Bovie Movie

First-time screenwriter Stelios Pavlou enjoyed a major success with this script that he wrote while working in an English liquor store by sending it to actor Samuel L. Jackson, who signed on for one of the lead roles. Jackson is Elmo McElroy, a kilt-wearing, golf club-wielding Los Angeles native who has invented an illegal drug formula that he hopes will provide him with a last major score of 20 million dollars before he retires from a life of crime. He travels to Liverpool, England, where he hopes to find a buyer for his creation among the denizens of the city’s rave scene, but his plans go awry when those who are in on the deal start turning up dead. Elmo’s only protector is a chain-smoking, Yank-hating local hood named Felix De Souza (Robert Carlyle), who reluctantly partners with the violence-prone American to finish the deal and cash in, sparking a gang war between Elmo’s vengeful one-time employer, The Lizard (Meat Loaf); Felix’s boss, Durant (Ricky Tomlinson); crooked cop Virgil Kane (Sean Pertwee); a beautiful assassin, who also happens to be Felix’s ex-girlfriend (Emily Mortimer); and an offbeat, yoga-practicing nightclub owner and mobster named Iki (Rhys Ifans). For its U.S. release, the title of The 51st State was changed to Formula 51.

Joel and Ethan Coen take on the classic battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy with Intolerable Cruelty. George Clooney plays Miles Massey, a high-powered Los Angeles divorce lawyer nearing a midlife crisis . While representing wealthy client Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann), Miles meets his match in Rex’s gold-digging wife, Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones). He’s impressed by her similarly heartless ways of using marriage to fuel an expensive lifestyle, but he still defeats her in court. With Marilyn looking to get her revenge and Miles finding himself attracted to her, the two engage in a ruthless romantic pursuit to out-swindle each other. Billy Bob Thornton shows up in a small role as Texas oil tycoon Howard Doyle.

The British prime minister and the Royal Family find themselves quietly at odds in the wake of a national tragedy in this drama from director Stephen Frears. On August 31, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales died in an auto accident in Paris; despite the controversial breakup of her marriage to Prince Charles, she was still one of the most famous and best-loved women in the world, and the public outpouring of emotion over her passing was immediate and intense. However, given the messy circumstances of Diana’s breakup with Charles, official spokespeople for the Royal Family were uncertain about how to publicly address her passing. It didn’t take long for the media to pick up on the hesitation of Buckingham Palace to pay homage to Diana, and many saw this as a sign of the cool emotional distance so often attributed to the royals, which in this case was widely seen as an insult against Diana and the many people who loved her. Prime Minister Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen) saw a potential public-relations disaster in the making, and took it upon himself to persuade Queen Elizabeth II (played by Helen Mirren) to make a statement in tribute to the fallen Diana — an action that went against the taciturn queen’s usual nature. The Queen was released the same year that Helen Mirren played Queen Elizabeth I in an acclaimed miniseries for British television; The Queen also gave Michael Sheen his second opportunity to play Tony Blair after portraying the prime minister in the television film The Deal.

It wasn’t as well received at the box office as the pictures that preceded it or followed it, but Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the finest of the James Bond movies and also arguably the last truly great movie in the series. James Bond, portrayed here by George Lazenby (in his only performance in the role) has spent nearly two years trying to track down Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE. He has been taken off the case by his chief (Bernard Lee), an action the pushes him to the point of considering resigning from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, just as he opens a possible new avenue of attack on his quarry. Whilst in the field, Bond has chanced to cross paths with the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, whom he rescues from one apparent suicide attempt and an embarrassing moment at a casino gaming table — the Contessa, who prefers to be called Tracy (”Teresa was a saint”), is the daughter of Marc Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), an industrial and construction magnate and also a crime boss, who is impressed with Bond personally as well as professionally, and would like to see him marry his daughter. Bond is, at first, unwilling to involve himself with a woman — any woman — on that level, but Draco’s underworld contacts give Bond a vital clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts that get him back on the case and hot on the man’s trail. Journeying incognito to Blofeld’s mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, Bond finds the criminal mastermind posing as a would-be nobleman and also as a philanthropist, running a clinic devoted to the treatment and eradication of allergies. It’s all a front for a surprisingly sinister (and scientifically valid) plot for international blackmail that would make any previous Bond villain quake in fear. And in the process of staying alive long enough to have a chance of stopping Blofeld, Bond discovers the Tracy is truly like no woman he’s ever known before — one special enough that he finds himself willing to give up his life as a free-living, free-loving bachelor.

Mel Gibson, long-time heartthrob of the silver screen, came into his own as a director with Braveheart, an account of the life and times of medieval Scottish patriot William Wallace and, to a lesser degree, Robert the Bruce’s struggle to unify his nation against its English oppressors. The story begins with young Wallace, whose father and brother have been killed fighting the English, being taken into the custody of his uncle, a nationalist and pre-Renaissance renaissance man. He returns twenty years later, a man educated both in the classics and in the art of war. There he finds his childhood sweetheart Murron (Catherine McCormack), and the two quickly fall in love. There are murmurs of revolt against the English throughout the village, but Wallace remains aloof, wishing simply to tend to his crops and live in peace. However, when his love is killed by English soldiers the day after their secret marriage (held secretly so as to prevent the local English lord from exercising the repulsive right of prima noctae, the privilege of sleeping with the bride on the first night of the marriage), he springs into action and single-handedly slays an entire platoon of foot soldiers. The other villagers join him in destroying the English garrison, and thus begins the revolt against the English in what will eventually become full-fledged war. Wallace eventually leads his fellow Scots in a series of bloody battles that prove a serious threat to English domination and, along the way, has a hushed affair with the Princess of Wales (the breathtaking Sophie Marceau) before his imminent demise. For his efforts, Gibson won the honor of Best Director from the Academy; the movie also took home statuettes for Best Picture, Cinematography, Makeup, and Sound Effects.