- Mystery Men
Captain Amazing has been too successful at doing what he does that there aren’t any real baddies left in the city. This has reduced his profile resulting in lucrative advertising contracts being pulled. To counter this, he gets arch-fiend Cassanova Frankenstein freed from the Asylum where he has been for nearly twenty years. Things don’t go quite according to plan and the responsibility for the city’s safety falls on the shoulders of the wannabe superheroes Mr Furious (who just gets angry), The Blue Raja (master of silverware, well forks anyway), The Shoveller (who tries to keep the rest in check, played wonderfully by William H. Macy), Invisible Boy (who can only disappear when no-one is looking), The Bowler (daughter of The Bowler who was killed by one of the Disco Boys), The Sphinx (dangerously mysterious and full of terribly useful proverbs), and The Spleen (who has a nasty gas attack). We get the “How can Lance be Captain Amazing since he wears glasses and Captain Amazing doesn’t - how would Amazing be able to see?” question it’s certainly funny but maybe too long at two hours. Watch out for the man who devotes his life to building non-lethal weapons.
- Sleepy Hollow
Constable Ichabod Crane sent to investigate murder in Sleepy Hollow. A famous American folk tale which lets us see Johnny Depp faint, be afraid of spiders, hide behind women and children for safety. He has to find out how or what is behind the decapitations of a number of townsfolk but you do keep wondering where Scooby Doo has got to when you have a headless horseman running about. There is a moment where, despite it being 1799, someone mentions the turn of a millennium whilst he’s still in New York City which seems somewhat an oversight. It looks good and some moments just make you laugh at the ridiculousness. A gothic tale well worth seeing.
- Bringing Out The Dead
Three nights in the life of Nicholas Cages’ alcoholic emergency medical services driver haunted by the ghosts of the lives he hasn’t saved. He knows if only he could save someone’s life everything would start to seem not so bad again but right now he just wants his boss to actually fire him - “I’ll fire you tomorrow.” Set in the early 90s before the major NYC reforms, it’s an intense experience which is sometimes really frenetic. The voice-overs certainly remind you of Taxi Driver (the script is also from Paul Schrader and both are directed by Scorsese) but there is no assassination attempt. I liked Ving Rhames’s character when he brings one junkie “back from the dead” in front of some other junkies and when he manages to roll the ambulance over. Patricia Arquette appears as a woman whose father ends up on life support and who we discover is not so clean-cut as she may have appeared the first time we saw her. It’s a ride but one worth taking.
- Grosse Point Blank
A professional killer returns to his high school reunion after disappearing on prom night ten years before leaving the girl he loved on her doorstep. The trouble is, due to a slight problem with the method of his last job, he has to kill somebody while there. My only real problem is that John Cusack’s delivery here reminds me too much of Cornfed from “Duckman.” As such, I keep visualizing a pink pig in a detective’s hat. Watch out for the magically moving baseball cap, from a bedpost to John Cusack in the blink of an eye.
- Fight Club
The first rule of fight club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of fight club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. Oh well... (sue me) it reminded me of a Stephen King short story called “Secret Window, Secret Garden” from “Four Past Midnight”. But just who is Tyler Durden? The twist bit (if you’ve read that short story you can probably guess) reminded me of both the Usual Suspects and the Sixth Sense. You are not your job, you are not how much you have in the bank, you are not the contents of your wallet. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything and Fight Club represents that kind of freedom. Is Fight Club a lesson in self-worth and personal identity or just lots of bare-fist fighting leading to some rather nasty bruising?
- Bowfinger
Shoot a film without the main star realising it. In doing so end up terrifying the star into believing what is happening is real. Enjoyable comedy: Eddie Murphy gets to be funny again and the whole thing just seems to work so well.
- Wonderland
Michael Winterbottom's film of a bonfire night weekend in London where a lot of things don’t quite go according to plan. We spend five days on a journey into the lives of Nadia, her separated sister, her absent brother and her parents. When Darren does phone home, you can’t help feeling how the father must feel at that point. A touching moment.
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