Bedazzled (2000 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
Bedazzled

Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley
Directed by Harold Ramis
Produced by Trevor Albert
Harold Ramis
Starring Brendan Fraser
Elizabeth Hurley
Frances O'Connor
Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Release date(s) October 20, 2000 (U.S. release)
Running time 93 minutes
Language English
Budget $48,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

Bedazzled is a 2000 motion picture, and is a remake of the original Bedazzled (1967) originally written by Peter Cook. It was directed by Harold Ramis and stars Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Elliot Richards (Brendan Fraser) works a dead-end job in a call-center in San Francisco and has no real friends. He has a crush on his colleague, Alison Gardner (Frances O'Connor), but lacks the courage to ask her out. After Elliot is ditched at a bar while trying to talk to Alison, he makes a wish that Alison was his. The Devil (Elizabeth Hurley) hears this wish and offers Elliot a contract. She will give Elliot seven wishes, and in return Elliot will surrender the Devil his soul.

As might be expected of a bargain with Satan, there is a catch to the deal. No matter what Elliot asks for himself, the Devil grants his wish in such a way that he is invariably unhappy with the result:

  • As a test wish, he wishes for a McDonalds Big Mac and a Coke. The devil takes him to McDonalds and places the order on his behalf. Elliot has to pay for it, because he had not wished for the food to be free.
  • He wishes to be rich and powerful, with Alison as his wife. The Devil makes him a Colombian cocaine manufacturer whose wife despises him and is having an affair with her language tutor, and whose business partners are about to double-cross and murder him.
  • He wishes to be emotionally sensitive; the Devil makes him so sensitive he spends much of his time crying at how beautiful the world is. Alison then decides to walk off with some bullies who have insulted Elliot and who "just want to get into her pants".
  • He wishes to be a superstar athlete. The Devil makes him an unstoppable seven-foot-plus tall basketball star, but gives him an extremely small penis and equally small IQ (as evidenced by a highly limited vocabulary), which causes Alison to lose interest in him.
  • He wishes to be intelligent, witty and well-endowed. The Devil grants this by making him a famous writer who is actually gay and co-habiting with a male partner.

After each wish is renounced (by dialling '666' on a pager), Elliot returns for a meeting with the Devil in which she blames him for not being specific enough in his desires and prompts him to try again. These meetings take place in a variety of locations, with the Devil each time in a different role in which she carries out a variety of everyday evil acts - dismissing a class full of students from their lesson without any homework other than to remember not take any interest in being educated, swapping the medication on a hospital trolley for candy, forcing parking meters to expire, and writing tickets for parked cars. The roles she plays (teacher, nurse, police officer, cheerleader) can be viewed as objects of typical male sexual fantasies. In one of the deleted scenes she also wears a French maid outfit.

Eventually he goes back to work, taking time to think on what would be best to do with the two last wishes. The devil points out that on their first meeting he asked for a Big Mac and Coke. This counts against his total, leaving just one wish remaining.

Then he goes to a church looking for God's help, where he briefly confesses to a priest who's willing to help. Just as soon as he's finished, he's seen being taken out of the church by cops. The officer decides to book him, and the Devil is now dressed and acting as the cop who gets to take him to jail. That's where he meets a mysterious stranger who tells him that he cannot possibly sell his soul as it belongs to God rather than him - The stranger is God. Elliot returns to the Devil and asks her to cancel their contract. When the Devil refuses, Elliot states that he will not use up his final wish. However, there is also an expirary date for the wishes, and The Devil angrily teleports both Elliot and herself to her domain, Hell, where she transforms, first into a black horned monster, then into an enormous giantess, who is much bigger than the terrified Elliot in comparison. When the Devil pushes him to make a final wish, Elliot blurts out that he wishes that Alison could have a happy life. With this the Devil grudgingly admits that by the terms of his contract a selfless wish voids the entire deal, and sends him away.

Before they part ways Elliott admits that despite her manipulation of him he has come to like the Devil and regards her as a friend, something she does not object to. She simply says that the classic battle of God versus the Devil is a sham, and in the end, Heaven and Hell can be found on Earth. It's up to the humans to choose. This implies that the Devil may simply just be another agent of God, sent to tempt humans, but otherwise just another servant of Him. This is further reinforced when she is seen playing a friendly game of chess with God. (In spite of the fact that while his back is turned she attempts to alter the pieces)

Elliot finally approaches Alison directly and asks her out, only to find that she is involved with somebody. He accepts this with good grace and continues with his life, soon meeting a new neighbour, Nicole De La Russo (also played by Frances O'Connor), with whom he enters a relationship.

[edit] Main cast

[edit] Trivia

  • The Devil claims that, on November 16, she will have held her job for six thousand years. This is a reference to Archbishop James Ussher, who used a literal interpretation of the Bible to calculate that the world was created on Sunday 23 October 4004 B.C.
  • During the beach scene in the "sensitive" wish, the Devil is shown walking two dogs named "Peter" and "Dudley" - a reference to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the stars of the original Bedazzled.
  • During the bedroom scene in the "intellectual" wish, a reference is made to The Pajama Game, which was directed by Stanley Donen, the director of the original Bedazzled.
  • During the wish when he was President Lincoln, Eliot says he has already seen the play, but someone responds that it is a new play. However, the play, Our American Cousin was actually seven years old at the time of Lincoln's death.
  • When the Devil is erasing the assignments for the class, the first assignment erased is to prove xn + yn = zn where n > 2. That appears to be a reference, albeit incomplete, to Fermat's Last Theorem, which posits that this expression has no non-zero integer solutions for {x,y,z} when n is itself an integer. While it was proved correct by Andrew Wiles, the proof is thousands of pages long, and the problem was for centuries a consuming, mythically unconquerable challenge for mathematicians. This is, perhaps, an oblique reference to purgatory.
  • Although Eliot is supposed to be a Colombian drug dealer in his second wish he and the characters around him speak with a Spanish, rather than Colombian accent. They also speak using a mix of grammar used mainly in Spain and Argentina.
  • According to the special features on the DVD release, Elizabeth Hurley provided and maintained her own costumes throughout the film.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../b/e/d/Bedazzled_%282000_film%29.html"