Something’s Gotta Give

In this sparkling romantic comedy, Jack Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a wealthy but ageing playboy with a fondness for younger women.

Marin (Amanda Peet) is his latest trophy girlfriend. She brings Harry home to meet her mother, a divorced, successful playwright Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), who has given up on finding a fulfilling romantic relationship.

Harry’s exclusive attraction to young women infuriates Erica. Things get even more awkward when Harry suffers a heart attack in her house and she ends up having to nurse him.

The two make peace and discover a smouldering attraction to one another.

However, some habits die hard. When Harry hesitates, his charming 30-something doctor Julian (Keanu Reeves) steps in and starts to pursue Erica. And Harry, who has always had the world on a string, finds his life unravelling.

Veronica Guerin

Veronica Guerin is the true story of a tenacious Irish crime reporter (played by Cate Blanchett) who exposed Dublin’s brutal drug trade in the 1990s.

Told in flashback, the film begins at the moment of her assassination by two masked gunmen in 1996 and moves backwards, telling the story of the last two years of her life.

A competitive journalist, Veronica started her fierce campaign against Dublin’s drug trade after witnessing young children playing with hypodermic needles in the city’s slums. Her investigation eventually led her into a fiercely protected inner circle of drug kingpins, controlled by the viciously powerful John Gilligan (Gerard McSorley).

She seemed deliberately to court danger, at one point confronting Gilligan and threatening to expose him by name. Her obsession put her family in real danger. She was victim of repeated assassination attempts – the last one fatal.

Her martyrdom, though, galvanised the public who took to the streets to campaign to rid Ireland of drugs.

Shattered Glass

Hayden Christensen (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones) stars as Stephen Glass, a high-flying America journalist who fell from grace a few years ago after he was caught fabricating his news stories (rather like Jayson Blair in the recent New York Times saga).

Glass was a staff writer for the respected American magazine The New Republic and a freelance feature writer for publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper’s and George. By the mid-1990s, his articles had turned him into one of the most sought-after young journalists in Washington – until he was exposed as an elaborate fraudster.

Shattered Glass tells this story grippingly, in a style reminiscent of the 1976 classic All the President’s Men.

Under the Tuscan Sun

Who hasn’t dreamed at least once of running off to a foreign country and starting a new life? That’s exactly what Frances (Diane Lane) does in Under the Tuscan Sun, directed by Audrey Wells (Guinevere).

Travelling through Italy after an unhappy marriage break-up, Frances impulsively purchases a rundown villa in Tuscany. With the help of a warm-hearted, smitten real estate agent and a local contractor with a team of Polish workers, her 300-year-old house is slowly transformed into a home.

Along the way, she encounters a larger-than-life British expatriate, kind and generous neighbours, and a charming Italian man or two. Lane is completely engaging as Frances, second-guessing her speedy purchase, looking for love and rediscovering herself.

Under the Tuscan Sun is a thoroughly upbeat, feel-good movie. The breathtaking scenery alone will have you pining to travel to Tuscany yourself.

House of Sand and Fog

Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind) is a troubled young woman struggling with drug addiction and recent abandonment by her husband.

Bewildered, she fails to check her mail, which includes letters threatening to evict her. After she is thrown out of the house she grew up in – wrongly, it turns out – a recent migrant Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley, Gandhi, Schindler’s List) buys the property at an auction.

Behrani, a former Iranian air force colonel – now reduced to performing menial tasks to earn a living – sees the house as the dream home for his wife and son now that they have become American citizens.

Based on Andre Dubus III’s bestselling novel, this film sympathetically depicts the plight of two desperate people – both of them lonely and in exile. One of them, Behrani, is an immigrant in a new country; the other, Kathy, feels like an immigrant in her own country.

The Last Samurai

Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is a man adrift. An alcoholic veteran of the American Civil War (1861-65), Algren once risked his life for his country. But the world has changed. Compromise and self-interest reign supreme, while sacrifice and honour are nowhere to be found.

A universe away, in Japan, another soldier sees his way of life about to disintegrate. He is Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the last leader of an ancient line of warriors, the venerated Samurai, who dedicated their lives to serving emperor and country. Just as the modern way encroached upon the American West, cornering and condemning the Native American, so it also engulfed traditional Japan.

The paths of these two warriors converge when the young emperor of Japan, wooed by American merchants eager for a share of Japan’s growing market, hires Algren to train his troops in the art of modern warfare. Part of Algren’s assignment is to help wipe out the Samurai. But when he is captured by this ancient warrior class, he must reconsider which side he supports and finds himself in the midst of a struggle between two eras.

This action-packed epic stars Scottish entertainer Billy Connolly as Algren’s old comrade-in-arms; Timothy Spall as an eccentric expatriate Brit who acts as Algren’s interpreter in Tokyo; Tony Goldwyn as Col. Tony Bagley, a former Civil War officer seeking his fortune in Japan; and a host of acclaimed Japanese actors.

Open Range

Academy Award-winning director Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves) pays tribute to the old West with this stylish action-packed film.

Open Range tells the story of four men – Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall), Charley Waite (Kevin Costner), Mose Harrison (Abraham Benrubi) and “Button” (Diego Luna) – trying to escape their pasts.

The West, with its vast prairies, is the one place where a man can be free, driving cattle in a land where nature makes the only laws.

Bound to each other by the “Code of the West” – standing up for what’s right, showing loyalty to those closest to you – the cowboys try to avoid violence.

But at one frontier town, the cowboys encounter a corrupt sheriff (James Russo) and kingpin rancher (Michael Gambon) who rule through tyranny and fear. Boss and Charley are drawn inexorably into a showdown as they are forced to defend the freedom and values of a lifestyle that is all too quickly vanishing.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

The saga of the mythic guitar-slinging hero, El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), continues in Robert Rodriguez’s “shoot-’em-up” action epic Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

The new adventure is set against a backdrop of revolution, greed and revenge. Haunted and scarred by tragedy, El Mariachi has retreated into a life of isolation. He is forced out of hiding when Sands (Johnny Depp), a corrupt CIA agent, recruits the reclusive hero to sabotage an assassination plot against the president of Mexico, which has been conceived by the evil cartel kingpin Barrillo (Willem Dafoe).

But El Mariachi also has his own reasons for returning – revenge.

The desperado returns with his two trusted sidekicks Lorenzo (Enrique Iglesias) and Fideo (Marco Leonardi). Also stars Salma Hayek and Mickey Rourke.

Thirteen Days

For 13 extraordinary days in October 1962, the world stood on the brink of an unthinkable catastrophe. Across the globe, people anxiously awaited the outcome of a harrowing political, diplomatic and military confrontation that threatened to end in an apocalyptic nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

US spy planes had detected the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in communist Cuba. US warships were dispatched to intercept Soviet vessels, thus escalating the tension between America and Russia.

Thirteen Days dramatically recaptures the urgency, suspense and paralyzing chaos of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Prominent in the crisis were President John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and a trusted presidential aide and confidante Kenneth O’Donnell (Kevin Costner), as well as a host of politicians, diplomats and soldiers who worked tirelessly to avert the feared nuclear showdown.

The Passion of Christ

Rarely has a film stirred up as much pre-release controversy as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. It is a graphic and heart-rending depiction of the last 24 hours of Jesus Christ before his crucifixion.

Jesus – hailed by many as the Messiah and king of Israel – was betrayed by a member of his own inner circle, Judas Iscariot, and falsely accused by the Jewish religious leaders of treason against Rome.

He was handed over to the Roman authorities. Roman governor of Palestine, Pontius Pilate, fearful of a riot, ordered Jesus to be flogged, taken outside the city and crucified as a common criminal. Crucifixion was a prolonged and particularly agonising form of death devised by the Romans.

Gibson, a devout Christian, has faced criticism for allegedly bringing up an age-old accusation that the Jewish people were somehow collectively responsible for killing the Son of God.

Gibson has emphatically denied this, stating that, as all human beings are sinners, all in a sense share responsibility for the death of Christ. Recently he said: “Anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.”

As if to emphasise this point, Gibson himself appears fleetingly in the film as one of the executioners. His hands are seen hammering the first nail into Christ on the cross.

Secondhand Lions

For 14-year old Walter (Haley Joel Osment, A.I: Artificial Intelligence), his great uncles’ farm in rural Texas is the last place on earth he wants to spend the summer. Dumped there by his mother, in the middle of nowhere with two crazy old men and the promise that she’ll come back for him, Walter is pretty nonplussed.

Eccentric and gruff, Hub and Garth McCaan (Robert Duvall and Michael Caine) are rumoured to have been bank robbers, mafia hit men and/or war criminals in their younger days. The truth is elusive. But Walter begins to see a new side to his great uncles when he stumbles on an old photograph of a beautiful woman hidden away in a trunk and asks Garth who she is.

Little by little, through stories spun against the backdrop of the dusty Texas night, an amazing story comes to life via Walter’s vivid, colourful imaginings – a tale set in a long-ago exotic, mysterious place where men rode stallions and fought with swords; where beautiful princesses tangled with treacherous sheiks; and where the two unlikely heroes lived an adventure most people only dream of.

Whether true or not, the uncles’ tales fire Walter’s imagination and open the doorway to a staggering new world where honour and valour mean more than money and power.

Special movie offer

For your chance to win one of our double-passes to House of Sand and Fog or Open Range, put your details on the back of an envelope and send it to Movie Comp, SA Police Journal (168).
Conditions: PASA members are welcome to enter for both films. However, there is a limit of one competition entry per person per film. On your entry slip, please indicate clearly which of the two movies for which you are entering.