Halliwell's Film & Video Guide 2003 [antikvár]

Introduction Welcome to a new edition of Halliwell's Film and Video Guide, now in its 25th year. When the Guide first appeared, Sylvester Stallone was flexing his muscles as the biggest box-office attraction. Vying with him in popularity were Barbra Streisand, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Robert Redford, while Tom Berenger, Tovah Feldshuh, William Katt and Meryl Streep were being tipped as the up-and-coming names. It was also the time of Woody Allen's best film, Annie Hall, which dominated the 1977 Oscars, and - a foretaste of what the future had in store - of George Lucas's Star Wars. The Guide, together with its companion volume, Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies, has tracked the great and forgettable films over those years, together with the waxing and waning of careers. It also provides an informed and detailed account of the earlier decades of cinematic endeavour, so that more than a hundred years of film history can be found in its pages. The Guide has grown during its lifetime of a quarter of a century. The first edition proclaimed that it contained '8000 reviews of English-language films', and you would have looked in vain for any mention of videos. Now it details nearly three times as many movies, including films from Africa, Austria, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Iran, Japan, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, and virtually every other movie-making country, alongside more familiar American and British releases. DVD and video availability and soundtrack albums on CD are now also noted, together with comprehensive information on cast and crew. The changes in movie-going since the 1970s haven't been fundamental, even if Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts are the names now attracting audiences to the multiplexes. Then, as now, the studios were making overblown thrillers (Black Sunday), supernatural mumbo-jumbo (Exorcist II: The Heretic), portentous horror (The Demon Seed), dim-witted sequels (Airport 77) and grandiose biopics (MacArthur). Certainly, Hollywood hasn't grown any more mature in its tastes. Indeed, of late, it has become more infantile. George Lucas's title for his latest Star Wars epic, Attack of the Clones, sums up the studios' approach as they serve up again this year what succeeded at the box office last year. They have become more reliant on video games, comic books and moribund, childish cartoons as a source of inspiration. They invest in 'franchises', a word once only used for fast-food outlets but now applied to movies whose formula can be endlessly and profitably repeated. In the past, movie series were cheap and cheerful fodder for a Saturday afternoon. Now, they are the biggest movies, the ones that cost a fortune to make. We can no doubt expect to be watching X-Men and Spider-Man movies for the foreseeable future, unless The Incredible Hulk outdoes them at the box office. The nadir, or maybe the epitome, of this approach to filmmaking has been Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, a movie so deliberately lacking in narrative content and coherence that you could wander slowly out of the auditorium to take time to refill your popcorn without losing the plot or missing anything of significance. While Hollywood indulged in a second childhood, Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring showed that it is still possible to make a fantastic film with a sense of urgency and morality It was also cheering to be able to enjoy the maverick talent of Robert Altman, with his elegant dissection of English society in Gosford Park, aided by Julian Fellowes's deft and deadly screenplay; the continuing excellence of the Coen brothers with The Man Who Wasn't There; Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, a movie based on an intelligent comic book; the exuberance of Alfonso Cuaron's Mexican road movie Y Tu Mamá También; Nanni Moretti's moving account of loss, The Son's Room; and Fred Schepisi's elegiac Last Orders, with immaculate ensemble performances from some of the best British actors. Here's to the next 25 years! I'm grateful to the readers, too numerous to mention, who have written to me with suggestions and criticisms. I owe thanks to the editorial skills of Val Hudson and Monica Chakraverty, and to the technical expertise of Graham Bell and Alan Trewartha at HarperCollins; to the support of my agents Rivers Scott and Gloria Ferris; and great gratitude to my wife Barbara, who endures incessant talk of auteurs with a laugh and a just a touch of hauteur. John Walker