Bovie Movie

This delightfully soft-centred rumination on the excesses of television has suffered in the wake of The Truman Show, but comparisons with the Jim Carrey blockbuster are misplaced. Ron Howard’s comedy drama is more concerned with feel-good laughs and formulaic romantic complications than hard-edged satire, and it doesn’t disappoint in delivering sheer enjoyment. Matthew McConaughey gives a winning performance as the small-town video-store assistant who agrees to be filmed 24 hours a day for a cable network. However, when his regular-guy persona makes him nationally famous, the novelty wears off. McConaughey delivers the script’s homespun messages with aplomb, while Ellen DeGeneres steals every scene as a ratings-hungry producer. Also rising to the occasion is Elizabeth Hurley, who makes sure her supporting role as the wannabe “It Girl” hitching her career wagon to Ed’s new-found fame pays maximum dividends. Hardly subtle yet highly entertaining, despite its deliberately unchallenging fuzziness. 

Ron Howard makes pictures of quality if not always distinction. So after years of being ignored by the American Academy as a director, it seems that with this biographical drama he decided 2002 would be his Oscar year. The true story of maths genius John Forbes Nash Jr, who battled paranoid schizophrenia at the height of his academic success and eventually won the economics Nobel Prize, is tailor-made Oscar fare. It has the triumph-over-tragedy, against-all-odds theme going for it, plus a powerhouse performance from Russell Crowe as Nash. Any film that traces nearly 50 years of an influential man’s life is making a claim to some celluloid glory, but underneath all the impressive ageing make-up, what exactly do we have here? A difficult man with a complex psychological condition — reduced to a series of delusional episodes to furnish a thriller subplot — who has devoted his life to an almost insurmountably dry subject, namely advanced mathematics theory. This is in no way a badly made picture, and there’s reliable support from Ed Harris, Adam Goldberg and Paul Bettany. However, the film’s overweening desire to be taken seriously gets in the way of the story. That said, the film won the best picture Oscar, Howard walked away with best director and Jennifer Connelly won a best supporting actress statuette for her well judged performance as Nash’s wife, though Crowe lost out as best actor to Denzel Washington in Training Day. 

You die on screen playing the prototype video game Staying Alive, then you prepare to meet the same bloody fate in real life. This is the premise of William Brent Bell’s predictable The Ring-goes-X Box chiller, which is set against the over-familiar horror landscape of New Orleans and centres on the quest of a group of friends to find the ancient evil that has possessed their consoles. That the police ignore the group’s crazy explanation despite clear evidence; that lovers make out amid the supernatural mayhem; and that characters utter lines such as “I can’t believe this is happening!”, only adds to the lame-brained, clichéd ennui. Pre-gore cutaways (to secure a wider audience) sink any shock value, while the sound effects — reliant on joystick controls buzzing like an electric razor — are lazy. Even the game’s computer graphics refuse to summon up the requisite gothic frisson. 

René Clair’s first French film for over a decade is a bittersweet, regretful look at the silent cinema in which he began his career. Maurice Chevalier plays an ageing ex-actor, now a director, who teaches his assistant (François Périer) the arts of seduction, unaware that they are both in love with the same young girl (an insipid Marcelle Derrien). The re-creation of the era is rather more convincing than the plot, but the 59-year-old Chevalier shows a rare depth.