Bovie Movie

Director Terry Gilliam adroitly applies his Monty Python sensibilities upon the “career” of famed German prevaricator Baron von Munchausen. Played herein by John Neville, the baron is seen quelling a war that he himself started, flying into the stratosphere on the back of a cannonball, ballooning to the moon, exploring the innards of a volcano, being swallowed by a whale….In short, all of Munchausen’s fabulous lies are here presented as “truth,” played out in full view of nonplussed witnesses Eric Idle, Charles McKeown, Jack Purvis, and Sarah Polley. Fringe benefits include several loving medium shots of jaybird-naked Uma Thurman as Boticelli’s Venus and an extended unbilled cameo by Robin Williams — that is, by the head of Robin Williams — as the King of the Moon. Filmed under considerable duress on a budget eventually exceeding 45 million dollars, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen never quite caught on with moviegoers, though it has enjoyed a lucrative afterlife on videocassette.

A man with the ability to see the future and change the outcome of events before they occur is forced to choose between saving himself and saving the world in this supernatural thriller starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, The Edge). Cris Johnson (Cage) is a Las Vegas magician who possesses the unique ability to witness the events of the immediate future moments before they happen. As a child Cris was subjected to a series of cruel experiments by government scientists and doctors, but a change of name and a new identity allowed the tortured psychic to elude detection and start a new life away from the prying eyes of his former captors. Though his clairvoyant vision only extends a few minutes into the future, it has still allowed Cris to eke out a living as a low-rent Las Vegas magician while earning a little extra cash at the blackjack tables. Up to this point in his life Cris has never used his power for anything substantial, but when he experiences a vision of Los Angeles being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, the small-time magician realizes that he could hold the key to saving millions of lives. But as low as he has tried to lie in recent years, Cris has never completely escaped detection by the government. Now, as terrorists prepare to unleash the ultimate horror on an unsuspecting city, FBI counter terror agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore) sets out to capture Cris and convince him to use his exceptional gift to prevent the nuclear nightmare from becoming a terrifying reality. Jessica Biel, Peter Falk, and Thomas Kretschmann co-star in the film, which is based on a short story by acclaimed sci-fi author Philip K. Dick.

The first motion picture produced by DreamWorks SKG, The Peacemaker (1997) was a spy thriller that married the exotic locations and derring-do of James Bond with the high-tech obsession and post-Cold War politics of Tom Clancy. Greedy Russian military officers crash two trains into each other, the warheads aboard one causing a nuclear blast. The accident is a cover for the theft of some of the weapons for sale to terrorists and rogue governments. In the U.S., intelligence officer Lt. Col. Tom Devoe (George Clooney), isn’t fooled. Neither is Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman), the acting head of a White House task force on nuclear smuggling. Devoe and Kelly team up to find the nukes, and they are able to stop the transfer of the weapons in a raid at the Iranian border, but one warhead is missing. It’s in the hands of Dusan Gavrich (Marcel Iures), a grief-stricken terrorist planning to call the world’s attention to the war in the former Soviet Union with a nuclear explosion in Manhattan. Although fictional, The Peacemaker was based on the magazine article “One Point Safe” by Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, a factual investigative news report about nuclear weapons smuggling in Russia.

With Goldfinger, the James Bond series took a turn away from relatively straightforward spy thrillers and toward campy gadgetry, extravagant sets, and kitschy jokes. Bond (Sean Connery) has to prevent a notorious gold smuggler, appropriately named Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), from robbing Fort Knox. Goldfinger is surrounded by evil henchmen such as the sexy female pilot Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) and Oddjob (Harold Sakata), who kills with his steel-rimmed bowler hats. In order to stop Goldfinger, Bond has to survive several perilous situations, including a huge, deadly laser. Goldfinger is one of the most popular films in the James Bond series, and it set the tone not only for the rest of the series but also for most of the action/adventure films of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

An unlikely band of scientists and soldiers join forces to save the world from certain destruction in this action-drama. As the world is struck with a variety of inexplicable phenomena — attacks by enormous swarms of birds in London, the explosion of the Colosseum in Rome, a potentially deadly malfunction which forces the Space Shuttle into a Los Angeles riverbed, and the simultaneous deaths of 32 people with pacemakers in Boston — a team of top scientific minds from around the globe is assembled to determine what has thrown the world into such a frenzy. Dr. John Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) makes the startling discovery that the Earth’s electromagnetic forces have begun to collapse, thanks to a sudden lack of movement of the molten ore at the center of the Earth. If the planet is to be saved, the core of the Earth needs a jump start, and Keyes assembles a team to burrow to the center of the planet and bomb the insides back into action. Joining Keyes on this dangerous, last-chance mission are the brilliant but arrogant Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), French arms expert Dr. Serge Levesque (Tch?ky Karyo, maverick researcher “Brazz” Brazzleton (Delroy Lindo), geeky computer genius Rat (DJ Qualls), and two no-nonsense military types, Commander Richard Iverson (Bruce Greenwood) and Major Rebecca Childs (Hilary Swank). However, as the crew digs deeper into the Earth, the more they discover what they haven’t been told about their mission and what’s really been causing the worldwide chaos. The Core was originally scheduled for release in the fall of 2002, but the movie didn’t reach theaters until the spring of 2003 as special-effects experts perfected the film’s more spectacular scenes.

This lucrative, elephantine-budgeted sci-fi opus paved the way for director Roland Emmerich’s mega-hit Independence Day (1996). The story commences in Giza, Egypt, circa 1928, where an archaeological expedition unearths an ancient ring with cryptic hieroglyphs. The film then moves to the present day, where Egyptologist Daniel Jackson (James Spader) is busily trying to convince a group of skeptics that the pyramids were not built by man, but by an extraterrestrial force. After the lecture, a military man approaches him and offers him a job translating the said ring; its inscriptions actually constitute a map to a massive stargate (or interstellar portal). The army sends over resident crackpot colonel Jack O’Neill (Kurt Russell) to travel through the stargate and see what’s on the other side; Jackson accompanies him, and the two men turn up in a desert planet on the other side of the universe, with three moons in its sky. The world in question is ruled by Ra (Jaye Davidson), a hermaphroditic Egyptian sun god, who oppresses hordes of slave workers. Jackson and O’Neill then join forces to help the said workers revolt against their oppressor.

An undercover CIA agent must fight for his life when his cover is blown during a heated assignment in this action entry starring martial arts mainstay Steven Seagal. CIA agent Jonathan Cold (Seagal) is attempting to infiltrate a group of well-known arms dealers when his former student is captured and his cover is blown. Now, with little time to spare before the wrathful weapons dealers sell a powerful nuclear bomb to an Eastern European terrorist cell, Agent Cold must race to save his former student while simultaneously stopping the bomb from falling into the wrong hands.