Bovie Movie

The rousing, true-life story of a single dad who went from living on the streets to owning his own brokerage firm is brought to the big screen by superstar Will Smith, appearing for the first time opposite his real-life son Jaden Smith. Set in early-’80s San Francisco, the film charts the hard times and eventual comeback of Chris Gardner, a suddenly single salesman who has custody of his son, but finds that providing for the two of them is a challenge in the increasingly unstable economic climate. He struggles to work his way from unpaid intern at Dean Witter to something more substantial, even as life continues to offer him setbacks. Making his Hollywood debut, Italian director Gabriele Muccino was championed by Will Smith for the project.

Robert De Niro is Gil Renard, baseball fan from hell. Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes) is the player he is nuts about. No sooner does the talented Rayburn sign a huge contract with the San Francisco Giants, than everything in his life goes horribly wrong. Not only does his field play deteriorate along with his batting average, but someone murders his chief team rival. It’s not revealing too much to say that Gil killed him, in the mistaken belief that he was doing Bobby a favor. When superfan Gil insinuates himself into Bobby’s everyday life, the situation grows much worse, because this fixated nut-case has some very strange ideas about family solidarity. Amusing highlights come from John Leguizamo as a ballplayer’s agent, and Ellen Barkin as a radio sports announcer.

The life and sordid, untimely death of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane are explored by director Paul Schrader in this biopic, which marks one of the few times the filmmaker has not scripted his own film. Auto Focus chronologically traces the meteoric rise of Crane’s show business career, beginning with his early success as a jokey deejay on Los Angeles morning radio in the early ’60s. A devout family man, Crane lives in Southern Californian comfort with his wife Anne (Rita Wilson) and their young children, relishing the modicum of celebrity his job provides him. His life begins to change, however, when his agent Lenny (Ron Leibman) proposes that he take a breakthrough role on the CBS POW-camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Initially reluctant to take the job, Crane signs on with the production and, to his and everyone else’s surprise, the show becomes a smash hit. With celebrity comes a new set of friends, and Crane falls in with audio-visual guru John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), a Sony sales rep who spends his days setting up home entertainment systems for the Hollywood elite, and his nights cruising strip clubs for anonymous sexual encounters. Already a pornography buff, Crane starts using his fame to secure him and Carpenter an endless parade of affairs, which they videotape and then obsessively review. It isn’t long before Anne demands a divorce, and Crane marries his Hogan’s co-star Patti Olsen (aka Sigrid Valdis, here played by Maria Bello), who’s more accepting of his escapades. When the sitcom is canceled, however, Crane has trouble securing acting jobs, and recedes further and further into his life of amateur porn with Carpenter. Auto Focus premiered at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals before its art-house run in the fall of 2002.

After parodying the blaxploitation films of the 1970s in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Keenen Ivory Wayans takes aim at slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s in this raunchy satire, which was produced under the clumsy but inarguably appropriate title Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween. As you might expect, a group of teenagers — not-terribly-bright Buffy (Shannon Elizabeth), her best friend Brenda (Regina Hall), stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans), fey football player Ray (Shawn Wayans), loudmouthed Greg (Lochlyn Munro), sexually overexcited Bobby (Jon Abrahams), and his prim girlfriend Cindy (Anna Faris) — are on the run from a maniacal killer who is looking for revenge after the kids accidentally kill a man following an auto accident. They also find themselves having to contend with intrusive reporter Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) and eccentric high school principal Squiggly (David L. Lander). Incidentally, the title Scary Movie is something of an inside joke: it was the working title for Scream, the movie that kick-started the mid-’90s slasher film revival.

Ivan Reitman’s sequel to the phenomenally successful Ghostbusters is looser and more self-assured than the original. The film opens with a title reading “Five Years Later” and finds the ghostbusters living in hard times. A restraining order has forbidden the boys to partake in paranormal warfare, and as a result they have had to seek other lines of work. Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston (Ernie Hudson) spend their time performing at children’s’ birthday parties, and Egon (Harold Ramis) is busy conducting experiments investigating the effect of human emotions on the environment, leaving ghostbusting behind. Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dana (Sigourney Weaver) have split up. Venkman now hosts a local cable show called “The World of the Psychic.” Dana, now divorced and the mother of a little baby named Oscar, works as an art restorer in a museum — and this is where the plot kicks in. While Dana is restoring a portrait of a 16th-century tyrant by the name of Vigo the Carpathian, the portrait becomes hexed. The evil Vigo wants to return to life by taking over the body of Dana’s little child. Vigo has enlisted Dana’s boss, Janosz Poha (Peter MacNicol), to compel Dana to cooperate. Soon dirty sludge and slime flow through the streets of Manhattan, and the ghostbusters have to reunite to save the city from a funky paranormal evil.