ORBzine Movie Reviews February 2001
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Family Man
Nicholas Cage stars as a man who left his girlfriend [
Tea Leoni
] to take a job in London. As a result, he became rich and successful.
But one day he discovers what would have happened to him if he had married
Leoni and become a lower-middle-class loser instead.
This film is basically another version of It's a Wonderful Life, with shades of that Harrison Ford film where he plays a high-powered lawyer who becomes a nicer person after getting permanent brain-damage. The moral seems to be that the more bad things happen to Cage - he loses his job, his life, everything - the better a person he becomes.
Dude, Where's My Car?
This has taken off after a plethora of American teen films.
The story concerns a couple of dope-smoking teenagers,
one of whom was Stiffler in American Pie
and the other is in That 70s Show.
They wake up with absolutely no recollection of the night before,
and spend their day attempting to reconstruct those events.
The result is vaguely reminiscent of the Bill & Ted films,
although the leads are more sympathetic.
It seems that the writers became more and more desperate to think of outrageous things to befall the protagonists, and thus decided to introduce Sci-Fi elements into the mixture. Not only do they have to locate the car and a suitcase filled with stolen money, they also have to find an artefact left by aliens and return it to its rightful owners or the world will be destroyed.
It's silly, but it's fun. There is little more to be said about it.
What Women Want
This is set in the offices of an Advertising agency.
Mel Gibson plays an old-fashioned Male Chauvinist Pig who is passed over for
promotion in favour of
Helen Hunt
. Alan Alda, not seen since Murder at 1600, pops up as their boss.
Hunt orders her team of executives to familiarise themselves with a new set of feminine beauty products they have been employed to promote. In an out-of-place slapstick scene Gibson dresses up in the female kit and then electrocutes himself. When he recovers he finds he has the ability to read womens' minds. At first he thinks this is a curse, but later he finds it a blessing in disguise.
Gibson reads Hunt's mind and takes her ideas in order to impress her and make himself look good. He also uses it to ingratiate himself with her socially. Why he wants to do this is something of a mystery. Hunt's character has no spine and no grasp of the concept of office politics. She starts out as a bitch who gets everywhere by trampling over others, but feels it's unfair when it happens to her!
Rocky & Bullwinkle
FBI boss Randy Quaid sends Coyote Ugly star
Piper Perabo
on a mission to recruit 1960s cartoon stars Rocky the Flying Squirrel and
Bullwinkle the Moose.
Meanwhile, the Evil Leader [Robert De Niro] plots to dominate the USA by broadcasting literally mind-numbing television programmes. He sends his henchmen Boris and Natasha [Jason Alexander and Rene Russo ] to stop them.
Jason Alexander, best known as a Seinfeld buddy, needs the money. Rene Russo, on the other hand, was a movie star in quite recent major films. There are a number of star cameos. John Goodman plays a cop, Whoopee Goldberg is a Judge and Janeanne Garofolo is a TV executive.
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