Bovie Movie

In the final episode of the Star Wars saga, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) emerges intact from the carbonite casing in which he’d been sealed in The Empire Strikes Back. The bad news is that Solo, together with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), is prisoner to the grotesque Jabba the Hutt. But with the help of the charismatic Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), our heroes and our heroine manage to escape. The next task is to rid the galaxy of Darth Vader (body by David Prowse, voice by James Earl Jones) and the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid), now in command of a new, under-construction Death Star. On the forest moon Endor, the good guys enlist the help of a feisty bunch of bear-like creatures called the Ewoks in their battle against the Empire.

Further cementing 2003 as the year of Ron Shelton cop movies, the director continued his vacation from the sports genre with Hollywood Homicide, a police comedy that comes right on the heels of Shelton’s Dark Blue, a decidedly grittier cop thriller. The film stars Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett as LAPD homicide detectives Joe Gavilan and K.C. Calden, two cops with bigger dreams. Gavilan moonlights as a real estate agent, while Calden teaches yoga and yearns for a career on the big screen. When an entire hip-hop group is murdered on-stage, Gavilan and Calden are called in to handle the case. As their investigation progresses, they begin to suspect that the rappers were offed for attempting to get out of their recording contract with label head Sartain (Isaiah Washington). Along with Bruce Greenwood and Keith David, the supporting cast boasts a plethora of real-life musicians, including Dr. Dre, Gladys Knight, Dwight Yoakam, Master P, and Ronald DeVoe of New Edition and Bell Biv DeVoe.

The Bold Ones was the umbrella title given a group of rotating hour-long TV series, which ran from 1969 to 1973. Joining established Bold Ones components The Doctors and The Lawyers in 1970 was The Senator, starring Hal Holbrook as RFK-like Senator Hays Stowe. The pilot for The Senator was A Clear and Present Danger, which first aired March 21, 1970. In this 2-hour “problem drama”, Senator Stowe tackles the issue of air pollution after a close friend dies of emphysema. The Emmy-nominated Hal Holbrook, Sharon Acker (as Erin Stowe) and Cindy Eilbacher (as Norma Stowe) carried their roles over to the “Senator” series proper, while Michael Tolan was cast as Stowe’s aide Jordan Boyle, the role played in A Clear and Present Danger by Joseph Campanella.

This 1993 box-office smash partly adheres to the 1960s TV series on which it is based and partly goes off on several tangents of its own. Harrison Ford stars as Dr. Richard Kimble, convicted of murdering his wife. While being transferred to prison by bus, Kimble is involved in a spectacular bus-train collision (one of the best of its kind ever filmed). Surviving the disaster, Kimble escapes, vowing to track down the elusive professional criminal whom he holds responsible for the murder. Dogging the fugitive every foot of the way is U.S. marshal Sam Gerard (an Oscar-winning turn by Tommy Lee Jones), who announces his intention to search “every whorehouse, doghouse, and outhouse” to bring Kimble to justice. Unlike his dour TV-series counterpart Barry Morse, Jones plays the role with a sardonic sense of humor: when a cornered Kimble screams, “I didn’t kill my wife,” Gerard shrugs and famously replies, “I don’t care.” Once the premise has been established, scripters Jeb Stuart and David Twohy and director Andrew Davis pull off several audacious plot twists, ranging from Kimble’s rendezvous with a sympathetic lab technician to a jaw-dropping dive into a huge waterfall. The second half of the film offers one surprise after another (including the true identity of the murderer), brilliantly avoiding the letdown that plagues many movie adaptations of old TV series.

One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness. Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), already on the edge, is assigned to find and deal with AWOL Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), rumored to have set himself up in the Cambodian jungle as a local, lethal godhead. Along the way Willard encounters napalm and Wagner fan Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), draftees who prefer to surf and do drugs, a USO Playboy Bunny show turned into a riot by the raucous soldiers, and a jumpy photographer (Dennis Hopper) telling wild, reverent tales about Kurtz. By the time Willard sees the heads mounted on stakes near Kurtz’s compound, he knows Kurtz has gone over the deep end, but it is uncertain whether Willard himself now agrees with Kurtz’s insane dictum to “Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all.” Coppola himself was not certain either, and he tried several different endings between the film’s early rough-cut screenings for the press, the Palme d’Or-winning “work-in-progress” shown at Cannes, and the final 35 mm U.S. release (also the ending on the video cassette). The chaotic production also experienced shut-downs when a typhoon destroyed the set and star Sheen suffered a heart attack; the budget ballooned and Coppola covered the overages himself. These production headaches, which Coppola characterized as being like the Vietnam War itself, have been superbly captured in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Despite the studio’s fears and mixed reviews of the film’s ending, Apocalypse Now became a substantial hit and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Duvall’s psychotic Kilgore, and Best Screenplay. It won Oscars for sound and for Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. This hallucinatory, Wagnerian project has produced admirers and detractors of equal ardor; it resembles no other film ever made, and its nightmarish aura and polarized reception aptly reflect the tensions and confusions of the Vietnam era.

George Lucas’ mythological popcorn movie is a two-hour roller-coaster ride that has passed into movie legend. The story, for the tiny number of people not familiar with it, concerns a farm boy named Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) who discovers that the used robot recently purchased by his family plays back a message from one Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), begging for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luke asks his father’s friend Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness) about this, and he discovers that Ben and Obi-Wan are one and the same. Kenobi tells Luke of the battle of the rebels against the ruling Empire and the spiritual energy called “The Force.” Soon Luke, Kenobi, and a mercenary named Han Solo (Harrison Ford) join forces to rescue Princess Leia from the Empire’s mammoth warship, the Death Star, controlled by evil genius Darth Vader (David Prowse, with the voice of James Earl Jones). George Lucas has frequently cited the influence of several films on Star Wars, particularly Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo and John Ford’s The Searchers, as well as the original Flash Gordon serials. After Star Wars became a success, Lucas announced his intention to turn the film into a series, originally totalling nine films (later pared back to six). Consequently, most reissue prints now feature the title Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, with The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) serving as Episodes Five and Six in the serial, and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999) going back to the myth’s beginnings.

The second of the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones epics is set a year or so before the events in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1984). After a brief brouhaha involving a precious vial and a wild ride down a raging Himalyan river, Indy (Harrison Ford) gets down to the problem at hand: retrieving a precious gem and several kidnapped young boys on behalf of a remote East Indian village. His companions this time around include a dimbulbed, easily frightened nightclub chanteuse (Kate Capshaw), and a feisty 12-year-old kid named Short Round (Quan Ke Huy). Throughout, the plot takes second place to the thrills, which include a harrowing rollercoaster ride in an abandoned mineshaft and Indy’s rescue of the heroine from a ritual sacrifice. There are also a couple of cute references to Raiders of the Lost Ark, notably a funny variation of Indy’s shooting of the Sherpa warrior.

In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford plays former CIA agent Jack Ryan, taking over from Alec Baldwin, who had played author Tom Clancy’s brainy protagonist in Hunt for Red October. This time around, Ryan foils an attempted assassination, thereby incurring the wrath of a maniacal Irish radical (Sean Bean). After seemingly neutralizing the villains, and deciding to celebrate the occasion with his wife (Anne Archer) and daughter (Thora Birch), everything appears to be back to normal; then all hell breaks loose. Author Tom Clancy himself bemoaned the liberties taken with his novel in the final sequences; the picture scored with audiences, however, and soon inspired a followup, A Clear and Present Danger (1994), also starring Ford.

A real-life historical incident becomes the basis for this military thriller from director Kathryn Bigelow that’s reminiscent of such submarine dramas as Das Boot (1981), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Crimson Tide (1995), and U-571 (2000). Harrison Ford stars as Captain Alexi Vostrikov, a Russian naval officer who’s being given command of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear submarine, K-19, at the height of the Cold War in 1961. The vessel’s previous commander, Captain Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson) has been demoted to executive officer following a botched test and his outspoken assertions that the flagship is not yet ready for deployment, but he curbs his resentment and resolves to serve his new superior well. Polenin’s concerns are well founded: parts are not yet installed, equipment is missing, and the ship’s doctor is killed in an auto mishap. Political pressure forces Vostrikov to sail his crew into the North Atlantic anyway, for a missile fire test that serves as a warning to the U.S. that its enemy is now its technological equal. The test is a success, but a disastrous leak in the K-19’s reactor cooling system soon threatens to create enough heat to detonate the craft’s nuclear payload — which would certainly be mistaken for the first salvo in a worldwide atomic exchange and spark the beginning of World War III. With no other option, Vostrikov orders his men to repair the damage in ten-minute shifts, irradiating them hopelessly. The conflict between the seemingly bureaucratic Communist Vostrikov and the more humane Polenin escalates, until a surprising twist reveals where both officers’ loyalties truly lie.

In this supernatural thriller, a woman believes that a visitor from another dimension is trying to guide her into a sinister mystery. Feeling lonely after her daughter leaves home for college, Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) begins to sense that something is wrong in her house, and feels a spirit is trying to contact her. At first her husband Norman (Harrison Ford), a scientist doing research in genetics, attributes her paranormal beliefs to stress or possibly a nervous breakdown, and sends her to a psychiatrist (Joe Morton) who puts no more stock in Claire’s stories than does Norman. While Claire’s contention that someone or something sinister is afoot leads her down a number of blind alleys, in time she becomes convinced that the mysterious happenings at her home are somehow connected to the disappearance of a woman who was a student at the nearby college — and bore a striking resemblance to Claire. What Lies Beneath marked the debut of screenwriter Clark Gregg, whose script is based on a story by himself and Sarah Kernochan; the supporting cast includes Diana Scarwid as Claire’s best friend Jody, and James Remar and Miranda Otto as a contentious couple living next door.