Month: April 1999

Horatio Hornblower: The Wrong War (review)

The cannons don’t thunder. The nagging feeling that life today is not as exciting as it once might have been has got to be part of why A&E’s Hornblower series has been so much fun. ‘When we put on this uniform, Mr. Hornblower,’ Horatio’s Capt. Pellew tells the young man, ‘we entered into a life of adventure and adversity.’ Our Hero is terribly upset and looking for reassurance that he’s chosen the right path for himself when Pellew offers this nugget, and though it seems to soothe Horatio only a little, I gotta say, adventure and adversity sounds like fun to me.

Election (review)

Election is wickedly funny stuff, but what you as the viewer find funny is gonna be hugely dependent on whether you’re still worrying about homework and whom to invite to the prom. Election is decidedly not the latest in the recent slew of teen movies — it’s Generation X’s first sucker punch at the irritating kids snapping at our heels.

Bulworth (review)

As not a particular fan of either Beatty or rap music, I was not expecting to enjoy Bulworth, so I was delightfully surprised to find myself totally won over by the film’s sharp satire and a performance by Beatty that is both wonderfully unrestrained and remarkably self-deprecating.

Horatio Hornblower: The Duchess and the Devil (review)

But guess what? Horatio Hornblower is a fictional character. And Ioan Gruffudd is an actor. On television. He lives and works thousands of miles away from you. You are not ever going to meet him. He is not going to leave his wife or his girlfriend or his boyfriend or his dog to turn up on your doorstep. He is not going to read your panting posting with a gasp and say to himself, ‘Where has this woman been all my life?’ It ain’t gonna happen.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and I Went Down (review)

Elmore Leonard’s novels were hip and ironic before that was even cool. Now that the rest of the world has caught up with him in the 90s, movies based on his books (Get Shorty, Out of Sight) are big… and movies not based on his books but coming off as if they could be (Analyze This, Grosse Pointe Blank) are all the rage. Leonard is starting to hold sway with filmmakers across the pond, too, as two recent films — one from England, the other from Ireland — demonstrate.

Horatio Hornblower: The Fire Ship (review)

Gene Roddenberry is said to have based much of Capt. James T. Kirk on C.S. Forester’s Napoleonic War hero Horatio Hornblower. I can’t say that I see much of Kirk in the young Hornblower A&E’s four-part movie series is showing us. In fact, The Fire Ship, the second in the series, has him behaving a decidedly un-Kirk-like manner.

The Matrix (review)

I knew The Matrix was something special when I realized, halfway through the film, that I wasn’t fighting an urge to laugh at Keanu Reeves, as I usually do. He’s actually — and here’s something I never thought I’d say in reference to Reeves — good.

Horatio Hornblower: The Duel (review)

The cable network A&E’s Horatio Hornblower movie series showcases Ioan Gruffudd in his first leading role (previously, he was seen as the sailor who pulls Rose from the frigid ocean in Titanic), and he comports himself nicely as C.S. Forester’s British naval hero (though of necessity he must lose his Welsh accent in favorite of an English one). The Duel is the first of four movies A&E will air in April 1999, all loosely based on Forester’s 1950 book Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.

The Out-of-Towners (review)

We’ve all heard of a thing that is greater than the sum of its parts. But can a thing be less than the sum of its parts? That’s how I feel about The Out-of-Towners, which should be less forgettable than it is. It has King Tut and Basil Fawlty and a Kid in the Hall, fer pete’s sake, and yet two days later I can barely recall it.