Bovie Movie

Four generations of an American family are brought together by difficult circumstances while facing some unpleasant truths in this drama. Henry (Michael Caine) is an elderly man in failing health living in a small town in the Southwest, where he’s cared for by his live-in nurse (Glenne Headly). As Henry’s condition grows worse, he’s joined by his son Turner (Christopher Walken), his grandson Jason (Josh Lucas), and his great-grandson Zach (Jonah Bobo). As the four men deal with Henry’s illness, they also try to come to terms with a lifetime’s worth of differences between them. Around the Bend is the first feature film from writer and director Jordan Roberts.

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.

Mimi Leder (The Peacemaker) directed this science-fiction disaster drama about the possible extinction of human life after a comet is discovered headed toward Earth with the collision only one year away. Ambitious MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) stumbles onto the story, prompting a White House press conference. United States President Beck (Morgan Freeman) announces the government’s solution: a team of astronauts will travel to the comet and destroy it. The team leader aboard the spaceship Messiah is Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), who was once the last man to walk on the moon. However, the mission fails, splitting off a chunk of the comet, now due to land in the Atlantic with the impact sending a 350-foot tidal wave flooding 650 miles inland, destroying New York and other cities. The larger part of the comet, hitting in Canada, will trigger an E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event), not unlike a “nuclear winter” as dust clouds block out the sun and bring life to an end. President Beck reveals Plan B: a cavernous underground retreat constructed to hold one million Americans, with most to be selected through a national lottery. Since teenage amateur astronomer Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) discovered the comet, his family gets a pass to enter the cave, but his girlfriend Sarah (Leelee Sobieski) and her parents will be left behind. Meanwhile, still in space, Spurgeon Tanner devises a plan for a kamikaze-styled operation that could possibly save the Earth. Special visual effects by Scott Farrar and Industrial Light & Magic.

Following memorable roles in the military action-adventures Pearl Harbor (2001) and Black Hawk Down (2001), young actor Josh Hartnett is propelled to romantic leading man status with this semi-autobiographical comedy from screenwriter Rob Perez. Hartnett stars as Matt Sullivan, a young man smarting over the bitter breakup of his most recent relationship. With Lent approaching, Matt decides to observe the 40-day tradition by abstaining from all sexual contact, including self-gratification. Once his odyssey of discipline has begun, he meets the girl of his dreams, while his ex begins campaigning to get him back. Co-starring Shannyn Sossamon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Vinessa Shaw, 40 Days and 40 Nights inspired another round of controversy between distributor Miramax and the Catholic League, which accused the film of being a “vulgar parody” of Lent. The League previously protested the company’s releases of Priest (1994) and Dogma (1999).

This remake of Force Majeure (aka Uncontrollable Circumstances), a 1989 film with Alan Bates and Kristin Scott Thomas, recalls the prison plight depicted in Midnight Express (1978). Rambling around Asia, getting high and just having a good time, are three young men — Sheriff (Vince Vaughn), Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix), and Tony (David Conrad). Sheriff and Tony say goodbye to Lewis, a conscientious Greenpeace activist and nature-lover who stays on to rescue endangered Borneo orangutans. Two years later, Tony is an architect about to marry, and Sheriff has a job driving a limo around New York City. When Beth (Anne Heche) steps into Sheriff’s limo, she tells him that she’s a lawyer working to save Lewis. He learns that Lewis was arrested by Malaysian authorities, tried as a drug dealer, convicted, and sentenced to death. Sheriff’s actions of trashing a borrowed bicycle and casually disposing of 100 grams of hash make him responsible for Lewis’s predicament, but does he feel guilty enough to get involved? The execution is only eight days away, but it will not happen if Tony and/or Sheriff return to also serve time — three years each if both come back, but six years if only one returns. Investigating this story is reporter M.J. Major (Jada Pinkett Smith), who views the situation as an important international news story. Tony readily agrees to go back and save Lewis — but only if Sheriff also returns with him. Sheriff initially declines, prompting the desperate Beth to find ways to convince him to go. Complicating matters, Sheriff and Beth begin to find they are attracted to each other. Eventually, all fly to Malaysia during the final 24 hours before the execution. Director Joseph Ruben filmed in Hong Kong, Macao, and Thailand, with Malaysian prison interiors shot in Philadelphia.

Love, treachery, and broken furniture are the hallmarks of this rollicking action drama. Dalton (Patrick Swayze) has a Ph.D., but rather than make a living teaching Socrates at some university, he’s opted to become a top-drawer “cooler” — an expert barroom bouncer who can break up fights without getting himself killed in the process. Dalton is hired to keep the peace at the Double Duce, a rough-and-tumble honky tonk in Jasper, Missouri, where beer-soaked free-for-alls are a nightly event. Dalton is hurt on his first night on the job, and he is patched up by “Doc” Clay (Kelly Lynch), a beautiful woman working as the town’s physician. Dalton and Doc immediately hit it off, but Dalton learns that another man, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), already has his eye on her. Wesley is a man used to getting his way; he’s an extortionist and crime boss who has nearly everyone in Jasper under his thumb, and he sets out to teach Dalton a lesson, while Dalton is determined to clean up the town like he breaks up brawls at the Double Duce. Sam Elliott plays Dalton’s mentor Wade, and Red West, a one-time member of Elvis Presley’s “Memphis Mafia,” appears as Webster; Canadian blues-rock guitarist Jeff Healey leads the Double Duce house band.

Director Oliver Stone once again offers a powerful and provocative story based on real-life events in this drama. Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and William J. Jimeno (Michael Pena) were two officers assigned to New York City’s Port Authority who were working their beats on a quiet day in early fall when they received an emergency call. The day was September 11, 2001, and McLoughlin and Jimeno were among the policemen who attempted to evacuate the World Trade Center towers after they were struck by airliners piloted by terrorists. Both McLoughlin and Jimeno were inside the fifth building of the World Trade Center when the towers fell, and were two of the last people found alive amidst the wreckage. As McLoughlin and Jimeno struggled to hold on to their lives as rescuers sifted through the rubble, their spouses — Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal) — clung to the desperate hope that their husbands would survive and be found. As the McLoughlin and Jimeno families waited for word on the fate of the two men, they watched as a city and a nation came together with strength and compassion in the face of a tragedy. World Trade Center was based on the true story of John McLoughlin and William J. Jimeno, both of whom cooperated with producers in the making of this film. Producer Debra Hill died during production - hence the posthumous credit.

Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, the impish impresarios of gross-out comedy, take their body function-inspired humor to new extremes in this mixture of live action and animation. Bill Murray stars as Frank, a zoo worker suffering from the effects of an unknown malady he contracted after eating an egg contaminated with simian saliva. Unknown to Frank, the inside of his body is actually a city (the City of Frank) teeming with cellular life, where the mysterious illness he’s fighting is an invading enemy that must be defeated at all costs. It’s up to Osmosis Jones (voice of Chris Rock), a white blood cell cop, and Drix (voice of David Hyde Pierce), a rookie over-the-counter medication, to hunt down and stop a lethal virus (Laurence Fishburne) who’s got an inferiority complex. Along the way, the partners visit Frank’s runny nostrils (Booger Dam) and a bar called, appropriately enough, the Zit. Osmosis Jones costars Molly Shannon and Chris Elliott, and features the vocal talents of William Shatner, producer Joel Silver, and singer Brandy Norwood.

Warren Beatty directed and starred in this big-budget action comedy featuring Chester Gould’s square-jawed, two-dimensional comic strip detective. Ruthless gangster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) touches off a gang war against underworld boss Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino), with Big Boy and his minions rubbing out enough of Manlis’s goons (along with Manlis himself) to take over his nightclub, and a healthy percentage of the city’s criminal activities in the process. Caprice also gains proprietary rights to Manlis’s girlfriend, nightclub chanteuse Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). Big Boy’s next move to is unite the rest of the city’s crooks under his command; this wave of corruption attracts the attention of lawman Dick Tracy, who is determined to smash Caprice’s criminal network once and for all. As Tracy plots to put Big Boy behind bars where he belongs, Breathless uses her considerable charms in an attempt to sway Tracy from the path of righteousness; this causes no small amount of anxiety for Tracy’s long-suffering female companion, Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), and the street-smart kid (Charlie Korsmo) they’ve been keeping an eye on. The various bad guys, heavily made up to resemble Gould’s cartoon characters (though Beatty is not made up to resemble Tracy), include Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, R.G. Armstrong, and William Forsythe.

The made-for-cable musical satire Reefer Madness is based on the award-winning play of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the notorious — and deliciously awful — 1936 anti-marijuana film originally titled Tell Your Children. A smarmy lecturer (Alan Cumming in the first of his three roles in the film) arrives in a typical small town of the late ’30s to warn the populace of the dangers of the “evil weed,” bringing along a lurid propaganda film to dramatize his message. In broad, unsubtle, and hilarious strokes, the movie-within-a-movie shows how even a squeaky-clean pair of highschoolers named Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) and Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell) can become hopeless dope addicts by succumbing to the lure of marijuana. Reefer Madness is not only a savage skewering of the original black-and-white movie (some of the musical’s campiest lines are taken directly from the earlier script!), but also a devastating attack on what playwrights Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney consider to be the real reason that the 1936 movie was made: to frighten the public out of their wits in order to keep them under the thumb of an oppressive government. Thus, the musical manages to take a number of not-so-veiled swipes at xenophobia, racism, McCarthyism, the Bush Administration’s Homeland Security policy, and even the recent FCC clampdown on “offensive” TV fare (one of the film’s highlights is a garish nightclub number featuring Jesus Christ). The ebulliently staged songs include “The Stuff,” “Down at the Ol’ Five and Dime,” “Lonely Pew,” “Listen to Jesus Jimmy,” “Mary Jane/Mary Lane,” “The Brownie Song,” “Tell ‘Em the Truth,” and the title number. Officially titled Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, this film first aired April 16, 2005, on the Showtime cable service.