Neil LaBute’s first two films, <i>In the Company of Men</i> and <i>Your Friends and Neighbours</i>, were the blackest of black comedies – labyrinths of sexual betrayal that showed men and women (but particularly men) at their lowest and nastiest. His new film, <b>Nurse Betty</b>, has a different tone altogether; it is offbeat and edged with darkness, but is lighter, sweeter and gentler than one might have expected.
This is the kind of review that tells you more than you may wish to know about the movie. So, if you want to see <i>In the Mood for Love</i> without preconceptions, read no further. No offence taken. You will, naturally, save this review to read after you’ve seen it.
What a load of hogwash. Robert Redford’s new film as a director, The Legend of Bagger Vance, is about a golfer who has such terrible experiences during World War I that it quite puts him off his game. He loses his swing, as they appear to say in golfing parlance. Then, some time later, with the help of a mystical black caddie, he gets it back.
Author Hubert Selby Jnr is best known for his Last Exit to Brooklyn, a sombre collection of connected stories that was made into a very effective film by Ulrich Edel in 1989. Now Darren Aronofsky, has tackled Selby’s novel Requiem for a Dream.
It’s enough to make one check into an ashram. The subject of drugs and addiction seems especially hard to get away from at the moment. There is Steven Soderbergh’s movie Traffic, a brilliant overview of the situation in the United States and Mexico; there is Darren Aronofsky’s film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jnr’s harrowing account of addiction, Requiem for a Dream.
Anglo-French writer Joanne Harris’s lovely novel Chocolat attracted much praise and has been something of a bestseller; now it has been made into a film by director Lasse Hallström (responsible for last year’s <i>The Cider House Rules</i>) and scriptwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs.
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/ 26 February 2001
The Coen brothers (Ethan produces, Joel directs, nominally at least; both write the scripts) have always had a quirky take on things, so it’s not an enormous surprise to find that their new movie, <b>O Brother, Where Art Thou?</b>, is based on Homer’s <i>Odyssey</i>. James Joyce did the same thing with his novel <i>Ulysses</i>, so there is precedent, but the Coens, naturally, make the transposition in their own inimitable way.
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/ 16 February 2001
Philip Kaufman’s film <b>Quills</b>, scripted by Doug Wright from his play, is set in the same time-frame as Peter Weiss’s revolutionary theatrical piece <i>The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade</i>, for short – whew – <i>Marat/Sade</i>.
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/ 9 February 2001
Mel Gibson has a certain comic talent, which emerged in his <i>Lethal Weapon</i> series of movies – a kind of practical-joker air, a naughty-boy glint in the eyes. It rendered his mad-policeman character appealing and memorable, and made a pleasant change after the grimly taciturn road warrior he played in the Mad Max films. After all, we really only need one Clint Eastwood.
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/ 2 February 2001
As the polarised reactions to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark have demonstrated, one person’s tragedy is another’s melodrama; one person’s deeply moving is another’s irksomely sentimental. If melodrama is tragedy that fails to move one, then sentimentality is emotion to which you do not respond.