RECORDED DELIVERY
A critical guide to the week's videos
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Your support makes all the difference.Looking For Richard (12) Fox, rental, 18 Aug. Having enlisted the help of a notable bunch of pals - Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder and Kevin Spacey - a bearded and baseball-capped Al Pacino (above) sets out, camera in hand, to make Richard III accessible to the masses . The resulting home-movie-cum-documentary is surprisingly good. He entertainingly harangues unsuspecting passers-by on the streets of New York and exposes their ignorance, thereby justifying his contention that people don't understand Shakespeare, and crosses the ocean to drink in the atmosphere of the Globe Theatre and talk to the pros. Sir John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh and Vanessa Redgrave are among those wheeled out to extol Shakespeare's virtues. We are invited to eavesdrop as the cast grapple with the text and we watch excerpts from the compelling
final performance. Sadly, there is so much musing on the cultural differences between England and America and the merits of the iambic pentameter, that the thimbleful of scenes from their performance prove rather unsatisfactory.
Mars Attacks (12) Warner, rental, 22 Aug. Plastic ray guns, green slime and conical breasts abound in Tim Burton's riotous sci-fi schlock-fest, where earth-shattering extra-terrestrials wreak havoc at the White House. The film has an impressive cast - a decapitated but still charming Pierce Brosnan, Jack Nicholson as the bungling president and Tom Jones as Tom Jones. It's all good ineties satire, but the true irony is that it cost Tim Burton the earth to hire a bunch of high-falutin' actors to give wooden performances and several more planets to computer- generate plastic-looking aliens.
I Shot Andy Warhol (18) BMG, rental, 20 Aug. Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor) is the complex subject of Mary Harron's first film. Author of the man-hating diatribe, the SCUM manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men), Solanas's disappointment at not being taken seriously led her to shoot Andy Warhol. Bitchy scenes from the Warhol factory are highly entertaining, but Solanas's perpetual ranting commands little sympathy.
Fiona Sturges
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