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Somewhat at cross-purposes, The Brave One sta! rs Jodie Foster in a shattering performance as Erica Bain, a p! opular e ssayist on a public radio station in New York. In love and engaged to David (Naveen Andrews), a doctor, Erica and her fiancé are brutally attacked one night by a gang of thugs. David is killed but Erica survives, only to find herself a stranger in her own skin, facing down her fears by shooting violent criminals.
With the city riveted by her anonymous actions, Erica becomes an object of curiosity for a police detective (an excellent Terrence Howard) disillusioned by his own struggles to protect the innocent from truly evil men. Jordan's previous films (The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto) resonate with The Brave One's most interesting angle, i.e., that each of us possesses a hidden element in our identities that comes out in extreme circumstances, making us wonder who we really are. It's all excellent food for thought, but the film squanders much of its significance by thrusting Erica into numerous, outlandish situations in which her only alternative! is to put a bullet in a bad guy. The result is a smart film tediously structured like a disposable B movie. --Tom Keogh
In his second directorial effort (following the 2000 biopic Pollock), Harris takes his cue from novelist Parker's often deadpan-comic touch, allowing action and character to accumulate in accordance with an overall eccentric rhythm. (The film's main disappointment is that it would benefit from more running time to allow things to stew a bit longer, especially in the second half.) The character work is choice, from the moment Tom Bower, James Gammon, and Timothy Spall step into view as Appaloosa's civic leaders; the director's father Bob Harris contributes a cameo as a mellifluous-tongued circuit judge, and an age-thickened Lance Henriksen turns up midfilm as gunman Ring Shelton, trailing affability and menace. In collaboration with Dances With Wolves cameraman Dean Semler, Harris sets up shots an! d scenes in such a way that we often see into and out of Appaloosa's various buildings simultaneously, to excellent dramatic and atmospheric effect, and there's a thrillingly vertical dynamics to a scene involving a train at an isolated water stop. The action is lethal when it needs to be, but never dwelt upon. "That was over quick," Hitch observes after one gun battle. Cole's response says it all: "Everybody could shoot." --Richard T. Jameson
A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.Michael Ondaatjeâs Booker Prizeâ"winning best sel! ler lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives i! n a bomb -riddled Italian villa in the last days of the war. Hana, the grieving nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the emotionally detached Indian sapper, Kipâ"each is haunted in different ways by the riddle of the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies swathed in bandages in an upstairs room. It is this manâs incandescent memoriesâ"of the bleak North African desert, of explorersâ caves and Bedouin tribesmen,
of forbidden love, and of annihilating angerâ"that illuminate the story, and the consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate outward in shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed.With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless,! burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.
From the Hardcover edition.Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.
A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje.! The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Li! on, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.
From the Hardcover edition.This is an excellent guide to Michael Ondaatjeâs best-loved novel. It features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, a comparison of the novel to the film, and a great deal more. If youâre ! studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, youâll find this guide informative and helpful. This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years â" from âThe Remains of the Dayâ to âWhite Teethâ. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.Winner of 9 Academy Awards® including Best Picture, Best Director (Anthony Minghella) and Best Supporting Actress (Juliette Binoche), THE ENGLISH PATIENT is a "fiercly romantic" (THE NEW YORK TIMES) epic where love knows no boundaries. During World War II, a mysterious stranger (Ralph Fiennes) is cared for by British allies unaware of his dangerous past. Yet, as the mystery! of his identity is revealed, an incredible tale of passion, i! ntrigue and adventure unfolds. Also starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth and Willem Dafoe, this powerful motion picture is an experience you will never forget.1. English Patient 2. A Retreat 3. Rupert Bear 4. What Else Do You Love? 5. Why Picton? 6. Cheek to Cheek 7. Kip's Lights 8. Hana's Curse 9. I'll Always Go Back to That Churc 10. Black Nights 11. Swoon, I'll Catch You 12. Am I K. In Your Book? 13. Let Me Come In 14. Wang Wang Blues 15. Convento Di Sant'anna 16. Herodotus 17. Muzsikás-Szerelem, Szerelem 18. Ask Your Saint Who He's Killed 19. One O'Clock Jump 20. I'll Be Back 21. Let Me Tell You About Winds 22. Read Me to Sleep 23. The Cave of Swimmers 24. Where or When 25. Aria 26. Cheek to Cheek 27. As Far as Florence 28. En Csak Azt Csodálom
THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
No matter the format, Stephen King's work is spellbinding because the author himself is spellbound. The first hugely popular writer of the TV generation, King published his first novel, Carrie, in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam. Images from that war -- and protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for nearly ten years. In Hearts in Altantis, King mesmerizes readers with fiction deeply rooted in the Sixties! , and explores -- through four defining decades -- the haunting legacy of the Vietmnam War.
As the characters in Hearts in Atlantis are tested in every way, King probes and unlocks the secrets of his generation for us all. Full of danger, full of suspense, and most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been able to leave completely.With his idiosyncratic blend of patrician airs and boyish charm, narrator William Hurt provides a wonderful complement to this wildly imaginative collection of short stories by author Stephen King. Hurt carefully weaves the disparate elements into a cohesive whole, embracing the subtle complexities of each character; one moment a wizened sadness leaks into his voice as a haunted old man, pursued by demons, asks his 11-year-old lookout, "You know everyone on this street, on this block of this street anyway? And you'd know strangers? Sojourners? Faces of those unkno! wn?" Then, in a profound yet almost imperceptible switch, he ! exposes the boy's naive enthusiasm, "I think so." Right about here your neck hairs will stand at attention. Hurt's peculiar vocal style is in perfect pitch to King's dark, surreal vision of growing up amid the monsters of post-Vietnam America. (Running time: 21 hours, 20 CDs) --George Laney Bobby befriends a new lodger in the boarding house where he lives and learns that he has strange powers and is being hunted by people called the lowmen.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 3-FEB-2004
Media Type: DVDFans of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption will feel a similar affection for Hearts in Atlantis, a Stephen King adaptation that again finds the horror writer in more mainstream waters, with a bit of dabbling in the supernatural. When mysterious out-of-towner Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins) moves into the boarding house that 11-year-old Bobby Garfield (Anton Yelchin) shares with his self-i! nvolved mother (Hope Davis), Bobby jumps at the chance to befriend an adult who talks to him straightforwardly. Ted enlists Bobby to read him the newspaper daily--and to keep an eye out for the "low men" bent on capturing Ted, who possesses a strange mind-reading power. Hopkins is in fine form, ably matched by the phenomenal young Yelchin, but director Scott Hicks (Shine) more often than not flattens out the dramatic arcs of the story, despite all the intriguing turns the film takes. Thankfully, though, the schmaltz factor is kept to a minimum, making Hearts in Atlantis a heartfelt coming-of-age drama. --Mark Englehart
Beyond Hitman
| Hitman Video Games | Hitman Books and Game Guides | More from Timothy Olyphant |
**In t! he Crosshairs Featurette **Digital Hits Featurette **Instruments of Destruction Featurette **Para-Ordnance P18.9 Featurette **Blaser R93 LRS2 Featurette **M16 Featurette **FN F2000 Featurette **Micro Uzi Featurette **M240 Featurette **Settling the Score Featurette
**Deleted Scenes - Ovie's Pool Scene, Hospital Scene, A Different Train Platform, Udre's Death
**Alternate Ending **Gag Reel
Disc 2: Digital Copy **Portable Digital Copy of HitmanItâs hard not to feel like one has entered a certain dimension of video-game logic while watching Hitman, a lightly enjoyable action-suspense movie indeed based on a popular and bloody game about a mysterious hired gun with a bar-code tattoo on his bald head and a number (47) in lieu of a name. Living like a chaste monk while slipping past borders to kill his targets, 47 (Timothy Olyphant of Deadwood) moves like a determined shark and speaks softly to his contact at the enigmatic "the Organization," which rais! es cast-off children to become well-paid assassins. Fruitlessl! y pursue d by an Interpol cop (Dougray Scott) who can never get sovereign governments to cooperate, 47 has no trouble slipping in and out of countries to ply his trade. Until, that is, heâs set up to take a fall in Russia by shooting a national leader who is promptly replaced by a lookalike double. Suddenly on the run, 47 has to retrace his steps and formulate a lethal plan for extricating himself from a trap. Caught in the chaos is the lovely Nika (Olga Kurylenko), forced into sex slavery by 47âs new enemies and the one person who seems uniquely qualified to break through 47âs many personal barriers. Directed by Franceâs Xavier Gens, Hitman features loads of bloody mayhem and unabashed moments of pulp absurdity, such as a scene in which 47 and three other Organization killers agree to fight one another respectfully, then proceed to pulverize each other with swords and fists. As fodder for gamers, however, Hitman is packed with visuals and dramatic moments that ! seem so odd on the big screen until one realizes they are basically placemarkers for the video-game edition. --Tom Keogh
Beyond Hitman
| Hitman Video Games | Hitman Books and Game Guides | More Action and Adventure on Blu-ray |
Also on the disc
The extended Killer Cut is 106 minutes compared to 97 for the theatrical cut, and it's hard to imagine choosing to watch the theatrical cut if you have a choice. In addition to some more of Amanda Righetti and of Jason, the extra nine minutes is mostly more gore in the gory scenes and more sex in the sexy scenes. If you're squeamish you might not want those things, but if you're that squeamish you probably don't want to watch Friday the 13th in the first place, right? Th! e longer cut will give you more of the stuff that you probably watch this movie for. There's also an 11-minute featurette on the new movie and three deleted scenes (a different version of Jason getting his mask, the police response to the phone call, and a revised climax). --David Horiuchi
Chaos ensues at the luxury hotel where the junket is scheduled, and America's Sweethearts pokes easy fun at the cynical machinery that keeps Hollywood running. Quotable quips are delivered in abundance, and while Zeta-Jones is readily convincing as a bitchy narcissist, Roberts effortlessly steals the show with her trademark charms. All of which makes America's Sweethearts lightly entertaining, even though it never rises (like Roberts's earlier Notting Hill) to the level of classic romantic comedy, hampered by a script that too often substitutes easy laughs for ripe satirical invention, flashing a phony grin when it should be baring its fangs. --J! eff Shannon
A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her ! best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so f! amiliar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above! me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America! , the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilb! erSt aring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Setheâs new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never ! named, thought of only as Beloved.
A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a ! device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was ! taken o ut, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her mem! ories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber
