Troy

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20051216165757/http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn:80/star/2004/0715/wh… Director: Frank Oz Shanghai Star. 2004-07-15 Starring: Nicole Kidman, Mathew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Glenn Close, Bette Midler The idea of doing a re-make of Ira Levin's "The Stepford Wives" after nearly 30 years must have been well-nigh irresistible to Hollywood. Here was a chance to do a movie of a best-selling book whose previous screen incarnation in 1975 had done well at the box office and the director this time around would be Frank Oz - a man who had achieved critical success with two previous comedy/satires, "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and "Bowfinger". On top of that, an all-star cast has been assembled bursting with talent, each with a track record that would seem to guarantee brilliant business for any film they are in. So what went wrong? From one point of view, maybe nothing. The movie generates plenty of laughs, has a fast-moving storyline, the acting skills of the cast would hold any audience's attention and there are some wonderful oneliners (delivered mostly by Bette Midler). There's even an interesting new twist to the ending. But, by the time the final credits start rolling, you have the feeling that something big was missed here, that it all could have been done so much better. The story is set in Connecticut in the upper-middle-class hamlet of Stepford, a gated community with few children and no African-Americans - the black family in the original version seem to have left town but, being the 21st century, a gay couple has moved in. The main story begins when two escapees from the New York rat race, Joanna (Nicole Kidman) and husband Walter (Mathew Broderick) and their two children come to live in this apparent American Utopia. Joanna is a high-powered television anchorwoman who has just been fired by a television network after a contestant went berserk on the reality TV show over which she presided. Joanna becomes a liability to the network when a cuckolded husband - a victim of a feminist segment of her show entitled "I Can Do Better!" - goes on a murderous rampage and attempts to gun down everyone associated with his on-screen humiliation, including Joanna. She has a nervous breakdown and nerdy Walter decides a complete break with her previous life is what the family needs if it is to stay together. Joanna (played by Katharine Ross role in the original movie) starts to meet the Stepford neighbours and becomes friends with wisecracking Bobbie (Bette Midler in the role played originally by Paula Prentiss). They are both firstwave feminists a la Gloria Steinem and are appalled at the compliant behaviour exhibited by all the other Stepford wives, especially ever-smiling Claire (Glenn Close). Claire is married to Mike (Christopher Walken) who seems to run the town from the Stepford Men's Social Club. All the men in the village look to Mike for leadership and the women take their cue from Claire. It becomes quickly evident that while the Stepford husbands are normal male chauvinists, the wives seem to be lobotomized bimbos with an obsessivecompulsive disorder that forces them to do constant house-work when they're not on call in the bedroom.

In the Bryan Forbes' 1975 movie based on Levin's book, the audience is hooked by the dawning horror of what is going on in Stepford - uppity wives are being killed off by their husbands and replaced by sexually submissive cyborgs. Frank Oz deliberately puts the brakes on the thriller-horror possibilities - the wives have behaviour-changing brain implants instead of being murdered - and he goes for some heavy-hitting social satire through exploiting the comedy potential. Unfortunately, the potential remains just that - potential - because the comedy refuses to play despite the best efforts of a great cast. Glenn Close literally grovels around on the ground in one scene as the satire goes way over the top and Levin's novel goes out the window. Barry Porter Troy Director: Wolfgang Petersen Starring: Eric Bana, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, Saffron Burrows, Rose Byrne, Julie Christie, Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson, Diane Kruger, Peter O'Toole, Brad Pitt This Hollywood epic is based on one of the basic pillars of Western culture, Homer's masterpiece of war in all its glory and evil, The Illiad. Despite the grand - even grandiose - scale of this undertaking, "Troy" actually does an impressive job of conveying Homer's still two-thirds barbarian Greeks to a modern audience. Despite the casting of contemporary heart-throb Orlando Bloom as Paris (with newcomer Diane Kruger as Helen), the Illiad is structured by antagonism not love and the action lies elsewhere. Among a plethora of fine performances, it is Brad Pitt's Achilles that makes (and might as easily have destroyed) the movie, and the twin conflicts of Achilles - with the king who claims to lead him and the hero who opposes him - structure the entire epic. The king, of course, is Agamemnon (Cox), portrayed as a brutal tyrant who opportunistically exploits the cuckolding of his brother Menelaus to complete his conquest of the Hellenic world by humiliating the still-defiant Trojans and reducing their legendary fortress city. Achilles represents an older Greece, deeply hostile to the emergence of the centralized monarchical power and enraged by Agamemnon's imperial pretentions (for this insight into the essence of Homer, Petersen deserves immense credit). Yet the heroic ethos - reinforced by the wiles of Odysseus (Bean) - draws Achilles into the fray in Agamemnon's cause. Thus is the archaic independence of the warrior betrayed by its own extravagant appetite for honour and implicitly reduced to mere military service, within the entangling web of the emerging State. Pitt brilliantly captures this tragic conundrum, as Achilles rages or sulks uselessly against his fated role in Agamemnon's schemes, his wisdom impotent against the objective stupidity of his position as a social fossil, caught between shame and servitude, trapped equally by action or vacillation, decision or indecision. Achilles' other antagonist is Hector (Bana), the Trojan hero, both tragic mirror-image and photographic negative of his Greek counterpart. Where Achilles is seduced by his warrior code into a ruinous loyalty he detests, Hector is ensnared by his filial and political loyalties into a confrontation that ruins his family and his city - though Hollywood sentimentality moderates the full force of this tragic fatality, ultimately sparing his wife Andromache (the lustrous Saffron Burrows) and infant child. While recent cinema blockbusters have lifted expectations so high that even this movie's spectacular armed collisions of Greek and Trojan armies might fail to overwhelm the jaded senses of today's audiences, the way in which the

director manages to combine the impact of vast armed masses with the decisive role of select "heroic" individuals deserves unqualified respect, for its sheer film-making talent and for its historical sensitivity to the Homeric world. The casting and acting of the movie is a feast, with notable performances by Sean Bean as Odysseus and Peter O'Toole as Priam, among many others. Petersen has also chosen a wise approach to the question of ancient Greek religion, managing to convey its prominence to the heroic culture of antiquity without subjecting a modern audience to miraculous or supernatural events even Achilles' "fatal" injury to the heel is presented as the suggestive precursor to a series of far more straightforwardly murderous arrow wounds. Keen students of Greek legend will notice a few minor amendments to the story, but none are arbitrary or fundamentally destructive of Homer's original. Nick Land Lover's concerto Director: Lee Han Starring: Cha Tae-hyun, Lee Eun-ju, Son Ye-jin Anonymous letters with photographs of lovely children keep coming to Jihwan, refreshing his memories of two long-lost best friends. Five years ago, Ji-huan came across two girls, Su-in and Kyung-hee, in a coffee bar and the three youngsters then became close friends. After the colourful days of the summer vacation, love grew in each heart and the two girls unexpectedly withdrew from this subtle relationship. The evocative letters lead Ji-hwan to find one of the girls again, although she is now sick and living in a remote area. The other girl passed away soon after the summer. This story is not of the ordinary love triangle pattern - what it depicts is the distinctive emotion of love and interdependence between the two girls who both have incurable diseases. They have even shared their names so that they believe that they can be with each other forever. No matter whether the love is that with the boy or that between themselves, they consider it to be pure-hearted and the most beautiful episode of their lives. This is a quiet and poetic movie mixed with sorrowful and insistent music that seems to be the fixed style for the classic love stories of South Korean cinema, rendering the artistic atmosphere more fascinating than the story itself. The purified and implicit love story, shuttling between memory and reality, may be a little confusing, but the ending illuminates all the romantic puzzles and details of the movie. "Lover's Concerto" is typical in this respect, with its marvellous and seemingly complicated plot evoking the simple but deep emotions of friendship and love, the passage of time and the uncertainty of life. Miao Qing Copyright by Shanghai Star.