This week's premieres
photo: Tatrafilm
The School of Rock (Škola rocku) - Comedy by Richard Linklater. The eclectic Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life), who dabbles in experimentalism as well as mainstream Hollywoodism, revisits the latter with The School of Rock. Jack Black (High Fidelity, Shallow Hal) stars as a rock musician kicked out of his band on the eve of a Battle of the Bands competition. In debt and anxious to prove his ex-bandmates wrong, he takes a job as a substitute teacher at a conservative private elementary school. Unbeknownst to the faculty and parents, he and his students form a rock band that aims to win the competition. With Linklater at the helm, it is likely that Black finally has a starring role to match his manic talent.
Scary Movie 3- Comedy by David Zucker. Veteran spoof filmmaker Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun) takes over the Scary Movie franchise from Keenen Ivory Wayans. Once again, its purpose is to make fun of as many contemporary movies as possible. It attacks its major targets of The Ring, Signs, 8 Mile, and The Matrix with a large cast of the talented (Queen Latifah, Leslie Nielsen), the untalented (Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy), and the questionably talented (Charlie Sheen). Expect lots of pointless celebrity cameos and what the Motion Picture Association of America calls "pervasive crude and sexual humour".
photo: Itafilm
The Rundown (Vitajte v džungli) - Action adventure by Peter Berg. The plot sounds boring: A bounty hunter goes into the Brazilian rainforest to retrieve a wealthy businessman's son, but things become complicated when a precious, highly sought after statue comes into the picture. It is the improbable cast that makes this one seem interesting: former pro wrestler The Rock, Rosario Dawson (The 25th Hour), Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting), and the incomparable Christopher Walken.
The Rules of Attraction (Pravidlá vášne) - Comedy/Drama by Roger Avary. After the film version of Bret Easton Ellis' extremely controversial novel American Psycho, about a homicidal Wall Street broker in the 1980s, became a cult hit, perhaps it seemed safer to adapt one of his earlier novels for the screen. And so comes The Rules of Attraction, which details the sexual exploits of a drug dealer and the young people of varying degrees of corruptness that surround him at a small, elite US college. James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame leads a cast of pretty young people.
Other movies playing
The Last Samurai (Posledný samuraj) - Action/Drama by Edward Zwick. Nominated for four Academy Awards, most notably a Best Supporting Actor nod for popular Japanese actor Ken Watanabe. Tom Cruise plays Captain Nathan Algren, a hero of the American Civil War enlisted by the Japanese government to train its troops in modern warfare to rid the country of its samurai. But after being taken prisoner by the samurai, Algren begins to understand and appreciate the very culture he was hired to eradicate.
Prepared by Jonathan Knapp
