david morrissey Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When Stephen Frears' The Queen came out in 2006, all the buzz emphasized Helen Mirren's icy performance as London's reclusive royal highness. The ubiquitous praise lead to her Oscar win, but it overwhelmed recognition of the movie's secret weapon: Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, quietly pressuring his Majesty to face the public in the wake of Princess Diana's untimely demise. There's a reason why Sheen conveyed the nuances of Blair's role in the event, which transpired a mere three months after the Prime Minister rose to power -- he had practice. The Deal, a fantastic made-for-TV movie Frears directed in 2003, tracked Blair's cunning (and morally questionable) instincts in the years leading up to his position at the top of the Labor Party.

Sheen played Blair in The Deal first, and it's both a superior performance and a superior film. Whereas The Queen had a tabloid hook and only tangentially explored the deeper political ramifications of a reclusive national leader, The Deal delves into precisely how Blair managed to emerge at the top of British politics with a series of calculated maneuvers. Political drama at its finest, The Deal hit DVD in the United States last month, where it has been touted as "the prequel to The Queen." That's not quite fair; The Queen is the sequel to The Deal, and the two movies ought to be seen as a single, wholly fascinating package depicting British politics in the 1990s.

The Next Karate Kid is no longer the embarrassing thing on Hilary Swank's resume. The Reaping is a movie that skates close to total incompetence, neither following its own rules, or seeming to care one way or the other. It focuses on the adventures of Katherine Winter, (Swank) who is something of a gymrat Amazing Randi, turning up at sites where local yokels think they've witnessed a miracle and spoon-feeding them some good old fashioned, God-hating science. When a Southern Caricature named Doug (David Morrissey) asks Amazing Hilary to come down to his town because, um, they're undergoing the ten biblical plagues down there, she doesn't snare him in a butterfly net but happily packs her bags. Let me stop here and mention that, having never seen or heard of actor David Morrissey before this film, I wrote in my notes: "If this guy is Southern, why the English accent?" When I got home, I looked up Morrissey's IMDB page and saw that he was, in fact, English. That's how much The Reaping cares about its details.

Once arrived in Mississippi Burningville, Swank and her overtly-religious partner, played by Idris Elba, begin to take notice of a local family that is being shunned by polite society because of a hazy perception that they are devil-worshippers, and have caused the local river to turn red. The little girl of the family, Loren (AnnaSophia Robb) is so feared by the local rubes, in fact, that at one point they are ready to set off in pickups to kill her. Swank and Co. must set about rowing through the river, colored a convincing shade of red through impressive special effects, in order to determine the scientific reason for the discoloration and calm down the God-fearing populace. At one point a few frogs also plop down from the sky into the river, but I couldn't figure out if that was supposed to count as a separate plague or the same one. And by the way, if a biblical plague is town-specific, which it apparently is, can't you just move one town over?

Released in 1992, the first Basic Instinct was a glossy, disposable piece of erotic-thriller trash that combined sex, death and stupidity. San Francisco cop Michael Douglas had to figure out if bad-girl novelist Sharon Stone was next in line for a killer's wrath – or if she was dispensing it. Directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by then-hot screenwriter Joe Eszterhaz, Basic Instinct was pilloried by gay and lesbian activists and roundly mocked by critics; it also made a not-unhealthy $117 million in the US alone. …

So, 14 years later, we get a sequel, which has the stupidity and comes short on the sex and death. Stone is back, but not Douglas; director Verhoeven has been replaced by Michael Caton-Jones (The Jackal, Rob Roy) and the script is not from Esterhaz but from the husband-and-wife duo of Leora Barish and Henry Bean. The action's moved from San Francisco, as well; Basic Instinct 2 starts in the streets of London, where Stone's Catherine Tramell is racing through the streets with footballer Kevin Franks (Stan Collymore) in the passenger seat, his hands all over what can be only called 'the swimsuit area,' when the car goes off the road and into the Thames. You might say the movie goes with them.