Reviews in Brief

I tend to rent and watch movies in spurts. Every so often I'll pick three or four and greedily devour them. And then being sated, my DVD player will lie dormant until the urge hits again. Over the past week or so, I took in the following films:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

An extraordinary waste of time. The graphic novel written by Alan Moore is a fun and clever homage to the heroes and villains of Victorian literature. The League consists of Minna Murray from Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll, Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, H.G. Well's Invisible Man, and Allan Quartermain of King Solomon's Mines fame. Together, they match wits against such foes as Dr. Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty. Anyone who's a fan of Victorian literature (of the type mentioned above) or history will enjoy the comic.

But sadly, not the movie which was dumbed down into a run-of-the-mill action flick, with most of the darkness of the book removed, along with the literary references. Skip the flick, get the graphic novel.

Wasabi

I like Jean Reno (The Professional, Ronin). I like gangster flicks. I like Hong Kong style action films. So naturally I enjoyed this Luc Besson outing. Reno is short-tempered two-fisted French cop who winds up protecting a long-lost daughter from the Yakuza. This is pure entertainment - no mental heavy-lifting here. Watch in it French with the subtitles.

Bravo Two Zero

Starring Sean Bean and based on the book by Any McNab, this BBC production relates the true story of an SAS team whose SCUD hunting mission goes horribly wrong during the first Gulf War. The tone of the film is very strait forward - almost like a documentary - from the workman like way the troopers prepare for their behind-the-lines-insertion, to the gritty details of small unit actions and escape and evasion techniques. This is not a 'rah rah' Sands o' Iwo Jima type war film. The accents take a little getting used to, but Bean - as usual - gives an excellent performance.

The Lion in Winter

Peter O'Toole and Kate Hepburn portray Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. They quarrel and scheme against one another - a lot. Nothing really happens in this film - the ending left me vaguely wondering what the point was - but the dialogue is wicked and it's a joy to watch O'Toole and Hepburn spar. Timothy Dalton and Anthony Hopkins made their feature film debuts in this picture, and I think Hepburn won an oscar for it.