So, who was the biggest star at the movies this year? The funny little Italian guy? The bimbo in the new Bond movie? No way. It was the bald bloke who won more Oscars than anyone else, wrote or inspired more big-time movies than anyone else, who's been around longer
than anyone else. That Shakespeare guy.
Two more Bard-inspired movies come out on video this holiday fortnight: a mallrat spoof of The Taming of the Shrew (released millennium weekend) and a star-encrusted A Midsummer Night's Dream (Christmas weekend).
\EE In a knowing send-up of contemporary culture, 10 Things I Know About You twists the plot of The Taming of the Shrew around the familiar characters of movies like There's Something About Mary and anything starring anyone in a series on TV3. Kate becomes the high-school princess, Kat.
Like all 90s teen comedies, there's the guy who struggles to land a girl to win a bet; the ingenue - Kat's younger sister, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) - who's a virgin to everything but consumerism. "There's a difference between like and love," says Bianca. "I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack!"
At the centre is Kat, played by Julia Stiles. Bitchy, brainy and flip, she puts down boys simply because they're boys - until she's wooed and "tamed" by charming Patrick (Heath Ledger). Nice one.
\EE Michael Hoffman has a pretty good reputation as a director so when he suggested an all-star bash at A Midsummer Night's Dream, quite a few of the all-stars listened. Then signed on.
Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Christian Bale and Sophie Marceau put their names on the dotted ... in an oddball production that sees the Bard's squabbling lovers rattling through the Tuscan landscape on bicycles (a Fiat's better, you can cover more vineyards in a day).
Helena (Flockhart) stomps around in an Ally McBeal-ish snit of love for Demetrius (Bale). Oberon (Everett) and his prankster messenger Puck (Tucci) share jokes at mortals' expense. Fairy queen Titania (Pfeiffer) is under a love spell, wooing the weaver-turned-spellbound ass Bottom (Kline), but coolly removed from the goings-on.
As Entertainment Weekly sum-marised, in a review memorably titled What the Puck, "This Dream, so lushly designed, expensively cast, and permissively under- disciplined by the expert director of One Fine Day, Restoration, and Soapdish, fractures and dissolves before our eyes."
\EE South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is the movie of TV's politically incorrect Stan, Kyle, Cartman and the hapless Kenny. The story, specifically designed to irritate anyone outside Generation X, goes that their favourite cartoon show (read South Park) has been turned into a movie. The uproar when 8-year-olds begin uttering expletives they hear in the multiplex brings Earth to the brink of World War III. If you've never tuned in to the TV show and decide to rent this, be prepared for a crude awakening.
\EE If you can remember those Saturday afternoon matinees with a Look at Life newsreel, a couple of Looney Tunes cartoons and a serial before the Hayley Mills feature, you'll recall that the serial always ended when Our Hero was about to be shot, leap over a cliff, or escape from a speeding train.
The Indiana Jones franchise did a pretty good job of reviving the feeling. The Mummy has a crack, too. It opens in ancient Egypt with a voiceover telling of forbidden love between the Pharaoh's wife and high priest Imhotep. She's murdered and mummified; he is buried alive with beetles gnawing at his flesh.
Cut to 1925 and Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and legionnaires are fending off the last guards who have kept Imhotep's tomb from being discovered. But our square-jawed hero, accompanied by Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and Jon-athan (John Hannah), uncovers the tomb, unwittingly resurrects the ancient evil and runs away to hide. There is no escape ... dumb fun for big kids, nightmarish for little ones.
\EE Two that you wouldn't want to hire for a family evening: American History X is set inside the United States' white-power movement, with Edward Norton as the skinhead leader of a race-hate group sent to prison when he takes revenge for his father's murder. After three years in jail, Derek comes home to find his brother Danny (Edward Furlong) regards him as a hero, while he has grown out of his past. Whether it succeeds in its message or simply glorifies the themes to the audience it is sure to attract is a moot point.
Lolita has Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith and Dominique Swain in a controversial new version of Vladimir Nabokov's novel about schoolteacher Humbert who marries his landlady purely to get close to her daughter, who reminds him of his childhood sweetheart. Like the previous movie, if there are redeeming messages here, chances are they'll be lost.
* Also out this fortnight: That Championship Season, Against the Law, Simply Irresistible, Trippin', The Mighty, Forces of Nature.
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