Bovie Movie

A perfectly ghastly entry in what was shaping up as an eagerly anticipated annual event, A&E’s end-of-Summer dramatization of a Spenser novel.

As I was initially fearful, the re-casting of Ernie Hudson was a blunder… a shaven head and a leather coat does not a “Hawk” make! The new co-henchman character of “Vinnie,” who didn’t have a line of dialogue in the entire screenplay, was infinitely more interesting. Hudson makes one long for the over-the-top version portrayed by Avery Brooks in the Robert Urich TV series and subsequent tele-flicks.

In this adventure drama, four men passed over by the space program get one last chance to be heroes and live out their dreams. Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood), Hawk Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones), Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland), and Tank Sullivan (James Garner) were top pilots within an elite Air Force squadron and on the fast track to becoming the first Americans in space in the early 1950s. However, when NASA was established, the pilots were cut out of the loop; Corvin went on to become an aerospace engineer, Hawkins continued on as a freelance pilot, O’Neill became an astrophysicist with a sideline in designing roller coasters, and Sullivan took up preaching as a Baptist minister. Years later, a Russian satellite’s guidance system has started to malfunction, and it is expected to crash into the Earth within a matter of weeks. The system is identical to the one Corvin designed for Skylab, so NASA head Bob Gerson (James Cromwell) asks Corvin to help him with the emergency mission to repair the satellite. Corvin agrees under one condition — that he be sent up to do the repairs himself, with Hawkins, O’Neill, and Sullivan as his crew. Clint Eastwood directed Space Cowboys while also starring as Frank Corvin; his supporting cast includes Marcia Gay Harden, Courtney B. Vance, Loren Dean, and William Devane.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, the mysterious drama Mystic River is based on the novel by Dennis Lehane and adapted by screenwriter Brian Helgeland. Set in an Irish neighborhood in Boston, Jimmy, Sean, and Dave are three childhood friends who are reunited after a brutal murder takes place. Reformed convict Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn) and his devoted wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) find out that their teenage daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum) has been beaten and killed. Jimmy’s old friend Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) is the homicide detective assigned to the case, along with partner Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne). Jimmy also gets his relatives, the Savage brothers (Adam Nelson and Robert Wahlberg), to conduct an investigation of their own. Jimmy and Sean both start to suspect their old pal, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), who lives a quiet life with his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) but harbors some disturbing secrets. Clint Eastwood won a Golden Coach for Mystic River at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

Set in 1953, Mona Lisa Smile tells the story of Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), a new young art history professor at Wellesley College, an all-female campus with a prestigious reputation for academic excellence. Unfortunately for free-minded Berkeley grad Watson, her East Coast teaching stint comes during a less-progressive time that finds most of her students — among them Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), and Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) — more interested in nabbing a good husband than achieving scholastic and intellectual growth. Watson challenges her students and the Wellesley faculty to think outside of the current mores of the community and redefine what it means to be a success; meanwhile, she tries to come to terms with her own heart’s desires. Mona Lisa Smile co-stars Marcia Gay Harden, Juliet Stevenson, and, as Watson’s conflicting love interests, Dominic West and John Slattery.

The cycle of life on Earth hangs in the balance when Death becomes emotionally involved in this romantic fantasy. William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) is a tremendously wealthy and powerful man who oversees a worldwide multi-media empire. Despite the loss of his wife, whom he dearly loved, William is content with his life, and he’s very close to his two daughters, Allison (Marcia Gay Harden) and Susan (Claire Forlaini). One night, as William is fighting a hostile takeover of his company and Allison is planning an elaborate party to celebrate her dad’s 65th birthday, William begins displaying the symptoms of a severe heart attack, and he is visited by a mysterious stranger, Joe Black (Brad Pitt). Joe is actually the angel of death, who has taken the form of a man who recently passed on to pay William a call. It seems that William is due to move on to the next world, but (no great surprise) he doesn’t want to go. Joe, on the other hand, is curious to know what life is like for mere mortals, so the two men strike a deal — William will have some time to get his affairs in order, and Joe will wait and see what it’s like to be a human being. Joe decides that he likes it very much when he falls in love with Susan, but negotiating the slippery slopes of romance is no easier for Joe than for any ordinary man. Meet Joe Black is an updated version of Alberto Casella’s play Death Takes a Holiday, which was adapted for the screen in 1934.

A severely beaten teenager, trapped in a walking purgatory between life and death, must help authorities to the location of his broken body before it’s too late, in this remake of the 2002 Swedish thriller Den Osynlige. Graduating senior Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) has plans to attend a prestigious writing workshop in London, despite the protests of his widowed mother (Marcia Gay Harden). In the days before his departure, he gets into a cafeteria brawl with a delinquent classmate, Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva), while defending his friend from her extortion attempts. Annie and her crew track Nick down on the night he’s planning to leave, mistakenly thinking he ratted her out to the police regarding a smash-and-grab burglary committed the night before. When the subsequent beating goes too far, the assailants dump the body in the woods in a panicked attempt to dispose of it. Only, Nick isn’t dead — he’s walking invisible among his classmates, friends and family, desperately trying to alert them that he’s still alive. Robbed of the traditional forms of communication, Nick must figure out supernatural methods of manipulating his environment — and he soon realizes the very girl who attacked him may be the only one who has the power to save him.

Director Lasse Hallstr?m offers a brisk account of the scam that shook the literary community with this semi-comic biographical drama starring Richard Gere as the man who sold a fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes to publishing giant McGraw Hill. The year was 1971; the Vietnam War was raging and protestors filled the streets. Clifford Irving (Gere) was a struggling author with bold ambitions, and the determination needed to see them through. When Irving’s attempt to sell his latest novel to McGraw Hill via his in-house publisher, Andrea Tate (Hope Davis), falls through at the last minute, the frustrated author loudly proclaims that his next novel will be “the book of the century.” Upon returning to his wife Edith’s (Marcia Gay Harden) makeshift studio, the humiliated author catches a glimpse of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes on a magazine cover. Later, almost jokingly, Irving and his best friend Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina) begin to fantasize about a scenario in which the author convinces his publishers that he has been personally selected by Hughes to pen the billionaire’s memoirs. The revenge fantasy becomes a complicated reality, however, when Irving and Suskind approach skeptical McGraw Hill heavy Shelton Fisher (Stanley Tucci) with a series of forged letters presumably written by Hughes himself and offering unwavering support for the project. His credibility continually questioned as the ante is upped at every turn, Irving is forced to maintain the increasingly difficult charade as he strong-arms McGraw Hill to pay “Hughes” an unheard-of one million dollars for the rights to his life story, acquires a the illegally procured documents that will provide the foundation for the book, and works around the clock to meet his publisher’s deadline.