Bovie Movie

Outrageously violent, time-twisting, and in love with language, Pulp Fiction was widely considered the most influential American movie of the 1990s. Director and co-screenwriter Quentin Tarantino synthesized such seemingly disparate traditions as the syncopated language of David Mamet; the serious violence of American gangster movies, crime movies, and films noirs mixed up with the wacky violence of cartoons, video games, and Japanese animation; and the fragmented story-telling structures of such experimental classics as Citizen Kane, Rashomon, and La jet?e. The Oscar-winning script by Tarantino and Roger Avary intertwines three stories, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, in the role that single-handedly reignited his career, as hit men who have philosophical interchanges on such topics as the French names for American fast food products; Bruce Willis as a boxer out of a 1940s B-movie; and such other stalwarts as Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Christopher Walken, Eric Stoltz, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, whose dance sequence with Travolta proved an instant classic.

A U.S. Army war correspondent is drawn into a deadly mystery in post-war Berlin as he seeks out his wartime mistress in this adaptation of author Joseph Kanon’s best-selling novel. The war is over, and Jake Geismar (George Clooney) is an American journalist assigned the task of covering the peace in Berlin — but he was once lovers with a mysterious woman named Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett). Lena is a lady with many secrets to hide, however, and now that the fighting has ceased, she has every intention of burying her sins and escaping her dark past. As Jake searches for Lena in war-torn Berlin with the assistance of American Army motor pool driver Tully (Tobey Maguire), the complex web of deceit woven by the desperate woman soon leads all three into the black market, which could prove either the ticket to Lena’s ultimate escape or the downfall of both her and her pursuers. Filmed entirely in the style of such Hollywood classics as Casablanca, The Good German was shot by director Steven Soderbergh (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) using 1940s era lenses, sound-recording techniques, and a decidedly less-mobile camera.

Acclaimed director David Fincher’s promising career was lucky to survive this astonishingly wrong-headed, almost universally despised second sequel to Alien (1979). The film careens into oblivion virtually from the beginning, as Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only survivor of a crash-landing on a hellish, God-forsaken prison planet. Not only does the crash kill little Newt, completely obviating the entire point of the superior Aliens (1986), but Fincher then compounds his betrayal of that film’s fans by having Ripley attend the girl’s gruesome autopsy and barely bat an eye as the child’s chest is bloodily ripped open with a steel bonesaw. Things just go downhill from there, as the rather unthreatening rapists and murderers harass Ripley and curse a great deal before being torn apart by large fans, having their heads crushed by the unconvincing CGI alien, and finally volunteering to be murdered by the beast rather than letting the evil Company get hold of it. Fincher does the best he can with a terrible script, and there are some nice supporting turns by Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, and Brian Glover, but nothing could redeem the film’s first 15 minutes. By the time Ripley takes a suicidal swan-dive into a vat of molten lead, cradling a baby alien as it explodes from her chest, many viewers will not know whether to reach for the remote control or a warm bath and a razorblade. A loathsome experience by any standard, Alien 3 still made enough money for Weaver to return as a Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection (1997).

Adapted from the novel by Pete Hamill, Flesh and Blood stars Tom Berenger as Bobby Fallon, a street punk who develops into a topnotch boxer while in prison. Upon his release, Bobby is taken under the wing of manager John Cassavetes. Outwardly tough and unmovable, Bobby is tortured with memories of his miserable childhood, which included an incestuous episode with his mother (Suzanne Pleshette). This two-part TV movie concludes with a heavyweight championship bout, bankrolled by Bobby’s long-estranged father (Mitchell Ryan). Photographed with Rocky-like intensity by Vilmos Zsigismond, Flesh and Blood first aired on October 14 and 16, 1979.

One of the great stories of doomed love is given a new screen interpretation in this historical drama. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, King Donnchadh (David O’Hara) of Ireland has become the de facto ruler of England, but one of his underlings, Lord Marke (Rufus Sewell), dreams of uniting British forces with an eye toward self-rule. One of Marke’s most valuable allies is Tristan (James Franco), Marke’s protégé, who has become a brave warrior since he was rescued by the lord after his parents were murdered by Irish forces during a battle. While Marke and Tristan dream of banishing Ireland’s presence in England, Tristan has a secret he’s been hiding from Marke — after suffering serious wounds during a hard-fought battle, he was rescued and nursed back to health by Isolde (Sophia Myles), King Donnchadh’s daughter, and the two fell deeply in love. But the couple were separated after Tristan returned to England, and when King Donnchadh attempts to quell the British uprising by staging a tournament among the nation’s greatest warriors, with an extreme and rather personal surprise in store for Tristan.
Tristan & Isolde was directed by Kevin Reynolds, and produced in part by Ridley Scott, who attempted to bring the story to the screen back in the 1970s.

In this action-horror flick from director Robert Rodriguez and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, Tarantino stars with George Clooney as a pair of bad-to-the-bone brothers named Seth and Richie Gecko. After a string of robberies that left a river of blood in the Geckos’ wake, the sadistic siblings head to Mexico to live the good life. To get over the border, they kidnap Jacob Fuller, a widowed preacher played by Harvey Keitel, and his two children, Kate (Juliette Lewis) and Scott (Ernest Liu). Once south of the border, the quintet park their RV at a rough-and-tumble trucker bar called The Titty Twister, where Seth and Richie are supposed to meet a local thug. After a couple of drinks, they realize that they’re not in a typical bar, as the entire place begins to teem with vicious, blood-sucking vampires. With the odds stacked greatly against them, the Fullers and Geckos team together in hopes of defeating the creatures of the night. Makeup artist Tom Savini and blaxploitation star Fred Williamson appear as allies against the vampires, and Cheech Marin fills three different roles.

A fictionalized account of one of America’s most groundbreaking sexual harassment lawsuits comes to the screen in this hard-hitting drama. In the late ’80s, Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) fled her abusive husband, and needed to find a way to support her two children. Aimes returned to her hometown in Minnesota and followed the lead of her old friend Glory (Frances McDormand), who had bucked tradition and found a job in the iron mines that had long provided employment for much of the community. Aimes found honest labor and a living wage working the mines, but she also discovered she was working with men who were uncomfortable working with women (whose right to work in the mines had been mandated by law almost 15 years prior), and didn’t care to show them much respect. However, as Aimes found herself the growing target of sexist jokes and abhorrent behavior, she found that many of her female co-workers were reluctant to stand beside her, afraid of losing a good-paying job at a time when they were increasingly hard to find. But as a personal crisis became a public war of words, Aimes became the center of a nationwide controversy when she attempted to file a class action sexual harassment suit against the mine owners, which put her and her family in a position of scrutiny beyond her worst expectations. North Country also stars Sean Bean, Sissy Spacek, and Woody Harrelson.

Near the end of The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey, in his Oscar-winning performance as crippled con man Roger “Verbal” Kint, says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This may be the key line in this story; the farther along the movie goes, the more one realizes that not everything is quite what it seems, and what began as a conventional whodunit turns into something quite different. A massive explosion rips through a ship in a San Pedro, CA, harbor, leaving 27 men dead, the lone survivor horribly burned, and 91 million dollars’ worth of cocaine, believed to be on board, mysteriously missing. Police detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) soon brings in the only witness and key suspect, “Verbal” Kint. Kint’s nickname stems from his inability to keep his mouth shut, and he recounts the events that led to the disaster. Five days earlier, a truckload of gun parts was hijacked in Queens, NY, and five men were brought in as suspects: Kint, hot-headed hipster thief McManus (Stephen Baldwin), ill-tempered thug Hockney (Kevin Pollak), flashy wise guy Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), and Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a cop gone bad now trying to go straight in the restaurant business. While in stir, someone suggests that they should pull a job together, and Kint hatches a plan for a simple and lucrative jewel heist. Despite Keaton’s misgivings, the five men pull off the robbery without a hitch and fly to Los Angeles to fence the loot. Their customer asks if they’d be interested in pulling a quick job while out West; the men agree, but the robbery goes horribly wrong and they soon find themselves visited by Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), who represents a criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze. Soze’s violent reputation is so infamous that he’s said to have responded to a threat to murder his family by killing them himself, just to prove that he feared no one. When Kobayashi passes along a heist proposed by Soze that sounds like suicide, the men feel that they have little choice but to agree.

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch’s surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage’s Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern’s Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta’s thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery.

“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.