Once upon a time, a clever movie director decided to remake the classic Cinderella tale as a period piece set in 16th-century France (and shoot it on location in a magnificent chateau) but goosed the story by giving it an unmistakably contemporary feminist spin. Out went the pumpkin carriage and the white mice who drew it; in came references to public education and the rights of servants. He cast Barrymore as the well-read, populist-minded Cinderella, Huston as her supercilious stepmom and Scott, a dashing Scottish-born actor, as the somewhat priggish prince who needs to be taken down a peg or two by Cinderella before he can truly be considered husband material.
Fortunately for moviegoers this tale ends happily. The director is Andy Tennant (whose previous films were the markedly uninspired It Takes Two with the Olsen twins and Fools Rush In with Matthew Perry), and his revisionist Cinderella tale, Ever After, is one of the unexpected delights of the summer. Tennant, who cowrote the screenplay for this romantic comedy with Susannah Grant and Rick Parks, retains the bare bones of the Cinderella story while ingeniously plumping up the back story for each of the characters. The prince, for example, first meets Cinderella while on the run from an arranged marriage to a Spanish princess. The orphaned Cinderella remains with her stepmother because she keeps hoping the woman will actually express maternal feeling for her. And Cinderella's fairy godmother is—hold on to your paintbrush—Leonardo da Vinci, who is hanging about doing some artwork for the prince's father.
Barrymore is delectable, switching back and forth between fierce displays of temper and blushing uncertainty. Scott makes a manly prince, and Huston comically conveys the stepmother's waspish cunning but also her emotional longing. And the supporting cast is strong, particularly Judy Parfitt as the prince's mom and Melanie Lynskey as the sweeter of the two stepsisters. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: In this pleasingly light confection, Cinderella grows up and discovers she can still have a happy ending
James Marsden, Katie Holmes, Nick Stahl
Scream made such a big splatter at the box office (grossing—apt word—along with Scream 2, more than $200 million) that Hollywood is churning out similar slacker slasher movies as fast as the studios can mix up fake blood. The latest is Disturbing Behavior, a movie that's lower on the evisceration and gore scale than its predecessors but higher in smarts than some of the other Scream wannabes (notably I Know What You Did Last Summer). While never rising above its humble genre pedigree, Behavior at least has a decent plot (new-to-town teen hottie, played by Marsden, discovers that the popular kids at school are really Stepford teens), amusingly smart-alecky dialogue and showy performances by the promising Stahl (The Man Without a Face) and luscious Holmes (TV's Dawson's Creek). (R)
Bottom Line: A satisfactory chiller for the Clearasil set, but older moviegoers can safely stay home
Documentary
From Dusk Till Dawn, a 1996 horror movie in which George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino played escaped convicts battling bloodthirsty vampires in a topless bar, was a crummy movie. Full Tilt Boogie, a confused, meandering documentary about the making of Dawn, doesn't improve upon its source material.
Full Tilt is the work of first-time filmmaker Sarah Kelly, now 28, and her inexperience shows. This documentary is a catch-as-catch-can affair. One sees much footage of Clooney clowning around between takes and coming off as a likable guy, but almost nothing of Dusk director Robert Rodriguez dealing with the daily hassles of making a movie. Getting the most screen time in Full Tilt are two young women employed as Clooney and Tarantino's personal assistants. One of their stop-the-presses revelations? "I hate going to Taco Bell for George," Clooney's assistant whines. "There's always a line." (R)
Bottom Line: Too lightweight even for the E! channel
Minnie Driver, Tom Wilkinson
Like a lustrously polished grand piano that is painfully out of tune, The Governess looks better than it plays. A romantic drama set in Victorian England, the movie features sumptuous garb, sweeping, moody scenery (shot on Scotland's Isle of Arran) and fabulously ornate interiors. That's all to the good. The problems come in Governess's story, that of a young Jewish woman (Driver) who, out of financial necessity, masquerades as a Christian (calling herself Mary Blackchurch) to land a job as a governess at a big house in rural Scotland. The mistress of the mansion (Harriet Walter, most amusing) is an affected chatterbox, and the middle-aged master ("Wilkinson, from The Full Monty) spends all day in his laboratory experimenting with the newly discovered process of photography. Driver and Wilkinson begin collaborating on photo experiments and, soon, pictures aren't all that they are developing.
Although the movie, written and directed by Sandra Goldbacher, starts out looking at questions of identity, once Driver and Wilkinson hit the hay, its focus becomes fuzzy and the plotting ever more gothic. Driver is certainly passionate enough but is often strident. Wilkinson just seems lethargic. (R)
Bottom Line: Too much sex ed in the lesson plan
Claire Danes, Lena Olin, Gabriel Byrne
Poor Lena Olin. In this irritatingly whimsical romantic comedy, she vamps about in one of those oversexed earth-mother roles that actresses adore but which too often come off onscreen as overheated ham. Here she plays a sexy Polish cleaning woman who lives crammed into a duplex in Detroit with her five children and passive husband (Byrne), a baker. When not getting it on lasciviously with a businessman amidst the scouring brushes on the floor of the office lavatory she's cleaning, Olin is ardently declaring, "Making life and love, that's my religion." Her teenage daughter (Danes, who's pouty) has it worse, since she is slated to lead the local church's Festival of the Virgin parade but inconveniently finds herself pregnant.
Tyro director-writer Theresa Connelly clearly meant her movie to be wacky, heartfelt ethnic fun, like Moonstruck. It's not. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: RSVP yes at your own risk
Sergi Lopez, Sacha Bourdo
Paco (Lopez), a thickly handsome Spaniard driving through Brittany and selling shoes, gives a lift to a small, chatty Russian drifter named Nino (Bourdo), who a few kilometers later steals Paco's rental car. Not too many kilometers beyond that, Paco (having been fired for his screwup) catches up with Nino and pummels him so badly he has to be hospitalized. Then, in the sort of unexpected curve that characterizes this gentle, funny French road movie, Paco befriends him.
He has cause to feel magnanimous: While stranded without his car or shoe samples, Paco—who takes great pride in his skills as a lady-killer—has found time to fall in love. When his new girlfriend proposes a three-week hiatus to test the strength of their affection, Paco and Nino, both of them now virtually without a cent, set off on a tour of the neighboring towns. Along the way, encountering one charming woman after another, Paco does his best to land the lovelorn Nino a date, even cooking up a door-to-door survey to sniff out likely romances. What gives Western its special poignancy is that these men are not only searching for love but longing for acceptance by that aloof beauty, La France herself. (No rating)
Bottom Line: Paco and Nino's adventure is excellent
>SAVING PRIVATE RYAN Visually and emotionally masterful, director Steven Spielberg's big one about the Big One is as good a war movie as we have ever seen. It makes viewers think long and hard about war, its costs and the men who fought for us a half century ago. (R)
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
Tasteless, gross and a whole lotta fun. Hey, it's been nearly a month now, but we're still not using hair gel. Matt Dillon, Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller stoop as low as you can go for laughs—and get them every time. (R)
THE OPPOSITE OF SEX Suffering from blockbuster overload? Then catch the smartest, funniest movie to open this summer, director-writer Don Roos's little black comedy about love and sex and all that other painful human stuff. Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow star. (R)
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
