Bovie Movie

Michael Lehmann directed this post-modernist hash of To Catch a Thief and The Naked Gun starring Bruce Willis as Hudson Hawk, a cat burglar who wants to go straight, but the circumstances won’t allow it. The story begins in a pre-credit sequence that takes place in the renaissance. Leonardo Da Vinci (Stefano Molinari) is rushing through his Mona Lisa painting to work on his latest invention — a machine to turn lead into bronze. But Da Vinci makes a mistake and, instead of bronze, the machine turns the lead into gold. Realizing the danger of his invention if the contraption gets into the wrong hands, he hides three parts of the apparatus inside three of his other works. Four hundred years later, Hudson Hawk, the world’s greatest cat burglar, is being released from jail after pulling a ten-year stretch. He wants to retire from the profession of cat burglary and drink some cappuccino, but two screwball billionaires — Darwin and Minerva Mayflower (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard) — won’t let him. Their nefarious plot is to steal the three Da Vinci works, restore Da Vinci’s gold-making machine, and destroy the world’s monetary system. They blackmail Hawks into working with them to steal the Da Vincis by threatening the life of Hawks’s pal Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello). Along with the power-mad billionaires, Hawks has to deal with the CIA, in the person of George Kaplan (James Coburn), breathing down his neck. He also has Vatican art restorer Anna Baragli (Andie MacDowell) falling for his smirk.

“I am….Drac-u-la. I bid you velcome.” Thus does Bela Lugosi declare his presence in the 1931 screen version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Director Tod Browning invests most of his mood and atmosphere in the first two reels, which were based on the original Stoker novel; the rest of the film is a more stagebound translation of the popular stage play by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane. Even so, the electric tension between the elegant Dracula and the vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) works as well on the screen as it did on the stage. And it’s hard to forget such moments as the lustful gleam in the eyes of Mina Harker (Helen Chandler) as she succumbs to the will of Dracula, or the omnipresent insane giggle of the fly-eating Renfield (Dwight Frye). Despite the static nature of the final scenes, Dracula is a classic among horror films, with Bela Lugosi giving the performance of a lifetime as the erudite Count (both Lugosi and co-star Frye would forever after be typecast as a result of this film, which had unfortunate consequences for both men’s careers). Compare this Dracula to the simultaneously filmed Spanish-language version, which makes up for the absence of Lugosi with a stronger sense of visual dynamics in the lengthy dialogue sequences. In 1999, a special rerelease of Dracula was prepared featuring a new musical score written by Philip Glass and performed by The Kronos Quartet.

Tim Burton returns to the dark but fanciful animated style of The Nightmare Before Christmas with this stop-motion black comedy. Victor (voice of Johnny Depp) lives in a small European village in the 19th century, where he is pledged to marry Victoria (voice of Emily Watson), a partnership arranged by their parents. The two only meet the day before their scheduled nuptials, and Victor performs disastrously in the wedding rehearsal. Later that evening, while he is walking through the woods and hopelessly practicing his vows, he puts Victoria’s wedding band on what looks like a branch. Victor quickly discovers this was a big mistake; as it happens, he has put the ring on the skeletal finger of the enchanted Corpse Bride (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), who then whisks him off to a dark and mysterious netherworld where they are now married. Victor is frightened in the land of the dead, and even realizes that he has fallen in love with his true fiancée Victoria, so he searches for a way back to his own world. Directed by Tim Burton in collaboration with animator Mike Johnson, Corpse Bride features a stellar voice cast, including Albert Finney, Christopher Lee, Richard E. Grant, Joanna Lumley, and Danny Elfman (who also composed the film’s musical score).