of the devil and an angel, will make many of us despair ?as will the thought of him doing it with his mouth all twisted up to one side, the better to facilitate a hilarious idiot voice. Suffice it to say that whatever lease on our affections Mr Sandler might have bought with The Wedding Singer has utterly expired. He is a monster of conceited, unfunny mannerisms. And yet, and yet. This film did force a few grudging laughs from this reviewer, largely on account of Reese Witherspoon playing Nicky’s mom as a Valley-girl angel. This, and all the frantic FX, might justify the price of admission for a few people. Peter Bradshaw

The Tao of Steve. Dex (Donal Logue) is an underachieving, pot-smoking, overweight kindergarten teacher who nonetheless has a faultless seduction technique based on his studies in philosophy of religion. But when he meets Syd (Greer Goodman), his secure system begins to show its flaws. The Tao of Steve is funny in an off-beat indie way, has its heart in the right place, and doesn’t drag out the more-or-less obvious conclusion for too long. Shaun de Waal