items tagged with Alastair Fothergill

THE LUCKY ONE

Every time I leave a movie version of some Nicholas Sparks novel, I’m relieved if it’s not, thus far, the worst movie version of some Nicholas Sparks novel. It’s to The Lucky One’s good fortune, then, that 2008’s Nights in Rodanthe still scrapes the bottom of that particular barrel, because otherwise we might’ve had a new champion.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

After his where’s-my-paycheck? turn in The Green Hornet, I was mildly concerned that, following his Oscar-winning Inglourious Basterds portrayal, Christoph Waltz might be resigned to a career of forever playing Euro-trashy über-villains in Hollywood action dreck. With director Francis Lawrence’s Water for Elephants, though – a Depression-era romance based on Sara Gruen’s beloved novel – my fears have proved unfounded. As the egomaniacal, possibly sociopathic owner and ringleader of a second-tier traveling circus, enraged by the blossoming affections between his star-performer wife (Reese Witherspoon) and the troupe’s young veterinarian (Robert Pattinson), Waltz is every bit as mesmerizing – charming, unpredictable, terrifying – as he was in Quentin Tarantino’s World War II opus. Yet fantastic though he is, Waltz’s talents here aren’t a shock. The bigger surprise is that the movie itself is so bloody marvelous.