Bovie Movie

In 1977, George Lucas released Star Wars, the ultimate sci-fi popcorn flick-turned-pop-culture myth machine. It quickly became the biggest money-making film of all time and changed the shape of the film industry. After two successful sequels (1980’s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Return of the Jedi) that extended the story of the first film, Lucas took some time off to produce movies for others, with mixed success. In 1999, Lucas returned to the Star Wars saga with a new approach — instead of picking up where Return of the Jedi left off, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace would be the first of a trilogy of stories to trace what happened in the intergalactic saga before the first film began. Here, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) is a young apprentice Jedi knight under the tutelage of Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson); Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), who will later father Luke Skywalker and become known as Darth Vader, is just a nine-year-old boy. When the Trade Federation cuts off all routes to the planet Naboo, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are assigned to settle the matter, but when they arrive on Naboo they are brought to Amidala (Natalie Portman), the Naboo queen, by a friendly but opportunistic Gungan named Jar Jar. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan plan to escort Amidala to a meeting of Republic leaders in Coruscant, but trouble with their spacecraft strands them on the planet Tatooine, where Qui-Gon meets Anakin, the slave of a scrap dealer. Qui-Gon is soon convinced that the boy could be the leader the Jedis have been searching for, and he begins bargaining for his freedom and teaching the boy the lessons of the Force. The supporting cast includes Pernilla August as Anakin’s mother, Terence Stamp as Chancellor Valorum, and Samuel L. Jackson as Jedi master Mace Windu. Jackson told a reporter before The Phantom Menace’s release that the best part about doing the film was that he got to say “May the Force be with you” onscreen.

An amoral young man wends his way into the lives of a handful of damaged souls in this adaptation of British Beat Generation writer Alexander Trocchi’s first novel. Written for the screen and directed by David Mackenzie, Young Adam begins with the discovery of a barely dressed woman’s corpse by two barge workers, Joe (Ewan McGregor) and Leslie (Peter Mullan). A taciturn drifter, Joe hoists the body ashore with little distress, and the ensuing police investigation does little to ruffle his day-to-day existence on the barge. But his behavior becomes more and more erratic, and as he begins a torrid affair with Leslie’s downtrodden wife Ella (Tilda Swinton), flashbacks reveal a similarly cruel encounter he once had with a young woman named Cathie (Emily Mortimer). Young Adam premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival before securing berths at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals later that year.

Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a young man with few prospects and fewer ambitions, lives in economically depressed Edinburgh. Like most of his friends, Renton is a heroin addict who loves the drug’s blissful nothingness; financing his habit also provides excitement and challenges that his life otherwise lacks. Renton’s two best friends are also junkies: Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), a snappy dresser obsessed with James Bond, and Spud (Ewan Bremner), a guileless nerd who suggests Pee Wee Herman’s debauched cousin. Renton and his pals also hang out with Begbie (Robert Carlyle), a borderline psychotic who loathes junkies even though he drinks like a fish. After one too many brushes with the law, Renton kicks heroin and moves to London, where he finds a job, a flat, and something close to peace of mind. However, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud all arrive at his doorstep on the trail of a big score, leading Renton back into drugs and crime.

Part high-tech spy thriller and part psychological study, Eye of the Beholder was Ewan McGregor’s first feature film following his mainstream breakthrough performance in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The Eye (Ewan McGregor) is an agent of the British Secret Service, equipped with the latest in high-tech crime fighting gadgetry and assisted by his indefatigable collegue, Hilary (k.d. lang). The Eye’s latest assignment is a surveillance project; the son of a well-known politician has been spending a great deal of money on someone, and they would like to know who and why. A little sleuthing reveals that the mysterious person taking the cash is a woman named Joanna (Ashley Judd), but the trail gets much stickier when the Eye witnesses Joanna pulling a knife and killing the politician’s son. Normally, he’d take the shortcut to putting her behind bars, but some time ago he lost contact with his daughter when his wife left him; Joanna reminds the Eye of his daughter, and he’s too fascinated with her to bring her to justice. The Eye now follows Joanna obsessively, and discovers that she’s also involved with a blind man (Patrick Bergin) and has a history of emotional instability from being abandoned by her father at a young age. Eye of the Beholder was directed by Stephan Elliott, best known for the comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

The second prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy takes place ten years after the events depicted in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. Now 20, young Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) is an apprentice to respected Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). Unusually powerful in the Force, Anakin is also impatient, arrogant, and headstrong — causing his mentor a great deal of concern. The pair are ordered to protect Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman), the former queen of the planet Naboo, now representing her world in the Galactic Senate. Someone is trying to assassinate her on the eve of a vote enabling Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) to build a military force that will safeguard against a growing separatist movement led by mysterious former Jedi Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). After another attempt on Padme’s life, Obi-Wan and Anakin separate. The young Jedi and Padme fall in love as he escorts her first to the security of Naboo and then to his home world of Tatooine, where the fate of his mother leads him to commit an ominous atrocity. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan travels to the secretive planet Kamino and the asteroid-ringed world of Geonosis, following bounty hunter Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) and his son, Boba (Daniel Logan), who are involved in an operation to create a massive army of clones. A vicious battle ensues between the clones and Jedi on one side and Dooku’s droids on the other, but who is really pulling the strings in this galactic conflict? In late 2002, the movie was released in IMAX theaters as Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones: The IMAX Experience, with a pared-down running time of 120 minutes in order to meet the technical requirements of the large-screen format.

George Lucas draws the Star Wars film series to a close with this dark sci-fi adventure which sets the stage for the events of the first film and brings the saga full circle. After a fierce battle in which Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin (Hayden Christensen) join Republic forces to help free Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) from the evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and his minions, Anakin is drawn into Palpatine’s confidence. Palpatine has designs on expanding his rule, and with this in mind he plants seeds of doubt in Anakin’s mind about the strength and wisdom of the Jedis. Anakin is already in a quandary about how to reveal to others the news of his secret marriage to Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) now that she is pregnant, and visions which foretell her death in childbirth weigh heavy on his mind. As Anakin finds himself used by both the Jedis and the Republic for their own purposes — particularly after Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) expresses his distrust of the young Jedi — he turns more and more to the Force for help, but begins to succumb to the temptations of its dark side. Many of the Star Wars series regulars returned for Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, including Frank Oz as the voice of Yoda, Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, Kenny Baker as R2-D2, and Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca.

A quickly forgotten chapter in United States military history is relived in this harrowing war drama from director Ridley Scott, based on a series of Philadelphia Inquirer articles and subsequent book by reporter Mark Bowden. On October 3rd, 1993, an elite team of more than 100 Delta Force soldiers and Army Rangers, part of a larger United Nations peacekeeping force, are dropped into civil war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in an effort to kidnap two of local crime lord Mohamed Farah Aidid’s top lieutenants. Among the team: Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann (Josh Hartnett), Ranger Lt. Col. Danny McKnight (Tom Sizemore), the resourceful Delta Sgt. First Class Jeff Sanderson (William Fichtner), and Ranger Spec. Grimes (Ewan McGregor), a desk-bound clerk getting his first taste of live combat. When two of the mission’s Black Hawk helicopters are shot down by enemy forces, the Americans — committed to recovering every man, dead or alive — stay in the area too long and are quickly surrounded. The ensuing firefight is a merciless 15-hour ordeal and the longest ground battle involving American soldiers since the Vietnam War. In the end, 70 soldiers are injured and 18 are dead, along with hundreds of Somalians. Black Hawk Down was voted one of the top ten films of the year by the National Board of Review prior to its limited Oscar-qualifying release. On the basis of his work in this film, co-star Eric Bana, a relatively unknown Australian actor playing Delta Sgt. First Class “Hoot” Gibson, won the lead in director Ang Lee’s version of The Hulk (2003).

A man struggling to save the life of another finds himself drawn into a strange netherworld he didn’t know existed in this stylish thriller. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) is a psychiatrist living in New York City with his girlfriend, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts), who was once one of his patients. However, it’s another one of his patients who becomes the focus of his obsessions when Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a disturbed young man whom Foster took over from a colleague, announces during a session that he intends to commit suicide in three days, on his 21st birthday. Sam takes the threat quite seriously and tries to track down Henry, who seems to have disappeared. Sam speaks to a number of Henry’s friends and acquaintances — his mother (Kate Burton), the man he claimed was his father, Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins), a waitress who regularly served Henry at the coffee shop where she works (Elizabeth Reaser), and his former therapist Dr. Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo). As Sam talks to people in Henry’s circle, he finds he’s learning more about himself than the man he’s supposed to save, and he begins to drift into an emotional netherworld where the supposedly dead and the living cross paths. Stay was directed by Marc Forster, who had previously enjoyed breakthrough hits with two very different films, Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland.

An outwardly ordinary teenager finds himself suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances upon discovering that his entire youth was part of an elaborate plan to create the perfect super spy in director Geoffrey Sax’s action-packed adaptation of author Anthony Horowitz’s best-selling series of novels featuring an adolescent secret agent. Alex Rider (Alex Pettyfer) always though that his kindly uncle Ian (Ewan McGregor) was your average, everyday nondescript bank manager, but when Ian was murdered by notorious assassin Yassen Gregorovich (Damian Lewis), everything young Alex thought he knew would be forever changed by one simple bullet. A deadly martial artist, skilled linguist, steady-handed mountaineer, and deadeye marksman, Alex realizes that his uncle has been secretly training him in the art of espionage when he is recruited by MI6 Special Operations agents Mr. Blunt (Bill Nighy) and Mrs. Jones (Sophie Okonedo). It seems that billionaire Darius Sayle (Mickey Rourke) has generously offered to donate a complimentary Stormbreaker supercomputer to every school in Britain, but while his philanthropic offer is welcomed with open arms by the struggling school system, MI6 fears that something nefarious is afoot. Assigned the task of infiltrating Sayle’s impenetrable lair by posing as the winner of a computer magazine contest, Alex makes the acquaintance of shady Sayle sidekicks Mr. Grin (Andy Serkis) and Nadia Vole (Missi Pyle) before getting a special sneak preview of the remarkable Stormbreaker’s true powers. His cover subsequently blown, Alex is given a key piece of information regarding the remarkable computer before being thrown to a giant jellyfish by Sayle and his henchmen and left to die just as the prime minister is about to push the button that will activate Stormbreaker computers all across Britain. With no time to spare and the fate of a nation hanging in the balance, Alex must now enlist the help of his trusted housekeeper Jack Starbright (Alicia Silverstone) and faithful classmate Sabina Pleasure (Sarah Bolger) in ensuring that the Stormbreaker system is not activated and revealing Sayle for the true villain that he is before the young super spy’s breathless first mission becomes his fatal last

Although a deluxe two-disc set is available, this one-disc edition of Moulin Rouge will do for those who want just the film. This DVD boasts a widescreen anamorphic transfer that preserves the original broadcast aspect ratio of 2.35:1. English soundtracks are rendered in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital Surround, and a French soundtrack has also been recorded in Dolby Digital Surround. Supplemental materials include a commentary track recorded by director Baz Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce, and a second commentary track recorded by Luhrmann, costume director Catherine Martin, and cinematographer Donald McAlpine. A behind-the-scenes featurette rounds out this strong release.