King of the swingers

Tarzan (U) Edgar Rice Burroughs became very rich on his 29 Tarzan novels. So rich he bought a ranch, named it Tarzana and later it grew into a town. But he was never happy with the film adaptations of his pulp hero and always wanted Walt Disney to adapt his books.

Burroughs might well have been happy with the animation studio's crack at The Lord Of The Apes, which remains pretty faithful to its source material. Shipwrecked on a tropical island, a young orphan boy is adopted by a primate family, but when humans return to the island, Tarzan must choose between man and ape. The animation is, as you might expect, quite stunning - traditional cell animation is seamlessly interwoven with CGI technology, most startlingly during the action set pieces with Tarzan swinging and hollering through the jungle.

The cast's voice-overs (Minnie Driver, Glenn Close, Nigel Hawthorne among them) do justice to their animated alter egos. It's only let down by the awful Phil Collins songs. Give me The Jungle Book, Louis Prima and The Bare Necessities anytime.

Miles Fielder Runaway Bride (PG)

AT its best, Runaway Bride rekindles memories of the battle-of- the-sexes farces of Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn. The relationship between its two leads - New York journalist Ike Graham (Richard Gere) and small-town heartbreaker Maggie (Julia Roberts) - is based on attrition, not affection. Director Garry Marshall really milks the jokes about the city slicker adrift in the sticks but at least the humour is tinged with malice and mischief.

About halfway through, Ike and Maggie begin behaving like lovestruck puppies and the comedy turns to mush. All sorts of complications must be overcome. Maggie has to jettison yet another man and Ike has to convince her to stick around for the marriage vows. The film tries to tantalize us by postponing what we know is inevitable.

Marshall conveniently forgets the small-town folks whose lives Ike and Maggie have trampled over, focusing exclusively on the two stars. Gere has a nice line in sardonic understatement while Roberts is a much more accomplished comedienne than her critics allow. But, while Runaway Bride begins as a barbed and genuinely witty satire about relationships, it ends up as yet another pat romantic comedy.

Geoffrey MacNab Felicia's Journey (12) Atom Egoyan's curious psycho-drama takes the Sweet Hereafter auteur from his native Canada and sets him down amid the smokestacks and trading estates of the British Midlands. Also in this dreamy landscape (at once humdrum familiar and weirdly off-beam) are Elaine Cassidy's pregnant Irish wanderer and Bob Hoskins' little-man psycho - a caterer haunted by the ghost of his flamboyant TV-cook mother (played in videotaped flashbacks by Arsinee Khanjian).

Egoyan works hard to bring his vision to bear on this terrain. But, despite his heroic efforts, Felicia's Journey (adapted from a William Trevor novel) still ends up awash with second-hand ingredients (a pinch of kitchen-sink and a dash of Peeping Tom). More crucially, the movie's spell gets broken by a plodding serial-killer psychology, with Hoskins' timid Oedipal wreck being little more than a roll call of sociopath cliches. The result is a weird stew of stolid social realism and lugubrious black comedy. For all its exotic textures, Felicia's Journey leaves Egoyan with egg on his face.

Xan Brooks

Copyright 1999
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