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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 November 1999 Issue No. 456 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 November 1999 Issue No. 456
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A sudden squall
By Mohamed El-Assyouti
November is usually a dry season for the release of films, with distributors preferring to wait for the mid-school year break. Yet despite Ramadan's first coinciding 9 December, and the consequent scheduling of the Cairo Film Festival for 24 November, several American films have been recently released. Not all cinemas, after all, will be festival venues, and distributors appear to have a glut of new movies on their hands. November, then, has seen the local release of three of the top ten box office hits of 1999: The Runaway Bride, The 13th Warrior and The Thomas Crown Affair.
Pretty Woman (1990) co-stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere reappear together in The Runaway Bride, again directed by Gary Marshall. While the first and last five minutes are relatively gripping, they sandwich a plot that recalls George Cukor's masterpiece The Philadelphia Story (1940), and the comparison is hardly favourable. Roberts and Gere are not quite a match for Katherine Hepburn and James Stewart, or even for Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra, stars of High Society (1956), Charles Walters' musical version of Cukor's film. Transforming Hepburn's leisured, aristocratic Tracy Lord into Robert's hairdresser, though, is a fitting touch for late 1990's filmgoers .
A USA Today columnist, Ike Graham (Gere) does not bother to check the stories his bar-mates spill out before publishing them. He achieves notoriety when he breaks the story that Maggie Carpenter (Roberts), a hairdresser from Hale, New England, has left eleven bridegrooms standing at the alter. But when a scandalised Maggie sends a letter to the editor accusing him of fabricating much of the story, Ike is fired.
Ike's ex-wife's husband commissions him to write a magazine article, fully researched, to show the first story was true: he noses around Hale, delves into Maggie's private life, befriends her family, ex-boyfriends and fiancés, only to end up falling in love with her. A typical star vehicle -- just don't expect many surprises.
The medieval tale The 13th Warrior is based upon Eaters of the Dead, a 1974 best-selling novel by Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park (1993), Disclosure (1994), Congo (1995), The Lost World (1997), and Sphere (1998). Crichton, who is the executive producer of the successful Warner Brothers television series ER, recently broadcast in daily episodes on Egyptian TV, co-produced The 13th Warrior, alongside its credited director John McTiernan; the former also reshot many scenes after a disappointing preview. In films such as Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), and The Last Action Hero (1993) McTiernan's skillful handling of mystery-suspense and action-adventure sequences quickly established him as a leading action director.
10th century Arab poet, Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan Ibn Al-Abbass (Banderas) fighting the cannibal Wendols
Antonio Banderas, whose star appeal is based upon his performances in films by Pedro Almodovar, Neil Jordan, Robert Rodriguez, and as Zorro in Martin Campbell's 1998 film, plays the 10th century poet Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan Ibn Al-Abbass, The 13th Warrior. In a standard Hollywood, Arabian Nights opening Ibn Al-Abbass is exiled to a remote border country as ambassador following an affair with the wife of a friend of the sultan. Omar Sharif makes a brief appearance as Melchisidek, his interpreter, and the shots of caravans manage to recall -- almost inevitably -- Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
The 13th Warrior places an Arab knight in a Viking context, sending him to the Baltic -- the film was actually shot in Canada -- where a pervasive, Predator-like atmosphere provides the setting for yet another Hollywood remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954). The 13th Warrior's multi-national pretensions necessitated the presence of several languages and interpreters in its opening scenes. But once Ibn Al-Abbass miraculously learns the tribesmen's language, everyone switches happily into American English. The film's particularity though lies in balancing the military inexperience of its Kurosawaian protagonist by his foreign culture's wisdom.
McTiernan's previous excursions outside the action genre have largely been failures -- who remembers Medicine Man (1992)? -- but his remake of Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) may well have bucked the trend. Pierce Brosnan retains much of his James Bond allure, giving a mature performance in the title role originally played by Steve McQueen, while a sexy Rene Russo plays Faye Dunaway's Catherine Banning, while the latter makes a cameo appearance as Crown's psychiatrist.
Brosnan's Crown is a wealthy art collector who occasionally gives in to the urge to steal a painting, while Catherine is the insurance company's bounty hunter. Remakes often fall flat, though not this: as humorous and amusing as the original, the finale caper is more sophisticated. Though Denis Leary is miscast as the investigating detective, few other faults can be found with a remake that reveals new aspects of McTiernan's entertaining skills.
The Other Sister, released this week, is directed The Runaway Bride's Gary Marshall. Carla Tate (Juliette Lewis) -- mentally challenged -- finds an ideal match in Danny McMann (Giovanni Ribisi), equally challenged. After several warm-up sessions watching The Graduate (1967) and referring to a manual, they finally succeed in consummating their relationship. A drunk Danny subsequently announces their love during a family party, spilling all the beans.
The film self-consciously quotes, directly and indirectly, both The Graduate and Rain Man (1988). Indeed, Danny's character is a Dustin Hoffman screen prototype and The Other Sister's plot parallels that of The Graduate -- family interference in children's marriage decisions, mother as the main obstacle, protagonist hitch-hiking his way to interrupt a wedding and reclaim his girl as Simon and Garfunkle sing Mrs Robinson. The underlying theme of The Graduate and Marshall's films is an attack on the traditional institution of matrimony emphasising the individual/society clash.
Instinct by John Turteltaub -- of While You Were Sleeping (1995) and Phenomenon (1996) -- finds anthropologist Ethan Powell (Antony Hopkins) in Hannibal Lecter mode, though later flashbacks explain that his aggression is a response to the trauma of witnessing the extermination of gorillas in the forest -- an analogy with Gorillas in the Mist (1988) whose star Sigourney Weaver becomes the subject of a joke by one of the film's characters, a fellow inhabitant of the maximum security prison for the criminally insane. Freedom is to be close to nature, to live with the animals as one of them -- kept in, Powell develops the hippie-looks of the The Rock's Sean Connery and pretensions to share the dilemmas of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz. Professor Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding Jr) assumes the responsibility of uncovering Powell's secret, guiding the viewer through the mystery.
Other American films currently in the cinemas include Inspector Gadget, a Walt Disney production that brings the cartoon characters to life with a lot of special effects. Gadget appropriates lines from The Last of the Mohicans, Hamlet, and Julius Caeser, and parodies Mission Impossible, Godzilla, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Holy Man. Generally however, this film is best suited to the children who are too young to watch Tim Burton's Batman.
