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- The Observer,
- Sunday January 9 2000
Ten Things I Hate About You (1999, 15, Buena Vista, VHS/Rental, DVD/Retail)
From Ford's The Quiet Man to Kiss Me Kate there have been many screen variations on The Taming of the Shrew , as well as several straight versions. None has been cleverer or funnier than Gil Junger's transposition of Shakespeare's sex-war comedy to Padua High School in Seattle, where the Stratford sisters, Bianca and Katarina, are respectively a beautiful conformist sophomore and an aggressive feminist senior who reads Plath and the Brontës, plays a mean game of soccer and despises boys. This clever movie sends up the high school genre and respects its source. As the school's black Eng Lit teacher says: 'Shakespeare was a dead white guy but he knows his shit.'
Basket Case (1981, Tartan, VHS,Rental/Retail)
Frank Henenlotter's low-budget schlock-horror flick got caught up in the 'video nasties' scandal of the early Eighties and now appears on the Tartan Terror cult label. After a mysterious upstate New York killing, an innocent country boy moves into a sleazy hotel near Times Square clutching a wicker basket that contains Belial, the lad's homicidal Siamese twin. The pair are seeking bloody revenge on the trio of doctors who separated them. The movie strives for a kind of comic badness that Ed Wood achieved effortlessly.
Rogue Trader (1999, 15, Fox Pathé, VHS/Rental)
Writer-director James Dearden (working with co-producer Sir David Frost, the first film-maker since Sir C. Aubrey Smith to use his knighthood in the credits) adds little to what we already know about Nick Leeson. The ubiquitous Ewan McGregor impersonates the over-reaching son of a Watford plasterer whose inept dealings in the Far East destroyed Barings Bank, one of the City's most patrician institutions.
Always watchable, never revealing, the film desperately needed a Bertolt Brecht, a Francesco Rosi or a David Hare to explore its implications. Anna Friel is given nothing to bite on as Lisa Leeson.
Titanic Town (1998, 15, Alliance Atlantis, VHS, Retail)
Roger Michell's spirited tragi-comedy (adapted by playwright Anne Devlin from a novel by Mary Costello, the daughter of an early Ulster peace campaigner) gives Julie Walters one of her best screen roles. Walters plays a tough-minded Belfast housewife in Catholic Andersonstown in 1972 attempting with little success to introduce common sense into the conflict between bigots, bureaucrats and paramilitaries. She's neither idealised nor patronised, and of course she fails, but the film is packed with incident, dark humour, humanity and flickering hope.
