Bovie Movie

The sophomore film from former music video and commercial director Michael Bay, this fast-paced action yarn featured rapid-fire editing, a cutting-edge rock soundtrack and liberal use of shots awash in a haze of burnished hues, all trademarks of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Nicolas Cage stars as Stanley Goodspeed, an FBI chemical weapons expert handed a unique assignment. Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris), an insane Marine Corps general, has taken 81 tourists hostage on the abandoned island prison of Alcatraz. He and his men are threatening to bomb San Francisco with deadly gas unless $100 million is paid in war reparations to the families of servicemen killed in covert operations. Goodspeed is teamed with former British spy John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery), the only man ever to escape “The Rock,” as well as a Navy SEAL team. When their military escorts are ambushed, it’s up to odd couple Goodspeed and Mason to break into Alcatraz and stop Hummel. The Rock was the last film produced by Simpson, who died of a drug overdose before the film’s release. Solo, his partner Bruckheimer continued making the sort of glossy, frenetic films for which the duo was famed.

Tony Curtis stars as The Great Leslie, a hero among heroes whose purity of heart is manifested by his spotlessly white wardrobe. Leslie’s great rival, played by Jack Lemmon, is Professor Fate, a scowling, mustachioed, top-hatted, black-garbed villain. Long envious of Leslie’s record-setting accomplishments with airships and sea craft, Professor Fate schemes to win a 22,000-mile auto race from New York City to Paris by whatever insidious means possible. The problem is that Fate is his own worst enemy: each of his plans to remove Leslie from the running (and from the face of the earth) backfires. Leslie’s own cross to bear is suffragette Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood), who also hopes to win the contest and thus strike a blow for feminism. The race takes all three contestants to the Wild West, the frozen wastes of Alaska, and, in the longest sequence, the mythical European kingdom of Carpania. This last-named country is the setting for a wild Prisoner of Zenda spoof involving Professor Fate and his look-alike, the foppish Carpanian king. When Leslie and Fate approach the finish line at the Eiffel Tower, Leslie deliberately loses to prove his love for Maggie. Professor Fate cannot stand winning under these circumstances, thus he demands that he and Leslie race back to New York. The supporting cast includes Peter Falk as Fate’s long-suffering flunkey Max, Keenan Wynn as Leslie’s faithful general factotum, Dorothy Provine as a brassy saloon singer, Larry Storch as ill-tempered bandit Texas Jack, and Ross Martin as Baron Von Stuppe. The film also yielded a hit song, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s The Sweetheart Tree. The Great Race was dedicated to “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy”.

The Living Daylights represents the first appearance by Timothy Dalton as “Bond…James Bond.” Based very, very loosely on an obscure Ian Fleming short story, the film finds Bond assigned to aid in the defection of KGB agent Jeroen Krabbe. 007 must prevent an unknown sniper from killing Krabbe before he can reach the West. The mysterious assailant turns out to be the luscious Maryam d’Abo, who like practically everyone in the film except Bond is Not All That She Seems. The plot wends its way through a scheme to trade several million dollars’ worth of diamonds for weapons, which will be shipped off to mercenaries worldwide. The climax takes place high above the clouds in a cargo plane loaded with opium. Dalton would play Bond one more time in License to Kill (1989) before handing the franchise over to Pierce Brosnan.

The Jewel of the Nile takes up where Romancing the Stone left off, with romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) traveling around the world with her boyfriend, Jack Colton (Michael Douglas). But Joan is becoming bored with Jack and all the romantic attention; as she asks, “How much romance can one woman take?” Invited by Omar (Spiros Focas), a wealthy Arabian potentate, to travel with him to his homeland, Joan readily accepts. Jack decides to pass on the trip, preferring instead to sail through the Mediterranean. It turns out that Omar wants to usurp the role of an Arab holy man known as “The Jewel of the Nile” (Avner Eisenberg), and Joan finds herself thrown in prison with the hapless spiritual leader. Jack comes to the rescue, teaming up with the slapstick bad guy from Romancing the Stone, Ralph (Danny DeVito). Together, the foursome have to cross North Africa in order to escape Omar’s minions.

Perhaps the most highly anticipated film of 2003, Kill Bill Vol. 1 marked the return of renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino after a six-year hiatus. Re-teaming the director with Uma Thurman for the first time since 1994’s Pulp Fiction, the film was originally the first half of what was to be a three-hour-plus movie before being split into two films. Thurman stars as The Bride, one-fifth of a team of assassins called DiVAS. When The Bride opts to leave the outfit for a life of marital bliss, it doesn’t sit well with her boss, Bill (David Carradine), so he has her former cohorts, played by Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, and Michael Madsen, show up at the nuptials, leaving behind a blood bath. Miraculously, The Bride survives a bullet to the head and, four years later, she sets out for revenge against her four assassins and their employer. The story is concluded in Kill Bill Vol. 2, released six months later.

A seemingly insignificant act may cause the fabric of history to unravel in this sci-fi adventure. Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) owns and operates a successful firm known as Time Safari. Thanks to time travel technology developed by Hatton’s employee Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), Time Safari allows big game hunters to journey back to prehistoric days and shoot living, breathing dinosaurs. Rand picks out the dinosaur in question, who is soon to die, and creates a floating walkway for the hunters, so the impact of their presence will not be felt by the land around them. But on one expedition, things go horribly wrong when a nervous hunter steps off the walkway and crushes a butterfly, a tiny act that proves to have massive consequences over the course of several million years. As the earth’s climate and animal life begin to mutate due to this shift in natural history, Time Safari’s leading hunting guide, Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), works beside Rand in a desperate attempt to halt the “ripples of time” before modern civilization completely collapses. A Sound of Thunder was based on a classic short story by pioneering science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Written and directed by Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer, Eurotrip is a teen comedy from the Montecito Picture Company (makers of similar movies Old School and Road Trip). Mainstream teenager Scott (Scott Mechlowicz) forms an online friendship with German student Mieke in order to get a passing grade in his high school German class. When he finds out Mieke is a buxom blonde girl (Jessica B?hrs), he travels to meet her with his pals Cooper (Jacob Pitts), Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg), and Jamie (Travis Wester). The group of randy teens head to Berlin by way of London, Paris, and Amsterdam.

Scary Movie screenwriters Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer join forces to parody the “biggest” movies ever to hit the silver screen in this comedy that gives such popular box-office hits as Pirates of the Caribbean and Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe the same treatment that Scary Movie gave to the slasher subgenre. A virtual smorgasbord of spoof, Epic Movie tells the tale of four fully grown orphans: one the victim of snakes that attacked her plane, another raised by a kindly Louvre curator, the third a Mexican “libre” wrestling refuge, and the last an average mutant from an “X”-community. When the curious quartet visits a sprawling chocolate factory, they stumble across a magical wardrobe which transports them to the enchanted land of Gnarnia. It seems that the wondrous fantasy land has recently fallen under the spell of the evil White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge), and in order to bring peace back to Gnarnia these four bumbling mortals will have to join forces with a charismatic pirate, a painfully sincere group of aspiring wizards, and one particularly libidinous lion.

Director John Woo brings Hong Kong-style martial arts action to this comic book-flavored sequel that eschews the complicated plot and political maneuverings of its predecessor in favor of pure, adrenaline-charged thrills. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, an operative for the top-secret government agency IMF (Impossible Missions Force). Fellow agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) has gone rogue, stealing a sample of a deadly synthetic virus named Chimera that could rapidly wipe out the world’s population. Ambrose’s plan is to sell Chimera to the highest bidder in exchange for shares of stock in the winner’s company. Summoned by the new IMF chief (Anthony Hopkins in an uncredited cameo role), Ethan is assigned to recruit the help of Ambrose’s former lover Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton), a gorgeous woman who left Ambrose broken-hearted and who may be able to quickly regain his confidence. Once he meets and spends a night with Nyah, however, Ethan is smitten, and now must both capture Ambrose and keep Nyah alive as she infiltrates a nest of vipers. Sophisticated disguises, gun battles, and high-speed chases are the order of the day, very much in the James Bond mold. Mission: Impossible 2 is based on a story by Star Trek: The Next Generation writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, with a script polish by Robert Towne.

In this raunchy comedy, Josh (Breckin Meyer), a student at a college in Ithaca, NY, videotapes his one-night stand with beautiful sorority girl Beth (Amy Smart). A few days later, Josh discovers that one of his friends accidentally mailed the homemade porn tape to his girlfriend, Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard), who is spending some time with her family in Austin, TX. Josh and his friends Barry (Tom Green), Kyle (D.J. Qualls), E.L. (Seann William Scott), and Rubin (Paulo Costanzo) borrow a car and hit the road in a desperate bid to intercept the tape before Tiffany loads it into her VCR; Beth, however, wants Josh for herself and has her own plans to track down Tiffany. Road Trip is the first fiction feature from director Todd Phillips, noted for such edgy documentaries as Hated: G.G. Allin & the Murder Junkies, Screwed, and Frat House. The cast also includes Fred Ward and Andy Dick.