Bovie Movie

If you know the Clement Clark Moore poem, you’ll know that Prancer is one of Santa Claus’ “eight tiny reindeer.” When 9-year-old Rebecca Harrell, who still believes in Santa despite the remonstrations of her parents and the taunts of her peers, stumbles across the selfsame Prancer in a remote part of the forest, no one will believe the girl. Later on, Harrell’s no-nonsense father Sam Elliot comes across a wounded reindeer, he feels it his duty to put the suffering animal out of his misery. The deer, of course, is Prancer, and it magically vanishes before Elliot’s startled eyes. Harrell nurses the deer back to health in secret, with the help of kindly doctor Abe Vigoda and her troublesome older brother John Joseph Duda. Harrell is determined to contact Santa and let him know where Prancer is, but her efforts only result in public humiliation for her father. But this is a Christmas film, and the spirit of goodwill is contagious by fadeout time, even transforming town-recluse Cloris Leachman into a warm-hearted social animal. Filmed in Indiana, Prancer isn’t quite a classic, but it’s perfect midwinter videocassette entertainment.

This is probably Peter Greenaway’s most famous (or infamous) film, which first shocked audiences at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and then on both sides of the Atlantic. A gang leader (Michael Gambon), accompanied by his wife (Helen Mirren) and his associates, entertains himself every night in a fancy French restaurant that he has recently bought. Having tired of her sadistic, boorish husband, the wife finds herself a lover (Alan Howard) and makes love to him in the restaurant’s coziest places with the silent permission of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Though less cerebral than Greenaway’s other films, featuring deadly passions reminiscent of Jacobean revenge tragedies of the early 17th century, the picture still offers the director’s usual ironic and paradoxical comments on the relations between eating and sex, love and death. The film is at once funny and horrific, and those who are not used to Greenaway’s peculiar style might be even disgusted or shocked; however, one might mention Sacha Vierny’s brilliant camerawork, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s gaudily stylized costumes, and Michael Nyman’s somber, pulsating music, which will haunt the viewer long after the film’s end.

Small-time crook Mickey Rourke is mockingly named Johnny Handsome because of his grotesquely deformed face. While in stir on a robbery rap, Rourke is knifed by convicts in the employ of his former partner–and now bitter enemy–Lance Henriksen. While in the prison hospital, Rourke is cared for by a kindly doctor (Forrest Whitaker), who believes that the key to Rourke’s rehabilitation might be a literal change of face. Undergoing plastic surgery, Rourke emerges as virtually unrecognizable to everyone but the audience. Paroled, Rourke seems to be willing to follow a straight and narrow path. Seems to be. Only Morgan Freeman, playing a hard-bitten law officer, sees through Rourke’s “new leaf.”

Though its PG-13 rating is well earned, Look Who’s Talking has some elements that might appeal to a family audience. Chief among them, of course, is the “talking baby” protagonist. The product of an extramarital affair, infant Mikey (played by several different babies, and given voice by Bruce Willis) is a cynical, sarcastic observer of his new world. Mikey’s mother, Kirstie Alley, having been dumped by her married lover George Segal, searches high and low for a new father for her baby. Of course, the perfect daddy is right under her nose all the time: cab driver John Travolta, who was on the scene when she went into labor on the sidewalk. The best moments in Look Who’s Talking include Ms. Alley’s imaginary flights of fancy, and the misadventures of Mikey as he progresses from sperm to reluctant newborn (his violent vocal protests against being yanked from the womb are worth the admission price in themselves). Look Who’s Talking has spawned two sequels, neither of which are as charming or disarming as the original.

The title refers to the radioactive fallout which descended upon ruined city of Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Young bride-to-be Yoshiko Tanaka has the misfortune to be visiting Hiroshima on the day of the explosion. Incredibly, she is unhurt; she returns to her own village, across the bay from Hiroshima. Unfortunately, her townsmen have been profoundly affected by the “black rain”; over the next five years, the poison in their systems slowly but surely erodes their souls. In a tragic state of denial, Yoshiko’s former friends insist that they can’t be sick-it must be the girl who is bringing sickness to them. Now a pariah, Yoshiko’s life is shattered as surely as if the bomb had disintegrated her upon impact. Director Shohei Imamaura, a onetime assistant to the great Ozu and the director of such Japanese classics as The Insect Woman and The Ballad of Narayama, never sensationalizes his material; the story is effective told in a muted, subdued fashion, allowing the horror to arise from the inner torment of the characters rather than being artificially imposed by camera trickery or “shock” cutting. Based on a novel by Masuji Ibuse, the black-and-white Black Rain won the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Award, along with several other honors.

The second of three films by co-writer/director Oliver Stone to explore the effects of the Vietnam War (Platoon and Heaven and Earth are the others), Born On The Fourth Of July tells the true story of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), a patriotic, All-American small town athlete who shocks his family by enlisting with the Marines to fight in the Vietnam War. Once he is overseas, however, Kovic’s gung-ho enthusiasm turns to horror and confusion when he accidentally kills one of his own men in a firefight. His downfall is furthered by a bullet wound that leaves him paralyzed from the chest down. He returns home, spends an appalling, nightmarish stint in a veterans’ hospital, and follows an increasingly disillusioned and fragmented path that ultimately leaves him drunk and dissolute in Mexico. However, Kovic somehow turns himself around and pulls his life together, becoming an outspoken anti-war activist in the process. The film is long but emotionally powerful; many consider it Stone’s best work and Cruise’s best performance. Both were nominated for Oscars, as was the film itself, but only Stone, who co-wrote the film with Kovic from the latter’s book, won for Best Director.

Timothy Dalton is better in Licence to Kill than in his first James Bond endeavor (The Living Daylights), but he still seems uncomfortable on the right side of the law. This time around, Bond is working on his own rather than on behalf of the British Secret Service. His American friend Felix Leiter (David Hedison), an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has been seriously injured by drug dealer Robert Davi, and 007 is out for blood. There is precious little time for the usual Bondian quippery and directorial campiness, resulting in a marked increase in bloodletting (including the “implosion” of secondary villain Anthony Zerbe). A climactic highway chase involving an oil tanker and a helicopter is stretched slightly beyond its value, but is still one of the best action setpieces in any Bond film. Licence to Kill was a refreshingly serious change of pace for the series, albeit one that tended to lessen Bond’s box-office value.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid was the first in a series of blockbusters that restored the venerable firm’s reputation as the world’s premiere animated-feature factory. The title character is a precocious teenager named Ariel, the daughter of Triton, king of the Sea. Against her dad’s wishes, Ariel journeys beyond her own world to the surface, where she falls in love with Prince Eric, a handsome human. Foolishly, the little mermaid enters into an agreement with evil sea witch Ursula in order to become human herself. The wistfully melancholy ending of the original Hans Christian Andersen story is dispensed with in favor of a joyously happy ending-but not before a spectacular climactic confrontation between Ursula and Triton. The obligatory Disney comic relief is handled by such freshly minted characters as Sebastian the Crab, who, courtesy of voiceover artist Samuel E. Wright, sings the film’s Oscar-winning “Under the Sea.” Other voices are provided by Broadway star Jodi Benson (as Ariel) and such Hollywood reliables as Buddy Hackett, Pat Carroll, Kenneth Mars, and Rene Auberjonois. The enormous box-office take of The Little Mermaid made possible such future Disney cartoon ventures as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The crew of an experimental, high-tech submersible is called into action to investigate a mysterious nuclear submarine crash. A series of strange encounters leads the crew to suspect the accident was caused by an extraterrestrial craft, and that they may be participating in an encounter with an alien species. However, in order to make contact, they must not only brave the abyss, an exceedingly deep underwater canyon, but also deal with the violent actions of one of their own crew members, an increasingly paranoid Navy SEAL officer. Approved by director James Cameron, The Abyss: Special Edition is an extended director’s cut of the 1989 underwater science fiction epic, reinstating nearly a half hour of footage removed from the original release under studio pressure. Much of the restored footage places the film’s events in a grander political context, as the crew’s mission becomes a factor in the dangerous escalation of nuclear tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The largest change involves the film’s ending, which provides further information on the aliens’ mission on Earth, bringing the film to closer to Cameron’s intention: a modern remake of Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Divorce lawyer Danny De Vito warns his prospective client that the story he’s about to tell isn’t a pretty one, but the client listens with eager intensity — as do the folks out there in the movie in the audience. The War of the Roses can best be described as a slapstick tragedy concerning the decline and literal fall of a marriage. After 17 years, Oliver (Michael Douglas) and Barbara (Kathleen Turner) Rose want a divorce. Not for this couple is there anything resembling a “civilized understanding”: Barbara wants their opulent house, and Oliver isn’t about to part with the domicile. Barbara nails the basement door shut while Oliver is downstairs, Oliver disrupts Barbara’s fancy party by taking aim at the catered dinner, Barbara lays waste to Oliver’s sports car….and so it goes, culminating in a disastrous showdown around, about and under the living room’s fancy chandelier. DeVito and screenwriter Michael Leeson never let us forget that the couple’s self-indulgent imbroglio exacts an awful price upon their children (Sean Astin and Heather Fairfield). The War of the Roses was adapted from the novel by Warren Adler.