ASTRO BOY - clever but lacking wit

I can't say I'd ever heard of ASTROBOY before watching this film but apparently he is an insanely famous Manga character created by Tezuka Osamu in the 1950s. Apparently the original stories have already inspired a 1960s TV series. In that series, Astroboy started life as the young son of a famous scientist, Dr Tenma. When young Toby is killed in a car accident, Dr Tenma resurrects his memory in a robot, CAPRICA stylee. But tragically, Tenma is revolted by his creation and sells him to a vicious circus-owner called Hamegg (shades of ELEPHANT MAN) whence he is rescued by Tenma's kind-hearted boss, Ochanomizu. Tenma may occasionally help Astroboy, but he never truly accepts him.

In this new film, ASTROBOY has been yanked into our contemporary political tensions. The whole narrative takes place in a world that has been ruined by litter-bug exploitative humans (shades of WALL-E) and the elite of the world have relocated to a shiny Metro City in the clouds. Metro City is being run by a politician who wants to start a war to win an election. Rather than being killed in a car crash, Astroboy is killed when the evil politician tries to put evil red energy into a military robot. His father still rejects him, but in order to make Tenma more palatable to modern audiences, he doesn't actually sell him to the circus owner. Rather, Toby runs away, and ends up with Hamegg by chance. And Hamegg is a more equivocal character - he truly loves robots, but at the end of the day, doesn't think AI makes you worthy of human rights. (A good debate for BSG fans!)

The resulting film is pretty complex for a kids film, and like Miyazaki films, is concerned with environmental degradation and consumption run amok. It also has shades of the best science fiction, making explicit reference to Asimov. The CGI animation is interesting in its design and the voice work is particularly good. I especially liked Freddie Highmore as Astroboy, Nic Cage as Tenma, and a modulated Bill Nighy as the heart-breakingly kind Elefun. But somehow, the diffuse plotting made for a rather plodding film, especially in the middle portion where Astroboy falls to Earth and side-steps into a film that seems to be half Oliver Twist and half Gladiator. I rather missed the wit, charm and old-fashioned simplicity of David Bowers previous directorial effort, FLUSHED AWAY.

ASTRO BOY played London 2009 was released last year in the US, Canada and Asia, It is now on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - AUGUST RUSH

A deeply sentimental film that could've been dreamt up by a Barbie obsessed 11 year-old. A wannabe rock musician (Rhys Meyers) and a cellist (Russell) share a nausea-inducing night of romantic twittering and, though coyly not shown, sex. Thereafter, evil forces (her controlling dad) split them up. The resulting baby is given up for adoption without the girl's knowledge. 10 years later, he's a musically gifted, irredeemably romantic boy (Highmore), on the lam from child services, playing music on the streets with Robin Williams' modern-day Fagin. Given that this is basically a modern-day, live-action fairy-tale, you can guess the ending.

AUGUST RUSH is actually a well-made, decently-performed film, and it doesn't hurt that Highmore, Rhys-Meyers and Russell always seem emotionally in the moment even when they have to utter dialogue that will have cynics rolling their eyes. I think the key test of whether you'll enjoy the film is whether you can get through Highmore's opening dialogue without wanting to slap the screenwriter. I have to say that I found the whole thing gauche but I can imagine it appealing to some people. Given that we live in a cynical world, directors trying to pull off a cheesy love story have to face the audience's in built objections head-on. That was the secret of the success of ENCHANTED.

AUGUST RUSH was released in Winter 2007/2008. It is now available on DVD.

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES - beautifully made children's fantay film

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES is a beautifully made, well-acted, children's fantasy adventure.

A young boy, angry at his parents' separation, discovers a curious field guide to a magical world of faeries, goblins and sylphs. Problem is, an evil ogre wants to steal the book and use its collected knowledge to rule the magical world. So much for the plot. The real meat of the movie is a story about children who have to live without their fathers, and the importance of family.

The great thing about SPIDERWICK is that the wonderfully-rendered CGI effects never swamp the story. Indeed, director Mark Waters takes an admirable amount of time to establish the human story before he unleashes the magical world. I also think that the casting is spot-on, and helps us feel real empathy for the characters. Freddie Highmore pulls off playing both twins - giving each a distinctive character and voice. Sarah Bolger and Mary-Louise Parker are believable as the big sister, mature before her time, and the mother at the end of her tether. But I especially like th casting of Nick Nolte as the ogre; David Strathairn as the author of the field-guide; and Joan Plowright as his grown up daughter Lucinda. Joan Plowright has the most amazingly sympathetic, twinkling eyes, and it's a pleasure to have her back on the big screen. The voice-work is also great, with Martin Short playing a sweet little brownie called Thimbletack who morphs into the angry Bograt; and Seth Rogen as the cowardly but kind-hearted Hogsqueal.

My only reservations about this movie aren't really concerned with the film-makers but with the source material. I was never particularly convinced by the internal logic of the fantasy world. (Then again, if you have Tolkien as your benchmark, everything seems thin by comparison). Moreover, I never felt the stakes were high enough. I don't think we see enough of the fantasy world to care about it's destruction and the script didn't make it very clear whether the human world was really at risk from the ogre, beyond the family itself.

Still, these are all comparatively small quibbles that might concern adults but not the kids. THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES is sure to keep children amused (at least those who aren't so young as to be scared by a pretty mean looking ogre who can morph into a snake).

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES opened in February 2008 in the US, Canada, the Philippines and South Korea. It opened earlier in MArch in Thailand, Mexico, Poland and Finland. It opens this weekend in the Netherlands, Greece, Portugal, Singapore, Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Venezuela. It opens next weekend in Belgium, Argentina, Chile, Croatia, Germany, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Iceland, Italy, Panama, Romania, South Africa and the UK. It opens on March 26th in Egypt and in April in Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, France, Serbia and Montenegro, India and Japan.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS aka The Gutless Cop-Out

What does it say about the times we live in that writer-director Chris Weitz has no qualms in having Jason Biggs masturbate on-screen with a warm apple-pie, but doesn't have the balls to depict an atheist's response to Paradise Lost? I don't know what saddens me more: the anti-liberal tyrannical response of my own Church to this movie, or the self-censorship of a studio too timid to respect Philip Pullman's profound artistic achievement. The upshot is that THE GOLDEN COMPASS is a rather feeble film. It looks pretty enough but it lacks the intellectual bravery of the source material. As a result, the viewer has to jump through the hoops of the complicated narrative without the concommitant emotional pay-off. In fact, the bizarre decision to cut short this adaptation before we have reached the final harrowing scenes of the book makes this film a deeply unsatisfying, unengaging experience indeed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 1995, Philip Pullman published the first novel in a trilogy called His Dark Materials. It is that book - called Northern Lights in the UK and The Golden Compass in the US - that we now see brought to the screen. Pullman's trilogy is nominally a set of books for children, filled with fantasy adventure elements and set in a world that shares many characteristics with our own. A plucky young girl called Lyra Belaqua sets off for the North Pole to rescue her friend Roger from the mysterious Gobblers with the help of a truth-telling golden compass that once belonged to her guardian, an Oxford don called Lord Asriel. On the way, she escapes the clutches of the devestatingly charming Mrs Coulter and benefits from the help of a Gyptian king, a beautiful witch called Serafina Pekkala, an aeronaut called Lee Scoresby and an armoured bear called Iorek Byrnison.

The book works well as an adventure story. The "baddies" are suitably sinister, the good guys are wonderfully drawn, and we really believe in the strenth of the friendship between Lyra and Roger. But there is so much more to the story than that. In Pullman's version of the world, a tyrannical ideological Authority is stamping out free will and free thought. It is true that in the novel this Authority is explicitly religious and adopts some of the terminology of the Catholic Church. However I firmly believe that the Authority can be read as a symbol of all intellectual repression and anti-liberalism rather than any particular set of beliefs. Lyra and her guardian are thus battling for freedom and against tyranny - for truth against self- and imposed censorship.

It is, then, ironic, as well as tragic, to find this film refusing to speak plainly and to defend the intellectual freedom that Lord Asriel seeks to defend. Furthermore, having shorn the movie of its intellectual substance, Chris Weitz might at least have left us the searing emotional climax of the novel. But even here he chickens out - and leaves us with just another wishy-washy luke-warm Hollywood ending.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS is on release in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Israel, Norway, the Philippines and Spain. It opens tomorrow in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia and Singapore. It opens on Friday 7th December in Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the US. It opens the following weekend in Serbia, Argentina, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Italy. THE GOLDEN COMPASS opens in Italy, South Korea, Greece, Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia later in December and in Egypt on January 16th 2008. It opens in Japan on March 1st.

A GOOD YEAR - charming, if utterly predictable, romance

I know, I know. Movies where ruthless capitalist bastards "find themselves" in lushly photographed socialist villages are a tad predictable. A GOOD YEAR is no different, but if you're willing to accept the format, it has a lot of laughs and some good old-fashioned sappy romance. Russell Crowe camps it up in the opening act as Max, a greedy capitalist bond-trading bastard par excellence. He manipulates the market to within an inch of the law, shags around, insults his underlings and generally enjoys his Master of the Universe status. When his uncle (Albert Finney) dies and leaves him a French chateau, Max' first impulse is to sell it for a ton of money via his similarly ethically-challenged best-mate and estate agent (Tom Hollander.) There is little in life funnier that seeing Crowe drive past a bunch of French cyclists, give them the finger and shout out "Lance Amrstrong". There's also little funnier in life than seeing a banker stuck in an empty swimming pool unable to reach his blackberry.

Of course, Max is redeemed. He falls in love with a ballsy local waitress (Cotillard, unrecognisable out of her Piaf make-up.) He remembers his uncle and his own youth (Freddie Highmore). He reconciles with his illegitimate cousin (Abbie Cornish) and even his best mate softens. The highlights are the lush photography and Tom Hollander's scene-stealing role as the oleaginous agent. Of course, it's schmaltz. But superior schmaltz all the same.

A GOOD YEAR was released in autumn 2006 and is available on DVD.

ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES is so cute I can forgive it all its manifest flaws

I've read the bad reviews of ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES and I agree with everything they say. The movie borrows heavily from other films and children's stories. The plot is a bit random. Whole set-pieces happen for no other reason than, say, writer-director Luc Besson, wants to see a rastafarian character (voiced by Snoop Dogg) get the pre-teen hero get high. And of course there is that snobbish need to condemn any movie that has a connection with Madonna. The movie rips off many another tale, and features far too much ueber-hip post-modern stylings from the characters. One of the most ridiculous plot contrivances is that despite life-threatening poverty, Arthur attends an English boarding school so as to explain his upper-class English accent! There's also a disastrous parody of Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever.

But the thing is that ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES is a fun time. If you take some kids to see it, they will enjoy it and, frankly, I enjoyed it too. Certainly a lot more than the usual talking-animal US animation.

The story sees a young boy called Arthur (Freddie Highmore) who lives with his poverty-stricken grandmother (Mia Farrow) on a rural farm in 1960s America. The nasty evil Goonies-style property developers are about to seize the family farm and turn it into condos. So Arthur has to search for some rubies that his grandfather hid on the family estate in the care of some inch-high little humanoids called the Minimoys. In miniature form, the movie switches from live action to animation and Arthur has to journey into the lair of the evil M (David Bowie) and rescue his grandfather, locate the ruby and win the heart of the feisty Princess (voiced with no little skill by Madonna.)

It's not a work of genius, but you know, the Minimoys are sweet, and their world is richly imagined. Despite the plot plagiarism, ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES is actually far less formulaic than most studio-produced kids movies. So all in all, I have to give it a thumbs up.

ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES was released in Francem Belgium, France, Israel, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Iceland, Hungary, the US and Kuwait in December. It was released in Poland, Australia, China, the Philippines, Argentina, Germany and the Netherlands in January. It is currently on release in Italy, Sweden, the UK. It opens in Denmark on Feb 9th, in Norway on Feb 16th, in Finland on March 2nd and in Hong Kong on April 5th.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY – bizarre directorial choices undercut the superb production design

I usually love movies by Tim Burton. He has an originality of vision that is rare in Hollywood and I adore the way he mixes mythic fairytales with the darker, nastier aspects of life. These two characteristics of his directorial skill would seem perfectly matched to the novels of Roald Dahl. I am a great fan of Dahl’s work precisely because he does not sugar-coat the nastiness of life as a kid. A brilliant example is in his novel, The Witches. The hero –a small boy – is turned into a mouse by an evil witch. By the end of the novel, the witches have been vanquished, but the boy is still a mouse. He has not been turned back into a kid in a classic Hollywood-ending. Indeed, he seems rather pleased that, as a mouse, his life expectancy is about the same as for his beloved old grandmother. Dark thoughts indeed for a children’s book. But, as I said, brilliantly suited to a director who made a kid’s animated movie called THE CORPSE BRIDE.

Sure enough, Burton brings a lot to this new interpretation of Dahls’ book. The production is lush and looks expensive, in sharp contrast to the 1971 version starring Gene Wilder. The set and costume design in beautifully realised and the cast is terrific. Freddie Highmore, the little kid from Finding Neverland, is charming as earnest little Charlie Bucket – the poor kid who dreams of a finding one of the five Golden Tickets that will win him entry to Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory. And the actors and actresses playing Charlie’s parents and grandparents are all great. It was also inspired to cast Deep Roy as all the oompa-loompas, morphing him in a variety of costumes in the various song and dance numbers, which are all fantastic fun. Compared to the original movie, the oompa loompas now seem to have real personality rather than being ciphers for the narrative-enhancing clever poems.

But there are big problems with this adaptation. First off, I think that at just under two hours the movie is a long play, especially if you are taking a young kid to see the movie. Admittedly, this movie is not much longer than the 1971 version, but I feel that the original was much more likely to hold a child’s attention because the entire second act takes place in the factory. In the new version, while kids will probably be entranced by the singing and dancing inside the factory, when the movie takes a tangent into the back story of Willy Wonka, they are likely to get fidgety. Heck, even I got fidgety. I am just not convinced that we need a back story for Willy Wonka: it just seems like an excuse for Tim Burton to re-tread thematic material he has already covered many times – the relationship between fathers and sons – notably in the cinematic mis-fire BIG FISH.

The second problem is that, in a variety of small ways, Tim Burton has made a rather more malicious film than the original adaptation. A case in point is the contrast between the original and new Veruca Salt. In the original movie, Veruca is a spoilt child, but her father is fully aware of this. A number of times, he looks nervously at Willy and shrugs as if to say, “I know it’s my fault, but now she is out of control and I don’t know what to do!” By contrast, in the new version, Mr Salt is as snobbish and obnoxious as his daughter and equally deserves her fate. Burton has made every parent more reckless and less sympathetic. To my mind these caricatures diminish the original material. Surely the novel is, if anything, a salutary warning to normal parents of the risks of over-indulging your kids. You are meant to look at these on-screen parents and say, “Jeez, that could be me!” rather than “What a bunch of freaks!”

I also found Johnny Depp’s interpretation of the Willy Wonka character bizarre and befuddling. The accent fluctuates as does the persona. Is he a geeky over-grown kid or an adult? The costume and make-up is more than eccentric and showman-like – it is just unsettling. Moreover, time and again we get the feeling that Depp’s Wonka really doesn’t like children at all. By contrast, in the book and the original film, Willy Wonka is just a normal guy, albeit a fairly eccentric one who lives alone in a chocolate factory populated by oompa loompas. He likes children, but not spoiled ones, and despairs of finding an heir. I love the fact that with Gene Wilder’s portrayal he is always an “in control” adult. The costume and song are all for show. Fundamentally he is a canny guy. The key to this is that when he comes out to greet the kids, he is hobbling with a walking stick. Then suddenly he turns a somersault and jumps up, fit as a fiddle. From that moment on, we don’t really know whether to trust him. He isn’t just some dappy, doo-lally, big kid. I respected the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka. I wouldn’t leave the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka alone with my kids. And surely, for a kids’ film, that is a pretty fatal flaw.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY is on global release.