Reviews
Forces of Nature (1999)
this movie suffers from a confusion of genres & intent
'Forces of Nature' is billed as romantic comedy, or, sometimes, screwball comedy. This amounts to false advertising. While the occasional finely-tuned screwball comedy puts across real emotional development (think 'The Philadelphia story), most of them hare off into fast-talking craziness (think 'His girl Friday' or 'The Big Lebowski'), and quite rightly too. True romantic comedies, like 'Moonlighting', are usually gentler creatures and even more firmly based in fantasy. That's why we watch them.
This movie's basic problem is that it wants to discuss real issues - marriage - in the context of a romantic setup. The ending isn't a surprise, it's a cheat. Affleck & Bullock work well together and even manage a small amount of zap, not a given in movies like this, and a movie about their accidental meeting etc would be fine. So would a movie about someone struggling to cope with the demands of adulthood and marriage. But this particular blend of the two goes gooey and sticky when it should be tough. The relationships are never quite believable, especially that of Ben and his fiancee, who's clearly been watching too much 'Friends' (did she remind anyone else of Rachel?) 'Forces of Nature' dithers in both directions, tells us too much and shows us too little, and in the end literally fails to satisfy.
TwentyFourSeven (1997)
favourable
I've been waiting a while for this to reach our screens, and though anticipation undoubtedly adds flavour, I was favourably impressed. Meadows has been billed as Britain's new white hope and 'Twentyfourseven' promises good things for the future. It may not have the (attempted) dramatic scope of a film like 'the Boxer', which in plot terms it resembles, but Meadows covers the ground efficiently and without histrionics in a free-flowing cinematic style that simultaneously displays a tensile strength. Meadows' eye is good (the crane shot outside the club at a crucial point towards the end shows that he can do formal, too) but his ear is even better. The exchanges and insults between the two gangs and among themselves, even when not fully comprehended by my kiwi ear, make similar lines from 'Good Will Hunting' and other popular films sound contrived. The freshness of 'Twentyfourseven' may be supported by control and critical judgement, but it is, all the same, real.