THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS aka THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS

I love this movie!  Parents with small kids should go see it!  Adults without kids should go see it!  It has wit, charm, intelligence, pirates, the Elephant Man, a dodo, swashbuckling, ham-eating, Brian Blessed, and all in an action-packed, emotionally satisfying 85 minutes.  Honestly,  this is about as good as cinematic entertainment gets!  Kudos to Aardman Studios (home of Wallace and Gromit) for brilliantly mixing hand-made stop-motion animation and CGI backdrops, and achieving a level of visual wit that demands repeated viewings. Kudos to director Peter Lord of Morph fame, for delicately balancing comedy and action.  Kudos to all the voice artists, but particularly Hugh Grant as Pirate Captain - a rare chance to see his comedy chops.  But most of all, kudos to Gideon Defoe, who wrote the screenplay based on his own novels. I really hope Aardman follow the ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS!* with the rest of the series.

In this instalment, we meet Pirate Captain and his dead-pan named crew (Number Two, Albino Pirate, Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate...).  He's a loveable old cove, but pretty hapless and destined to lose the Pirate of the Year award unless he can pull off a massive coup. His chance arrives when he mistakenly holds up Charles Darwin's Beagle, and Darwin (David Tennant) tells him that his beloved parrot, Polly, is in fact a Dodo!  There follows a trip to London to display Polly at the Royal Academy, thereby winning some booty, and an adventure against a sword-wielding Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) who hates, hates, HATES pirates!

There's so much to love here.  The richly decorated backdrops are full of visual jokes.  But in the foreground, I loved the whole Brian Blessed worship.  I loved the idea of Darwin's butler being a trained monkey with comedy flash-cards.  I loved the idea of Queen Victoria as a murdering ninja.  Most of all, I just loved Hugh Grant in his best performance since ABOUT A BOY.

This is hands down my movie of the year to date.

THE PIRATES! is on release in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Kuwait, New Zealand, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on April 12th in Greece; on April 20th in Argentina, Colombia and Romania; on April 27th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Canada, India and the USA; on May 11th in Brazil; on May 17th in Hungary; on June 7th in Serbia; on July 20th in Spain; on July 26th in Hong Kong; on August 9th in Israel; and on August 30th in Singapore.

*I'm not sure why the film has been retitled for the US market unless the marketing department think the US has become a crypto-theocracy in which even the mention of science is going to alienate audiences?

AS YOU LIKE IT - I love you, "Bob"!

First, some context for this review. I have some limited experience of Shakespeare, having attended a school where our literary education consisted of little else from the age of eleven. I even took specialist Shakespeare examinations to enter University and before my Masters degree, even though I was applying for a different discipline in each case. I would also count myself as a great admirer of Kenneth Branagh's adaptations of Shakespeare, and I consider his Hamlet and Henry V amongst the best films of the past twenty years. So it was with increasing dismay that I realised how much I disliked his new adaptation of AS YOU LIKE IT.

AS YOU LIKE IT is, in his defence, a particularly problematic play, and not in the same way that, say, HAMLET is problematic. In the latter case, Shakespeare gives us such complex and fascinating imagery and action that we can pick out differing interpretations. AS YOU LIKE IT is problematic in the same way as COSI FAN TUTTE - it has such a frothy, convoluted plot that depends on conceits so alien to reality that it is difficult to know how to present it to a modern audience. On top of this structural complexity, I simply do not think it is one of Shakespeare's better plays. The comedy is not as broad as in his best and most vulgar comedies, the strain of melanocholy is not as integral and developed as in his darker plays, and, simply put, the language is not as beautiful.

The play opens with two sets of warring brothers and closes with four weddings. In between we have a pastoral comedy reminiscent of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and TWELFTH NIGHT. Duke Senior has been usurped by his brother Duke Frederick and banished to the Forest of Arden. Soon after, their daughters Celia and Rosalind also flee the court for the forest, accompanied by the fool, Touchstone. Meanwhile, young Oliver is feuding with his younger brother Orlando, who has also fled to the forest. Orlando loves Rosalind, and she tests his love in the guise of a young boy called Ganymede. Phoebe, a young shepherdess falls for Rosalind/Ganymede, and scorns the love of Silvius. Oliver will eventually be redeemed by his love for Celia. Phoebe will eventually content herself with Silvius when she realises that Ganymede is a girl. And Touchstone will eventually marry a doltish goat-herd called Audrey.

Such a plot is testing for a cinema audience. Watching this sort of gender-bending from a distance in the theatre we can just about suspend our disbelief. But celluloid close-ups demand that the actress roughs herself up and takes on the physicality of a boy. I think the most successful example of this that I have seen is Felicity Kendal in the 1980 TV adaptation of Twelfth Night, but Sienna Miller is also convincing in Lasse Halstrom's CASANOVA. In Branagh's film, there is no attempt to make Bryce Dallas Howard look convincing as a boy and she certainly makes no attempt to alter her voice or physicality. Indeed, I didn't much like the way she performed the Shakespeare at all. It seemed very deliberate and self-consciously theatrical and, like Kevin Kline's performances as Jacques, arguably better suited to the stage. I found Alfred Molina (Touchstone), Adrian Lester (Oliver) and David Oyelowo (Orlando) gave the most natural and therefore the most convincing performances.

So, I don't particularly like the source text and I found the performances of mixed quality. But I was most surprised by my complete dislike of Kenneth Branagh's directorial decisions. In particular, I thought the device of staging the play in 19th century Japan utterly contrived. It added nothing to my understanding of the text and seemed motivated by the desire for novelty in the costume department. (I also hated the staging of the songs and the cheap Busby Berkeley ariel shots of people dancing in formation.) The Japanese conceit led Branagh to stage an Ang-Lee-esque opening action sequence involving samurai taking over the court. This proved that Branagh cannot choreograph an action scene and that his DP does not have the requisite skill to create depth of colour and contrast in a night scene.

AS YOU LIKE IT was released in Italy and Greece in 2006 and in Hungary in 2007. It was premiered on HBO in August and is currently on theatrical release in the UK.