When all else fails to please in a William Shakespeare comedy, you can always count on the clowns. That's certainly true with this Love's Labour's Lost, in which hilariously hammy turns by Lane (Isn't She Great) and Timothy Spall (Topsy-Turvy) are the high points in an otherwise misguided musical adaptation.
Branagh, who also directed and stars, has kept this lesser romantic comedy by the Bard in the teeny European kingdom of Navarre but set it in 1939, on the eve of World War II. This gives Branagh an excuse to make like Fred Astaire, as he none too gracefully wedges in such period classics as George and Ira Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away from Me," Jerome Kern and Dorothy Field's "The Way You Look Tonight" and Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek." But Branagh doesn't trust the music and the lyrics, and instead of letting the movie's characters simply sing these beautiful pop laments, he turns each and every song into an excuse for an ungainly, over-the-top production number, most egregiously in a Busby Berkeleyesque aquatic ballet to Berlin's "No Strings (I'm Fancy Free)."
Love's Labour's plot begins with Navarre's king (Nivola), along with three comrades (Branagh, Lillard and Adrian Lester), signing a vow to spend the next three years studying while forgoing feminine company. Enter the lovely princess of France (Silverstone, who's game but hopelessly miscast, coming off as Valley Girl-upon-Avon) and three comely women-in-waiting (McElhone, Carmen Ejogo and Emily Mortimer). Bye-bye vows.
It's not much of a plot or play. Shakespeare was warming up here for his later, greater romantic comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. Branagh and McElhone's lovers have all the best lines in Love's Labour's, but their characters, Berowne and Rosaline, are but pale understudies for Ado's gloriously baleful bickerers, Benedick and Beatrice. With the exception of Lane and Spall, the rest of the cast has too little to do (Lester and Mortimer) or does its small bits badly (Scream's Lillard, who minces). And no one croons with distinction. (PG)
Bottom Line: Lost cause, alas
Chase Moore, Jan Decleir
In this worthy children's film the yearning to break loose from the shackles of a miserable life is heroically personified (make that equineified) by Lucky, the four-legged malcontent who knows there's more to life than being a workhorse. "I will never be chained to a wheel," Lucky tells viewers in a voice-over (Lukas Haas speaks for the horse). "I was born to run free and wild."
Run free and wild he does, eventually. Free, sentimentally appealing and beautifully photographed, briskly follows Lucky from his birth aboard a grim German freighter carrying horses to South Africa for work in copper mines, to his separation from his mother (cue the dream sequence where he romps with Mom), to his adoption by an orphaned stableboy (Moore). The movie ends with Lucky's happy triumph as the leader of a herd of wild horses in the desert and his finding true love with a dewy-eyed mare. Pity Mr. Ed: He never had it this good. (G)
Bottom Line: Shows excellent horse sense
John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu, Toni Collette
The title, at least, is precise. A financier, rich and recently widowed, transforms his stately country home into a seraglio for eight-point-five mistresses. The fraction is a mute, legless Japanese woman. Cute touch.
Director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) apparently took inspiration for his latest movie curiosity from the ripely sensual women who parade through Federico Fellini's films—especially the 1963 classic, 8½, starring Marcello Mastroianni. Women is more like 10 reduced to the second digit. Greenaway has a perverse genius for making naked flesh look as unappealing as wood pulp, and the women here are quarrelsome, demented and overpowering. If Fellini had put the courtly Mastroianni in bed with Xena, "Warrior Princess, you might have had similarly peculiar results. (R)
Bottom Line: Harem scarem
Beat Takeshi, Yusuke Sekiguchi
Too many foreign movies released in the U.S. lately share the same plot: gruff geezer turns sweet after being forced to take care of guileless small child. Think of Kolya, The King of Masks and Central Station. Add Kikujiro, a Japanese film, to the list, but with an asterisk. Its crusty middle-aged coot, Kikujiro (Takeshi, who, as Takeshi Kitano, also directed), warms up to his mini mate (Sekiguchi), but he remains as irascible as ever with everyone else.
Kikujiro is a road movie, with its mismatched pair hitting the highway in search of the 9-year-old's long-absent single mother. Along the way, Kikujiro teaches the boy how to puncture the tires on a car, insult strangers and steal food. The film is slow at times, but wryly amusing. (R)
Bottom Line: Familiar formula, with a twist
>Croupier Best bet out there right now for adults. Intelligent thriller about a struggling novelist (Clive Owen) who finds his material upon getting a job in a shady London casino. (Not rated).
Dinosaur Computer-animated dinosaurs lumber along against live-action landscapes. Visually impressive but dramatically inert. Too scary for small fry. (PG)
Gladiator Thumbs up. Brawny Russell Crowe commands center arena in rousing epic. (R)
Hamlet Nifty new version of Shakespeare's tragedy plunks the Danish prince (Ethan Hawke) down in today's Manhattan. Director-adapter Michael Almereyda makes you pay attention anew. (R)
Live Virgin Dead movie. Spoiled teen (Mena Suvari) rebels against her porn-film producer dad (Robert Loggia). (R)
Mission: Impossible 2 Mission Passable is a more accurate title. Good action but gobbledy-gook plot. Tom Cruise sweats through multiple stunts. (PG-13)
Shanghai Noon Multicultural western spoof is the silly blast that last summer's Wild Wild West should have been. Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson star. (PG-13)
- 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!
