Bovie Movie

Noted theater director Sam Mendes, who was responsible for the acclaimed 1998 revival of Cabaret and Nicole Kidman’s turn in The Blue Room, made his motion picture debut with this film about the dark side of an American family, and about the nature and price of beauty in a culture obsessed with outward appearances. Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a man in his mid-40s going through an intense midlife crisis; he’s grown cynical and is convinced that he has no reason to go on. Lester’s relationship with his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) is not a warm one; while on the surface Carolyn strives to present the image that she’s in full control of her life, inside she feels empty and desperate. Their teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is constantly depressed, lacking in self-esteem, and convinced that she’s unattractive. Her problems aren’t helped by her best friend Angela (Mena Suvari), an aspiring model who is quite beautiful and believes that that alone makes her a worthwhile person. Jane isn’t the only one who has noticed that Angela is attractive: Lester has fallen into uncontrollable lust for her, and she becomes part of his drastic plan to change his body and change his life. Meanwhile, next door, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper) has spent a lifetime in the Marine Corps and can understand and tolerate no other way of life, which makes life difficult for his son Ricky (Wes Bentley), an aspiring filmmaker and part-time drug dealer who is obsessed with beauty, wherever and whatever it may be. American Beauty was also the screen debut for screenwriter Alan Ball.

So how far would you go to win a beauty pageant? That’s the burning question of Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which the citizens of Mount Rose, Minnesota gear up for the year’s biggest event, the Sarah Rose Miss Teen Princess America Pageant, in which Becky Leeman (Denise Richards) and Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst) are the contestants to beat. Becky’s mother Gladys (Kirstie Alley), a former beauty queen herself, has instilled in her daughter a drive to succeed at any cost. And Gladys will do anything to help Becky’s chances of success. Amber’s mother Annette (Ellen Barkin) is devoted to her daughter but drinks, smokes, and swears like a sailor. And while Amber is ambitious and a skilled beautician (a talent that she uses in her part-time job at the local mortuary), her view of the pageant is pragmatic: while boys can get sports scholarships, this pageant may be her only ticket out of town. However, Amber and the other contestants may have underestimated just how badly Becky wants to win — or just how good she is with a gun. Drop Dead Gorgeous was directed by Michael Patrick Jann, a founding member of the sketch comedy group The State (who had their own series on MTV), and written by Lorna Williams, a veteran of the beauty pageant circuit who claims that nearly everything in the film is based on an actual incident.

Adam Shankman’s adaptation of the stage musical Hairspray, itself an adaptation of the non-musical John Waters film of the same name, stars Nikki Blonsky as Tracy Turnblad, an overweight high-school student whose only dream is to be on a local Baltimore teen dance program. While her father (Christopher Walken) tells her to follow her dreams, her mother Edna (John Travolta in drag) reminds her that she doesn’t look like the girls on that show. After impressing the show’s host (James Marsden), Tracy earns a coveted spot on the program, but when she becomes a popular addition to the cast, she earns the wrath of the prettiest girl in school — a girl whose mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) just happens to operate the local television station. Tracy’s visit to detention hall opens her eyes to the racial tension on the show, as does the budding relationship between her best friend (Amanda Bynes) and an African-American boy named Seaweed (Elijah Kelley). Thus empowered, Tracy attempts to integrate the races on her favorite program.

A group of feisty forest critters awaken following the winter freeze to discover that not only has a new neighborhood cropped up during the cold months, but living in close proximity to humans may have its benefits in this computer-animated comedy-adventure for all ages featuring the voices of Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Steve Carell, Wanda Sykes, Avril Lavigne, Eugene Levy, and William Shatner. Despite Verne the Turtle’s (Garry Shandling) initial hesitance to breach the formidable foliage that has appeared on his doorstep since last fall, the arrival of fearless raccoon RJ (Willis) and revelation that their new human neighbors throw out enough food in one day to feed a whole forest lead the gang to consider taking the plunge and exploring the snack-filled suburbs. As Verne and RJ learn to work together in taking on their strange new surroundings, Stella the Skunk (Sykes), Hammy the Squirrel (Carrel), Heather the Opossum (Lavigne), and Heather’s father, Ozzie (Shatner), join in on the fun by scavenging for Girl Scout cookies and attempting to scuttle past the pesky new suburbanites undetected.

Andrew Stanton, who helped write Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., co-wrote and directed this computer-animated comedy-adventure about finding a very small fish in a very large ocean. Marlin (voice of Albert Brooks) is a more-than-slightly paranoid Clown Fish who is extremely devoted to his young son, Nemo (voice of Alexander Gould), the only survivor after an undersea predator swallowed up Nemo’s mother and her other offspring. It’s not Marlin’s nature to explore unfamiliar waters, but when he and Nemo are accidentally separated near the Great Barrier Reef en route to Nemo’s first day of fish school, Marlin gathers his courage and sets out to find his son. What Marlin doesn’t know, however, is that while Nemo was looking at a boat passing on the surface, he was caught in a net and given a new home in a dentist’s aquarium. As Marlin searches for his son, he makes friends with a friendly but absent-minded Regal Blue Tang named Dory (voice of Ellen DeGeneres), a Great White Shark named Bruce (voice of Barry Humphries) who is trying to cut fish out of his diet, a beach-rat Sea Tortoise named Crush (voice of Andrew Stanton), and Nigel (voice of Geoffrey Rush), a Pelican who can take Marlin’s search from the ocean to dry land. Finding Nemo’s impressive voice cast also includes Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney, Eric Bana, Stephen Root, and Brad Garrett.