Bovie Movie

More an intense portrait of doomed romance than a serial-killer thriller, writer/director Patty Jenkins’s brutal biopic of prostitute-turned-multiple murderer Aileen Wuornos burrows deep into the woman’s psyche with the help of an Oscar-winning turn from Charlize Theron. While her physical transformation may have caught the Academy’s eye, Theron’s performance goes beyond the weight-gain and dental prosthetics, finding both compassion and coldness in Wuornos’s descent into homicidal mania. Aileen’s first kill is in self-defence, escaping from a “client”, but the impulse soon escalates into murder as she fights both to survive and to protect her burgeoning relationship with the naive outcast lesbian Selby (a superbly understated Christina Ricci). In other hands, this could have become overwrought melodrama, but Jenkins skilfully mines the humanity within the sensationalism to come up with something that is both tender and chilling — and ultimately heartbreaking. 

Hollywood’s plundering of classic TV series has produced its fair share of turkeys, but this is a glorious exception. This is partly owing to director Barry Sonnenfeld’s wise decision to stick with the black humour of Charles Addams’s original and very popular New Yorker cartoons and, perhaps more importantly, some inspired casting — Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia are note perfect as loving Morticia and Gomez, while Christopher Lloyd was equally born to play Fester. However, these stars are almost surpassed by the astonishingly agile Thing and by Christina Ricci’s splendid performance as the young Wednesday. The plot — a confidence trickster (Lloyd) poses as Fester to steal the Addams fortune — is a tad contrived, but Sonnenfeld makes a confident transition from cinematographer to director (he proved himself again with Get Shorty in 1995) and the result is a witty family comedy that has enough sly humour to keep adults chuckling throughout. The massive success of the film inspired the cast to return for a sequel. 

This supernatural gothic whodunnit is another beautifully crafted offering from eccentric maestro Tim Burton. With a perfect cast milking every sinister nuance, Burton’s clever take on Washington Irving’s timeless tale of terror uses the classic look of Hammer’s golden horror era to stunning effect. Johnny Depp, sporting a clipped English accent, is brilliant as maverick policeman Ichabod Crane, sent to the small New England community of Sleepy Hollow to investigate three mysterious beheadings, which the locals are blaming on the ghost of the legendary Headless Horseman. Cruel shocks and subversive thrills combine with sly humour in a stunning movie that’s steeped in Burton’s Grimm fairy-tale sensibilities and unrestrained love of the fantasy genre. 

Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, The Fisher King) directed this colorful, stylized, pseudo-psychedelic $21-million adaptation of the 1971 Hunter S. Thompson classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, about stoned sportswriter Raoul Duke, Thompson’s alter ego, on a wild drug-crazed road trip, a paranoid plummet into the belly of the beast, with his pal, lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta. Originally serialized in Rolling Stone (November 1971), the book catapulted Thompson headfirst toward the Kerouac-Mailer-Capote pantheon and jump-started the entire movement of “gonzo journalism.” Carrying a suitcase of drugs, Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp with shaved pate) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) drive a red convertible across the Mojave from L.A. to Vegas, where Duke has an assignment to cover the Mint 400 desert motorcycle race. As the drugs kick in, Duke ventures into voiceover, filling in the blank spots and narrative gaps. “This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs,” says Duke, but even so, they consume vast quantities, eventually escalating to ether. Duke notes that with ether “you can actually watch yourself behaving this terrible way, but you can’t control it.” The two trash their hotel room, and Gonzo goes back to L.A. Thinking the hotel room holocaust will lead to an arrest, Duke begins a drive back to L.A., but after an odd encounter with a highway patrolman (Gary Busey) and a telephone conversation with Gonzo, he returns to Vegas to cover the District Attorney Convention on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the glitzy Flamingo Hotel. This time the drugged-out duo trash their Flamingo room. The crazed carnival atmosphere segues into a carney casino, Bazooko’s Circus, where a barker (Penn Jillette) spiels amid aerialists, clowns, and a rotating carousel bar. Gonzo worries over runaway teen Lucy (Christina Ricci), who paints portraits of Barbra Streisand. Soon the hallucinations begin: Duke sees Gonzo transmogrify into a demon with breasts on its back, and an acid vision of a Vegas bar features large legit lounge lizards (courtesy of monster makeup man Rob Bottin). Flashbacks depicting Duke’s intro to the drug scene jump back to love-Haight relationships in San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Cameos and guest stars include Mark Harmon, Cameron Diaz, Flea, Lyle Lovett, Harry Dean Stanton, Ellen Barkin, Tobey Maguire, and Hunter S. Thompson himself. The film features a Geffen Records soundtrack mixing rock of the period with Vegas lounge tunes. Over the years, various script adaptations came and went as did numerous talents; people connected with past efforts to film Thompson’s book include Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and writer-director Alex Cox. Shown in competition at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

With this messy tale of teen horror, director Wes Craven tries to reinvigorate the werewolf movie in the same way that his Scream series breathed life into the jaded slasher genre. The film stars Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg (Roger Dodger) as LA siblings who are infected by a lycanthrope after a road accident. The events that follow, as the two slowly begin to transform, aren’t so much scary as darkly amusing, with scriptwriter Kevin Williamson’s adolescent witticisms and whines to the fore. The first third of the movie is like TV’s The O.C. with added gore and light tension, giving the film an enjoyably breezy appeal that masks its surprisingly clumsy direction and ridiculous storyline. It’s only when the werewolf effects go from a teasing flash of fur to full-frontal monsters that the feature disintegrates entirely. The CGI effects are so appalling that they overshadow everything else, spoiling the creepy fun and turning a guilty pleasure into groan-worthy rubbish. 

Adapted by director Moises Kaufman from his own play, which was itself based on testimony from the citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, this is a sobering account of the savage murder of HIV-positive student Matthew Shepard in 1998. However, Kaufman dissipates the impact of his exposure of homophobia in small-town America by studding the flashbacking action with cameos from well-meaning stars like Christina Ricci, Laura Linney and Steve Buscemi, whose presence punctures the film’s already strained veneer of stylised realism, as members of the Tectonic Theater troupe glean information from interviews with locals of diverging backgrounds and beliefs. Worthy, but flawed.