It’s a Pity They’re Not More Witty
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Humor is easy to appreciate but hard to achieve. It is also not easily translated from one artistic medium to another. Actor-director Stephen Fry has turned Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, “Vile Bodies,” into the movie “Bright Young Things.” Aside from giving the material a more euphonious title, Mr. Fry, in his directorial debut, has done little to justify his adaptation of this wondrously droll depiction of England’s effete jazz-age set.
The director does muster a consistently rich mise-en-scene, thanks to production designer Michael Howells and cinematographer Henry Braham, whose work is both gauzy and sharply etched. And the cast can’t help but raise eyebrows – and expectations – spanning as it does a good half century of English acting. What was the last film to marshal the likes of John Mills, Peter O’Toole, Margaret Tyzack, Bill Paterson, Simon Callow, Julia McKenzie, Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant, and Emily Mortimer?
Yet what Waugh manages so economically on the page, Mr. Fry cannot make gossamer in his script. First our hero, Adam Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore), and his beloved Nina (Ms. Mortimer), are engaged, then they aren’t, then they are, then they aren’t, and so on. In between come all those gay parties, broken up by teas and lavish lunches and jaunts to the country. If Mr. Fry’s only goal was to point out the emptiness of it all, he certainly went the long way about it.
The young men who fairly dominate the picture don’t help matters. They’re able enough, but it is a bother distinguishing between one thin, pale, bumbling Englishman and another. Mr. Moore is especially wan, and it’s hard to root for him to win Ms. Mortimer’s beautiful hand.
The movie winds up dominated by Mr. O’Toole and Fenella Woolgar, two shameless hams with a pitch-perfect sense of what Waugh requires. Mr. O’Toole plays Nina’s dotty pater with sovereign comic abandon, offering his most indelible work since playing the louche Alan Swann in “My Favorite Year” (1982). Ms. Woolgar – equal parts Penelope Wilton and Patricia Hodge – is new to films. The camera loves her, though, and she lends Agatha Runcible addled hauteur and only barely suppressed fear, making her the movie’s most sympathetic character.
Waugh might have liked that, but it is hardly what Mr. Fry intended.
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The law of unintended consequences is vigorously argued for in “Nicotina,” a supremely amusing caper picture whose entertainment value is undiminished by its graphic violence. Like a tighter “Pulp Fiction” set in Mexico City instead of L.A., Hugo Rodriguez’s film weaves together several story lines to produce a cohesive whole that is more than the sum of its considerably compelling, and often very funny, parts.
Lola (Diego Luna of “Y tu mama tambien” fame) is a young computer geek who seems to have prospered in real estate. He’s mad for Andrea (Marta Belaustegui), a gorgeous cellist who lives in his building but barely knows he exists. She also doesn’t know that he’s installed cameras and bugging devices throughout her apartment. Nene (Lucas Crespi),a young friend of Lola’s, wants him to hack into some Swiss bank accounts. In return for the information Lola downloads, Nene and his partner, the tough but caring Tomson (Jesus Ochoa), will acquire a substantial cache of diamonds, some of which will go to Lola, who vainly hopes that vast riches will finally lure Andrea.
But the diamonds-for-information exchange with the burly Svoboda (Norman Sotolongo) doesn’t go as planned. Guns are fired; people get wounded. A slow-speed chase on foot ends up involving not just the criminals, but two sets of small-business owners. Needless to say, morality, compassion, and just plain decency are jettisoned the moment anyone in this movie hears about those diamonds.
Wagging a finger at greed is a cinematic convention. And Mr. Rodriguez and screenwriter Martin Salinas don’t say anything that John Houston (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and Stanley Kramer (“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”) haven’t said before. But the film is very well made, the suspense heightened by editor Alberto de Toro’s rapid-fire crosscutting. The finishing touch is musical, with Fernando Corona’s original score mixing perfectly with Mexican pop standards from the 1950s and 1960s.