great laughs and an engagingly energetic performance from Day as the buckskinned tomboy. Grosvenor, Glasgow. Chicken Run (U) **** (Nick Park/Peter Lord, UK, 2000) Voices of Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Miranda Richardson. 85 mins. For their first feature Aardman studios have re-written the WWII P.O.W. experience as an Orwellian satire, albeit with laughs. So, Stalag 17 becomes a battery farm and the camp commandant farmer Tweedy’s domineering wife, while in the hutches, Ginger rallies her fellow hens to fly their coop. Though the characters aren't as established as Wallace and Gromit and the feature length running time slows the action, Aardman continue to work real wonders with their familiar Plasticine animation. Selected release. Chuck And Buck (15) **** (Miguel Arteta, US, 2000) Chris Weitz, Mike White. 95 mins. Chuck (Weitz) and Buck (White, also seriptwriter) used to suck and fuck each other, when they were kids. As the years pass they drift apart, Chuck moves to Los Angeles and becomes a successful music industry executive while Buck stays at home with his mother, living in a state of perpetual childhood at 27 years-of-age. But the death of Buck’s mom brings the boys back together, much to Buck‘s delight and Chuck '5 chagrin. You‘ll find Chuck And Buck either irritating or endearing, but it’s an American indie movie that makes a truth of those much overused adjectives: quirky, offbeat and oddball. See review. GFT, Glasgow. City Of Angels (12) *** (Brad Siberling, US, 1998) Meg Ryan, Nicolas Cage, Dennis Franz. 117 mins. Cage plays an angel who falls in love with heart surgeon Ryan in this earnest but unintentionally leaden remake of Wim Wenders's sublime Wings Of Desire. Moments of high emotion are off-set by flashes of humour, but the Gothic magnificence of Wenders‘s film is replaced by a soft focus, filtered earnestness that pushes the story towards soapy melodrama. Lumiere, Edinburgh. Coyote Ugly (12) it (David McNaIIy, US, 2000) Maria Bello, Piper Perabo, John Goodman. 101 mins. Presumably the high concept pitch for this latest slice of wish fulfilment was ‘I’lashdance meets Cocktail'. The title refers to a New York drinking spot, where the drop-dead gorgeous (female) bartenders dance suggestively on the bar and pour shots down the customers’ throats. The latest recruit to this ‘lively' environment is young Violet (Perabo), a girl from New Jersey who dreams of making it in the Big Apple as a singer-songwriter. Ignore the claims that this is a tale of female empowerment: the film is a tease, titillating its male viewers with its images of midriff- baring babes in halter tops and tight leather trousers, before retreating behind its 12 certificate. General release. Dinosaur (PG) *irir (Erie Leighton, Ralph Zondag, US, 2000) Voices of: DB. Sweeney, Julianna Margulies, Joan Plowright. 82 mins. This latest computer animated offering from Disney follows the journey ofAIadar the Iguanadon as he flees across the meteor-ravished wasteland of prehistoric Earth alone after being separated from his family. Initially, the excitement is contagious; the C01 scenes are so realistic it's not that hard to believe what you are watching could be real. Then tragedy strikes; the lemurs talk. And talk. Yet as the predictable and, ultimately, boring storyline of Dinosaur unfolds, that winning Disney formula is guaranteed to keep any dinosaur crazy four-year-old pinned to his or her seat without scaring them too much. General release. Disney's The Kid (PG) *1“: (Jon Turteltaub, US, 2000) Bruce Willis, Spencer Breslin. 104 mins. This Kid bears great similarity to the body swap films of the mid 80s (Big, lica I’vrsa), where characters got the chance to re-evaluate their lives by seeing the world through their own younger eyes. For career driven image consultant Russ Duritz (Willis) this is an unexpected twist in his otherwise careful planned life, as he comes face to face with his podgy, rather gauche eight-year-old self, Rusty (Breslin). Old-fashioned entertainment that passes the time and raises a smile or two along the way. See review. General release.
Dolphins (U) The producers of the most successful IMAX movie ever, Everest, take us undersea into the aquatic home of dolphins. With narration by Pierce Brosnan and music by Sting. IMAX, Glasgow. Drole de Felix (15) hit (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, France, 2000) Sami Bouajila, Ariane Ascaride, Pierre-[soup Rajot. 97 mins. A likeable gay-themed road movie about a guy, Felix (Sami Bouajila), travelling from Normandy to Marseille in search of his father, Drole De Felix is in essence a rite of passage. Dutifully structuring the film around life lessons learned through encounters on the road, the directors’ episodic story provides Felix with a kind of family in dribs and drabs. But though the film’s tone is generally cosy, it also incorporates the risque and the political. Filmhouse, Edinburgh. The Emperor And The Assassin (12) *** (Chen Kaige, China, 2000) Gong Li, Zhang Fengyi, Li Xuejian. 161 mins. After their collaboration on the gangster melodrama Temptress Moon, Kaige and Li, both superstars of contemporary Chinese cinema, reunite for this ambitious, epic period drama about China's first emperor, reputedly the most expensive Asian film ever made. The film is packed with stunning images and interesting ideas, but aiming at both epic spectacle and psychological complexity, Chen hits the former more surely than the latter. Selected release. Extreme Screen (U) tint 40 mins each. Although the lwerks experience impresses on a technical level, neither of these films transcend entertainment as lumbering fairground attraction. Everest is a dry-as- sand account of a recent expedition up the big yin. Filmed in the style of a Sunday afternoon docudrama, it also has the dubious honour of rendering a remarkable adventure mundane. A much better bet is the visually wondrous The Living Sea, an ‘edutaining' look at mankind's relationship with the sea (with voice-over from Meryl Streep). UGC Cinemas, Edinburgh. Fantasia 2000 (U) iii (Various, US, 2000) Voices of Steve Martin, Bette Midler, Quincy Jones. 75 mins. When Walt Disney first came up with the idea of turning classical music pops into an animated pot pourri, he originally envisioned that Fantasia would continue to be renewed by additional material. Sixty years on, his dream has at last came to fruition with this new collection of musical highlights. The star of the show is the one segment retained from the original, the Dukas ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ set-piece with Mickey Mouse in a pointy Wizard’s hat and lots of buckets of water. Odeon, Glasgow. For Me And My Gal (PG) *** (Busby Berkeley, US, 1942) Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy. 104 mins. Kelly‘s debut came as a relatively unlikable hoofer who joins a male/female duo, pushing them further along the road to fame. Routine plot lifted by energetic numbers. GI’I‘, Glasgow. Gods And Monsters (15) *vktt (Bill Condon, UK/US. 1998) Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave. 115 mins. Moving, lovineg crafted film following the last days of English-bom filmmaker James Whale, director of the 1931 Frankenstein. In 1957, while in retirement in Hollywood suffering from the side effects of a stroke that causes him to re-Iive episodes from his past life Whale strikes up a tentative, homoerotic friendship with his handsome gardener. Grosvenor, Glasgow. The Golden Bowl (12) *trk (James Ivory, UK/US, 2000) Nick Nolte, Kate Beckinsale, Uma Thurman, Jeremy Northam. mins. The Merchant-Ivory team's polished adaptation of Henry James's The Golden Bowl pits innocence (Nolte’s widowed American billionaire and his daughter, Beckinsale) against experience (Northam‘s impoverished Italian aristocrat Prince Amerigo and his illicit lover, Maggie's worldly friend, Thurman). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's script smooths out the leasing, irreducible ambiguity of James‘s writing. Enough remains, however, of the book's elegant convolutions of betrayal and guilt, jealousy and suspicion to make this a cut above the average frock flick. See Frontline and review. Selected release.
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