COCO

Miguel is a little Mexican boy who lives with his close-knit extended family, complete with seemingly ancient and senile great-grandma Mama Coco. His family are shoemakers but Miguel dreams of being a musician like his hero - the famous but now dead singer Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). The only problem is that Miguel's family are  against music of any kind and are determined not just to make Miguel a shoemaker in the family tradition, but to erase all memory of his Mama Coco's father - another wannabe musician who apparently abandoned his family.  The consequences of this are that his great grandpa's photo is not laid out with the rest of the ancestral portraits on the Day of the Dead, so that he cannot visit with his family.  Of course, this is just pre-amble. The story truly begins when Miguel is magicked into the world of the dead, and begins a quest to find Ernesto de la Cruz and get his blessing to return and to sing! Along the way he learns much about his family history, and also about the pride and love of coming from a large family.  

In COCO, director Lee Unkrich (TOY STORY 3) creates a truly wondrous, uplifting and profound film of the kind that only Pixar seems able to create.  The animation was bold, beautiful and kinetic - the music truly memorable - and the story well-paced and exciting. But what makes this film stand out is its nuanced and meaningful examination of the ties of family and the dangers of legacy and the power of memory. It'a film that resonated with me - coming from a large Asian family - and I'm pleased to see old grannies taking off their shoe to scold an impudent upstart is not just an Indian trope!  Most of all this film made me cry. And not the cheap deliberately engineered tears of a manipulative melodrama. But genuine, hard-won tears from investing in a little boy's story, in his family, and seeing a loving reconciliation. This is animated storytelling at its most ambitious, intelligent, and affecting.

COCO has a running time of 105 minutes and is rated PG. It is on global release. 

THE GREEN HORNET - in which Hollywood pisses on my eiderdown once more

I am HUGELY disappointed by THE GREEN HORNET. I know it had a "troubled" journey to our screens, with Kevin Smith's scripts hacked and directors dropping out like so many milk-teeth. But when it got to the final credit list, I was full of anticipation. After all, this was a superhero movie that was going to be set square in the tradition of fond mockery - the tradition that produced the brilliantly funny KICK-ASS and genre-pastiches like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. And who better to mock fondly than director Michel Gondry - the guy behind the wonderfully sweet, adorably goofy BE KIND, REWIND, not to mention quirkier, stranger, more brilliantly crazy THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP. The cast looked fly too - the newly trim Seth Rogen - hilarious in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS was going to bring that child-like enthusiasm and general all-round good-egg persona to the role of Britt Reid/The Green Hornet, playboy millionaire turned masked-crime-fighter. Cameron Diaz - always willing to take the piss out of herself - was going to play the love interest, Lenore Case. We had the promise of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS' Chrisoph Waltz as the evil villain Chudnofsky. And best of all for Battlestar Galactica geeks, we had Edward James "Adama" Olmos as the editor of the Daily Sentinel. Okay, so I'd never heard of the Jay Chou, guy who plays The Hornet's sidekick, Kato, but I was willing to roll with it. So there it was - I was all ready for a superhero pastiche/homage full of good jokes, ridonkulous super-weapons and a general good-time.

But what did I get? Joke-free boredom. And without jokes, all this movie becomes is a Batman/Superman knock-off. Derivative, predictable, silly, emotionally involving, and absolutely no stakes. And when the jokes don't work you have to blame either the script or the actors or, in the case of physical humour, the director. So, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Michel Gondry, I know want you to go and stand in the corner and think VERY carefully about what you've done. Especially Gondry. I mean, I am genuinely amazed that Gondry even knows how to direct something this banal.

Evidently, somewhere in Hollywood, in some drawer, there is a Kevin Smith script for THE GREEN HORNET that is frackin' amazing. Somewhere, years ago, in some producer's office, there was a dream of a brilliantly witty, action-filled movie. The dream, ladies and gentlemen, is dead.

P.S. I got so angry when I was writing this review that I forgot to mention the biggest insult of all! This movie has been retro-fitted with 3D after principal photography was completed. The result is a film that costs an extra few pounds to see, and where the only material impact of 3D is that it looks several shades more dull than if you were watching it without the glasses.  There are no cool action shots that are enhanced by it. There's no immersive, subtle enhancement of depth of field. Just cynical commercial decision-making at its most brazen.

THE GREEN HORNET is on release in Belgium, Chile, Egypt, France, Belgium, Chile, Egypt, France, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Canada, Estonia, India, Spain, the UK, the USA and Venezuela. It opens next weekend in Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Japan. It opens on the 28th January in Greece, Singapore and Italy. It opens on February 3rd in Russia.