Shrek
The evil Lord Farquart [John Lithgow -
3rd Rock From The Sun
] has all the magical creatures in his Kingdom rounded up and evicted.
One of these is the talking donkey [Eddie Murphy],
who meets up with the reclusive ogre, Shrek [Mike Myers].
They end up on a quest to save Princess Fiona [
Cameron Diaz
] from the castle of a dragon ...
The film successfully parodies both fairy tales and Disney films based on fairy tales. The animation is excellent, but one cannot help but feel that the film itself is ever-so-slightly overhyped.
The problem with the film is quite simple. The supposed moral of the story, which is opposites attract or it doesn't matter what you look like, it's the person inside that matters or something like that ... just isn't borne out by the ending. As for the propaganda about true love ... bleugh!
Ginger Snaps
Just when we thought the teen horror flick had become unsalvageable,
along came this genre-breaking film.
The cliched characters are all there - the bitchy cheer-leader type,
the cannabis dealer and so on.
What's different is the plot, a refreshingly original revamp.
Unsurprisingly, this is not a Hollywood product. It was made in Ontario, Canada, and while it seems to be a low-budget effort the makers spared no expense on their creature.
Ginger [ Katharine Isabelle ] and Brigitte [ Emily Perkins ] are a pair of death-obsessed semi-Goth mid-teen sisters who live in a town where the local pets are being killed off by some ferocious unknown beast. When Ginger gets attacked by the creature, she starts to undergo strange physical changes. Although they may be archetypal, here you actually care about the characters. This is undoubtedly the best werewolf movie since ... well, ever, really.
The scientific explanation of the Lycanthropic infection seems similar to the Martians' biological imperialism in the 1980s TV show War of the Worlds
The film was directed and co-written by John Fawcett who has directed episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess . Lucy Lawless did an uncredited cameo as the school's tannoy announcer. The only other recognisable name is Mimi Rogers , who gets a supporting role as the girls' mother.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Finally it arrives, the film that promises to be the biggest of the summer.
Simon West
[Con Air] delivers the worst film of the year so far.
The action scenes are boring and predictable -
you either don't feel that the characters are threatened, or don't care.
What about the babe factor? Well, Angelina Jolie 's legs are shorter and stumpier than Lara Croft's. Also, since her bra is padded [to boost from 36c to 36d] we all know that there is nothing much to gawk at. At least she can manage the plummy upper-class accent, so it's not all bad news.
The so-called plot consists of Lara's efforts to retrieve the parts of a magical triangle that can control time. No shit. She must race against time not only because of a planetary alignment, but also because the triangle's power is sought by a secret society called The Illuminati. Their henchman is Iain Glen, the guy who did the naked handstand in Nicole Kidman 's stage play The Blue Room.
Chris Barrie [credited as Christopher] plays Lara's butler. The other recognisable face is Jon Voight [ Enemy Of The State ], Jolie's RL father cast as Croft's father.
Jurassic Park 3
Oh god no, I hear you cry.
They made a third one!
This time Spielberg only produced, and left the directing to his pal
Joe Johnston
[whose previous features are the similarly CGI-SPFX intensive
Honey I shrunk the Kids, Rocketeer
and
Jumanji
].
We start with Sam Neill meeting with his old colleague Laura Dern . He tells her that he has discovered that velociraptors have almost human-like intelligence. She tells him that she is now married to an important bureaucrat in the US Government's State Department. Like most things about this film, the two facts are vital to the plot and incredibly convenient! For example, when Neill's sidekick [Alessandro Nivolo - Face Off ] mentions he is an Extreme Sports enthusiast, we know there are some fancy stunts lined up ...
William H. Macy and Tea Leoni hire Neill to act as a spotter on their air-tour of Site B, the location of the second film. They bring along a few gun-toting mercenaries, including Bruce A. Young as the token black guy and Dubois from Green Mile . Their mission, unbeknown to Neill, is to rescue their twelve-year-old son. As you can no-doubt predict, things go wrong. As always. They are trapped on the island, with no hope of survival ...
Luckily for them, things just happen to be incredibly and unbelievably convincing. If you head in a straight line through a jungle, directly for the coast, then you will somehow manage to bump into every that would make the movie interesting.
The kid has survived, just like Newt did in Aliens . The mercenaries and dinosaur experts are befuddled, but a pre-teen boy thrives! None of the human characters is interesting, and there's no real character development. The dinosaurs only pop up when it's convenient, and just like in the sequel we get to see NEW kinds!
The film has several moments of self-parody. One is where Sam Neill tells the kid that two toy dinosaurs would fight, and then goes on to witness a battle of giant CGI carnivores battle to the death. Another scene contrasts a giant super-predator with the purple childrens' character, Barney the Dinosaur. However, the most fitting piece of self-parody is when the humans have to dig through gigantic piles of dinosaur crap, which they discover is littered with bones and other indigestible stuff. That is what we as viewers feel like ... all the good stuff was used in the first film and regurgitated for the second, while all we get is the indigestible remains. And the crap, of course.