iPad Round-Up 4 - THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

This new adaptation of Herge's famous children's adventure stories is a technical masterpiece. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have come together to create a movie using the latest motion capture, CGI and 3D technology to create a spectacular visual experience.  The problem is that I'm not sure their choices work, and I'm not sure the story can withstand the heavy visuals placed upon it.  

The first problem is that Herge's comics have such a particular style, and the motion-cap work seems to come down somewhere between straightforward animation and live-action, creating a sort of eerie look of humans with plasticine faces and over-large hands.  I  found the mo-cap humans with exaggerated facial features creepy.  

The second problem is that the movie contains so much swash and buckle, so many car-chases, naval-escapades and exotic locales, that I had no idea what was going on or what was at stake.  The whole thing read as a giant MacGuffin, designed to propel us through ever more exciting action sequences. I simply did not care about the clues to treasure that TinTin and his alcoholic sidekick, Captain Haddock, were seeking, nor did I think that they had enough camaraderie to anchor a buddy-action adventure story.

Maybe my whole problem is with the character of TinTin himself? I've never read the comic books and I find this strangely asexual boy-scouty do-gooding journo deeply unengaging.  So much of this film shares the 1920s action serial tropes that made INDIANA JONES so compelling, but without a loveable rogue as the lead character, there's no emotional entry point.

So, count me out for the sequel.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN opened in October 2011 and is now available to rent and own.

iPad Round-Up 2 - TATSUMI

TATSUMI is a wonderful animated film that works on two levels.  Most obviously, it is the life story of Japanese manga artist Toshihiro Tatsumi, based on his award-winning graphic novel/memoir, "A Drifting Life".  It shows him growing up in war-torn Japan, making his name as a young Manga artist, and finally pioneering a new type of comic for adults, dealing explicitly with sexual frustration, ennui and social issues in post-war Japan - in sharp contrast to the Astro Boy comics of his idol Osama Tezuka. To that end, the movie works as biopic for manga fans, interspersing the impressively frank autobiography with short animated films of some of his most famous short stories. This was interesting, and elegantly done, but as a person who has never read a single manga story, I found the movie more compelling as a document of social history. Thanks to Tatsumi's keen eye and honesty, we learn a lot about the social, sexual, political and economic changes in Japan, from the horrors of the nuclear bomb, to deprivation, to the economic boom. There were all sorts of little facts that shocked me - I was shocked at my own ignorance - such as the fact that the Japanese couldn't travel abroad until 1964 and even then with only a dollar's worth of Yen. So, for me, this film was entertaining, moving and educational, and I would recommend it even to people who have no interest in manga at all.  The visuals are beautiful, elegant and powerful, and have prompted me to start reading "A Drifting Life".

TATSUMI played Cannes 2011 and opened last year in Singapore and Hungary. It opened earlier this year in Ireland and the UK and is currently on release in the USA. It is available to rent and own. 

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?

London Film Fest 2011 Day 5 - TALES OF THE NIGHT / LES CONTES DE LA NUIT

In the cynical world of commercial cinema, there is something heartening and wonderful about the French animator Michel Ocelot.  He creates films of such vivid colour, beautiful design, and delicate style that you can't help but admire them.  And even better, he sees himself as an entertainer in the most old-fashioned sense. He simply wants to give us, the audience, pleasure, and can see no better way than by using the ancient fairy-tales from around the world that have held us captivated for centuries.  Ocelot's latest film is not a single-story feature, in the manner of KIRIKOU AND THE SORCERER or AZUR ET ASMAR, but a compendium of six short stories, each set in a different mythical land - from Africa, to Aztec temples, to the Himalayas, to the medieval Europe of the Brothers Grimm. His tales are filled with princes and princesses, young lovers who conquer evil, magic necklaces and tom-toms, werewolves and evil dragons.  The style is like something out of a magic lantern show projected onto colourful, richly textured tapestries - a style that feels perfectly suited to the 3D in which the film is presented. I found the movie to be an absolute delight.  Never simple-minded, but containing an economy of design and a simplicity, maybe purity, of purpose that was refreshing and delightful.  And judging by the young audience, many too young to read the subtitles and certainly too young to understand the French, once again Ocelot has created a film in which the images are so powerful and delightful that they can communicate clearly and entertain regardless.

TALES OF THE NIGHT / LES CONTES DE LA NUIT played Berlin, Sitges and London 2011. It was released in France in July 2011.

Preview - THE SMURFS

Smurfs are cute little blue creatures with white floppy hats who live in mushroom-houses in a magical forest. They are cared for by Papa Smurf, the Gandhi of cartoon characters - so caring and lovely that he even turned around the character of Smurfette - the girl smurf sent by evil wizard Gargamel to tempt them. The Smurfs are so without guile that they defy post-modern teenage cynicism regarding their sexual proclivities and political leanings. Okay, there may be a hundred boy smurfs and just one smurfette, but what's so odd about that?!  

What I like about this new live-action/animation movie is that it both embraces the innate loveliness of smurfs, while also tipping its hat to the anachronism of Peyo's creation.  What you get is a movie that is basically very simple and sweet, but also contains the odd witty wink to the camera - such as mocking the use of the word "smurf" as an all-purpose asterisked curse-word; or having Papa Smurf decode a magic spell by looking at an old book of Smurf "mythology" aka a Peyo comic book!  

The contrast of Smurf naivete and modern-day cynicism is achieved, as in the movie ENCHANTED, by having the wizard Gargamel chase the smurfs through a "vortex" to contemporary Manhattan, where they are stranded until they can magic a blue moon and get back home.  Just as Amy Adams' Giselle made Patrick Dempsey's Robert a softer, more fun-loving person in ENCHANTED, the Smurfs give Patrick and Grace Winslow (Neil Patrick Harris and Jayma Mays) a new-found joyfulness and confidence.  I liked the parallel between Patrick discovering the confidence to be a new father with poor Clumsy discovering that he doesn't have to be defined by his name, as all smurfs typically are.

So, as you can tell, I just about enjoyed THE SMURFS because, well, smurfs are cute, and made me feel nostalgic. But, objectively, this is a very badly made movie. Director Roger Gosnell (BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA) and DP Phil Meheux (THE MASK OF ZORRO) shoot everything in a workman-like over-lit obvious style; Hank Azaria is mis-cast and hammy as Gargamel (imagine Jim Carrey in the role - so much better); the plot is predictable; and for a kids film without sustained adult in-jokes, the run-time, at 100 minutes, is too long.  For all those reasons, this isn't the kind of children's film that adults can watch without the excuse of taking the kids.  But as genuinely earnest, warm-hearted entertainment for the young cinema viewer, it will, no doubt, hit the spot.

THE SMURFS is on release in the US, Canada, Argentina, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Turkey. It opens next Friday in the UK, China, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia and Paraguay. It opens on August 19th in Estonia, Lithuania and Poland and on August 25th in Denmark and Hungary.  THE SMURFS opens on September 2nd in Singapore, Finland, Norway and Sweden; on September 8th in Greece and Japan; on September 16th in Italy and on October 6th in Thailand. 

Overlooked DVD of the month - CHICO & RITA

CHICO & RITA is an absolutely wonderful movie - beautifully animated; honest in its depiction of sex; centred on a timeless story of love; and wrapped around Bebo Valdez' jazz score that takes in some of the greats of the post-war jazz scene - Thelonius Monk, Woody Herman, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. It's a crying shame that the flick hasn't had the crossover success of a film like BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (a movie it elegantly references in its final act, thanks to a cameo by real-life chanteuse Estrella Morente) - but hopefully the constraints of a limited release (narrow-minded distributors unsure about an R-rated animated flick?) will be broken by DVD popularity.

Chico is a gifted piano player, looking back from a run-down 1980s Havana to his "glory years" in the 50s and 60s. He meets the beautiful singer Rita and falls in love - or erotic/musical fixation - at first sight. The two lovers are destined to be together and not together - kept apart by pride; fiery tempers; betrayal; and an entertainment business happy to give a contract to a pretty singer but not her piano player. Their journey starts in Havana, but soon Rita achieves success in New York before making a Hollywood movie and ending up in Vegas. Chico crosses paths were her, often acting as her voice of conscience - reminding her of what she is giving up - how inauthentic she is having to be - to achieve success in America.

The three directors - Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba - deserve big props for daring to produce an adult-themed animated movie; for the ambition of their scope - across continents, musical styles and forty years; not to mention delicate references to post-war racial politics. One might argue that the genius of Ignacio Martínez de Pisón and Fernando Trueba's script is that the movie Shows rather than Tells us about the changing political climate - and wears its profundity very lightly.  That said, when the political themes culminate in a moving, half-drunken, outburst by Rita - the movie really does pick up notch - and I defy anyone not to glow with good-will during the final scenes.

CHICO & RITA played Telluride and Toronto 2010 and was released in the UK in 2010. It was released earlier this year in Spain and Greece. It will be released in Poland on July 1st and in France on July 6th. It is available to rent and own in the UK.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE

I really rather liked LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE. It is a beautifully animated, brilliantly voiced, old-fashioned story in the manner of WATERSHIP DOWN.  Moreover, it is blissfully absent of the sort of post-modern wit that propels the SHREK franchise. What's even more astonishing is that it was directed by Zack Snyder - purveyor of visually lush but morally vacuous, if not morally objectionable, fare like 300 and SUCKER PUNCH. The protagonists were sympathetic and endearing and their adventure story more compelling than any plot description would suggest. 

The story is based on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole books by Kathryn Lansky books, and this film focuses on two young owls, Soren and Kludd, who are kidnapped by some nasty racial purist owls. Luckily Soren is taken under the wing of a fellow inmate and taught how to outwit his captors and to eventually seek out the Jedi like Guardians who can teach him how to use his Gizzard and "save the world". If this sounds very STAR-WARS then it succeeds for the same reasons that Star Wars succeeds - it's a classic Saturday Morning Adventure Serial with good triumphing over evil, framed as a coming-of-age story. 

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE went on global release in autumn 2010. It is now available to rent and own.

RANGO - Wonderful, radical, revolutionary

RANGO is a revelation. It is one of the best films I have seen this year, one of the best animated films since TOY STORY, and must surely raise the bar in terms of what is seen as appropriate material for a children's film, and the level of ambition one can bring to the visuals in an animated film. I wonder if history will judge it as revolutionary as AVATAR in terms of bringing the craft of cinema forward and - contra AVATAR - showing us just how dazzling and immersive visuals can be without 3D, but when the CGI animators are guided by one of the best cinematographers working today, Roger Deakins (TRUE GRIT, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN).

The movie has been put together by the team behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp - and it's their best film to date - capturing the sheer energy and comedy of the original POTC film, but allying it to a stronger story and imbuing it with an indulgent love of cinema. For this is, above everything, a film for cineastes - a film about the joy of transformation - of being part of a story that you craft - and about living up to the Heroic Ideal. To that end, John Logan (GLADIATOR)'s screenplay leans heavily on the plot of 70s film noir, CHINATOWN, but lives in the shadow of all of those wonderful Clint Eastwood westerns, not to mention doffing its cap to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and APOCALYPSE NOW among others.

Johnny Depp plays a pet lizard with no real friends but a vivid imagination. The lizard is the ultimate cinephile, indulging in wild cine-literate fantasies, but ultimately lonely and confused about who he really is. When a car accident leaves him wondering into a old western town in the Mojave desert, he takes the opportunity to reinvent himself as "Rango" - a gun-slinging hero along the lines of The Man With No Name. And boy does this town need a Hero. Some Evil man (obvious to anyone who's seen CHINATOWN) has been hoarding water, leaving the town to run dry, forcing humble farmers from their land....In order to sort this mess out, Rango has to over-come his fear, make good friends, and become a Real Hero, helped out by a wise armadillo (Al Molina) and a surreal dream featuring Timothy Olyphant as the Clint-like Spirit of the West.

What I love about Rango is its evident love for the genres it's referring to (in sharp contrast to the risible YOUR HIGHNESS) and its evident love for the textures of the western. I've never seen an animated film - typically full of shiny, bright, smooth CGI - look so dusty, weather-beaten and worn. The details of the fur, the clothes, the buildings is quite stunning and the film is drawn as if it really has been shot on old fashioned 35mm by the best cinematographer in the business. Add to that a story with real stakes and real emotional heart, voiced by actors at the top of their game. (Special mentions for Isla Fisher as Beans and Ned Beatty as the Mayor.) But most of all I love that this film neither patronises its young audience nor bores its adult audience - and yet doesn't pander to quick, cheap laughs with post-modern winks at popular culture - a trait I particularly detest in the SHREK films. Which other animated movie would dare to have a joke in which the word "thespians" is confused for "lesbians" - or a sequence in which the Hero cross-dresses?

All of this makes RANGO at once marvellously old-fashioned in its cinephilia, its textures and its wonderful photography, but also marvellously modern in its subversive adult humour and willingness to use surreal dream sequences. This really is a wonderful film - and one can only hope that other animated features rise to the challenge of matching its attention to detail and depth of vision.

RANGO is on global release in all bar Japan where it opens on September 23rd.

Overlooked DVD of the month - MARY AND MAX

MARY AND MAX is an amazing film, and all the more wonderful for being un-expectedly so. It's a darkly comic, emotionally raw clay-animated drama about the unlikely friendship between two very lonely people - a little girl called Mary, who lives in Australia, and an old man called Max, who lives in New York. Mary Daisy Dinkle is lonely because her mum is a mean drunk and her father is a withdrawn taxidermist. She hates how she looks, she's socially awkward and other kids tease her. Max is lonely because he finds the world strange and irrational and frustrating and retreats into a closed existence of comfort-eating and writing angry letters. They are each other's only and best friends. 

The movie takes us from the early heady days of their friendship - the first not to involve an imaginary friend for both of them - through Mary's adolescence and marriage. The friendship blossoms, then flounders on betrayal, and is finally redeemed. The journey is genuinely moving - I cried like a baby at the end of the film - and I was happy to have spent time with these intriguing people despite the harsh material I was forced to endure - drug abuse, sexual infidelity, self-loathing, suicide and chronic disease. 

If all this makes MARY AND MAX sound about as much fun as shock-therapy, then please believe me that despite the unbearable sadness as its heart, it's also a very funny, and ultimately uplifting film. The detail of the art design is wonderfully witty, with lots of clever details to repay a repeat viewing, and the verbal humour is at once pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny. I have always had nothing but praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he really surpasses himself as Max, imbuing every sentence with common-sense, hurt, longing, fear and unintentional wit. Toni Colette is wonderfully misguided and sympathetic as Mary, and even Eric Bana gives a sweet cameo. So, if you love the kind of gentle, warm, heart-breaking humour found in the following quotations, please check MAX AND MARY out. As for me, I just can't wait to see what Australian writer-director Adam Eliot does next.

Max Jerry Horovitz: When I was young, I invented an invisible friend called Mr Ravioli. My psychiatrist says I don't need him anymore, so he just sits in the corner and reads. 

Max Jerry Horovitz: Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine-dependent. 

MARY AND MAX played Sundance and Berlin 2009 and opened in Australia, the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Russia that year. It opened last year in Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the UK. It is currently on release in Singapore and opens in Japan on April 23rd. It is available to rent and own.

TANGLED - lovely!

So the first thing to do is forget the Brothers Grimm tale of Rapunzel, the peasant girl taken by the witch next door in exchange for the herbs that saved her mother's life. Locked in a tower as she reached puberty, Rapunzel was knocked up by a passing Prince, enchanted by her voice, but cast out by the witch in disgust. Of course, there was a happy ending. The Prince, blinded on thorns by the scheming witch, wanders into Rapunzel, who's tears of sadness heal his sight, and he takes her to be his princess.

Naturally, in Disney's version of the tale, we can't have a naive girl fall pregnant, and we can't have something as simplistic as true love conquering blindness. Moreover, in the post-modern, post-Shrek age of animation, we have to play up the modern social angle. Rapunzel is now a captured Princess who falls for a commoner (just as in SHREK and THE KING'S SPEECH - what is with it Hollywood's obsession with royals falling for commoners?) and while the teen rebellion survives, it is now cast less as a tale of hidden puberty than of fighting for independence from an over-bearing manipulative mother. Rapunzel is less a fairy-tale than an animated version of THE FIGHTER! (Not to mention the fact that she really can handle herself!) Every musical number borders on pastiche - from Riverdance style folk dances, to Mother Gothel's Big Momma Morton inspired "Mother Knows Best". There are quotations from cinema, there's teen-angst slang, there's "talk to the hand" attitude from the side-kick comedy chameleon. Basically, this movie may be a fairy tale about an innocent girl, but it's very very knowing indeed.

Still, for all that, I rather enjoyed it! Mandy Moore's Rapunzel is charming; Zachary Levi's handsome commoner, Flynn, is very witty; Donna Murphy's Mother Gothel is absolutely brilliantly manipulative, and I simply LOVED the blood-hound horse, Maximilian! There was annoyingly modern verbal humour, yes, but even better, good old-fashioned slapstick humour and a wonderfully old-fashioned visual look to the film. It may have been made on computers, but it feels a lot more painterly than recent films, and has the lush colours, deep woods and medieval castles of SNOW WHITE. The 3D added nothing, and some of the songs were soupy, but overall, TANGLED was well worth watching. I was genuinely engaged by the movie, and moved by its ending. So, after the serious mis-step with BOLT 3D, and the side-track into the American dream with THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, I can honestly and gladly say that Disney is back to what it does best: fairytales. Beautifully drawn, moving, funny fairy-tales.

TANGLED was released last year in the US, Canada, Israel, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Venezuela, Belgium, Egypt, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary, Kuwait, Bulgaria, Austria, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia, Ukraine, Australia, Turkey and Chile. It was released last month in Croatia, Argentina, Greece, New Zealand, Brazil, Panama, Romania, Serbia, Peru, Estonia, Iceland, India, Slovenia, Ireland, Lithuania and the UK. It opens this weekend in Denmark, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Norway, Spain and Finland. It opens on February 11th in Finland and on March 12th in Japan. It has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - SHREK FOREVER AFTER

SHREK THE THIRD was a desperate movie - a commercial enterprise designed to squeeze every last buck from a franchise, no matter that the plot was confused and cobbled together. I barely sat through it, and hated every moment. When the franchise began, Mike Myers's Shrek was a loveable anti-hero subverting our idea of a fairytale Prince into a farting ogre and Cameron Diaz' Princess Fiona wasn't just a passive pretty girl waiting to be rescued but a feisty, whip-smart woman whose true self was fat and happy. The joy of those films was to see unlikely friendships form between Shrek, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas), and to see Shrek and Fiona fall in love. To be sure, the humour was subversive of the Disney myth, but it was always warm-hearted, and after a pretty straight-forward adventure our anti-heroes would always emerge triumphant and true to themselves.

By contrast, by SHREK THE THIRD, Shrek had turned into a whiny little bitch, and the humour was particularly snarky and mean - coming in the form of cheap, lazy Exorcist spoofs of ROSEMARY'S BABY and teen-rom-coms. Fiona was less feisty woman that put-upon wife, and the whole thing had a rather mean-spirited, vulgar feel. So, when SHREK FOREVER AFTER rolled into our cinemas, complete with that ultimate commercial shake-down - 3D - I decided to give it a miss. Imagine, then, my surprise to discover that SHREK FOREVER AFTER isn't have bad at all!

The good news is that the writers have decided to focus on just one idea - and the big grand concept is that Shrek is so peeved with being a harassed father that he allows Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohm) to trick him into signing a contract in which he never existed. What then follows is a sort of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE meets STAR WARS movie, in which Shrek sees what would have happened if he hadn't existed, and must get Fiona to give him "true love's kiss" in order to get back to normal. Donkey blanks him; Puss In Boots has become fat and lazy; Far Far Away is ruled by a tyrannical Stiltskin, and Fiona, having rescued herself, has become a Rebel Leader leading her fellow ogres in arms against Vader, sorry, Stiltskin! The great thing about this conceit, is that we get to see Fiona back to being feisty, and we get to relive what was wonderful in the first films - seeing Shrek and Fiona fall for each other again, and seeing Shrek and Donkey and Puss become friends again. It's as though the film-makers didn't want the franchise to end on the downer of Part Three and so restored us to the feel-good feeling of Part One. SHREK FOREVER AFTER is, then, a pleasingly good watch. Not as brilliant as Part One, partly because we can't get back that initial surprise, but good fun nonetheless. Hopefully, the film-makers will have the good grace to end it here.

SHREK FOREVER AFTER was released in summer 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

TRON: LEGACY 3D - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

TRON: LEGACY is the much anticipated sequel to the iconic, pioneering 1982 sci-fi flick that took us inside the computer for the very first time. It is faithful to the original, while at the same time taking full advantage of new technologies, and while I am sure fan-boys will be happy, as a complete newbie, I found it exciting, evocative and literally wonderful. However, as I'll go on to explain, it's not without its problems - and for those reasons - I think the original movie stands head and shoulders above the remake.

As with the original movie, TRON: LEGACY has a simple plot that is explored on two levels: in reality and on the Grid (the computer-world), and characters exist both in real life and as avatars in both. A prologue tells us that back in 1989, talented computer programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared, leaving his little boy Sam an orphan. 27 years later, and Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is lured into the Grid by an apparent signal from his long-dead father, and both will try to battle a Programme more powerful than MCP (the villain of the first film). This time, the enemy is the very avatar Kevin Flynn created to patrol the Grid, called Clu; and Clu has bent Tron, the original security programme, to his will. No matter - for the Flynns have their own programming skills, as well as the help of a pioneering new programme called Quorra (Olivia Wilde), not to mention the attention of an oleaginous show-man called Castor (Michael Sheen).

The first good thing to say about TRON: LEGACY is that is looks absolutely bloody amazing. I watched it in 3D and what they did with the Disney logo - the logo - not even the film ! - had me gasping. We then break into scenes of real-life as we establish the prologue and the back story, but once we enter the Grid we're back into a world of clean fluorescent lines; dazzling car and motorcycle chases; iconic costumes and sets; and simply amazing 2012-like interior design. I can't wait to see this film again just to, quite simply, see it - to luxuriate in its design. I guess this reflects well on the fact that Disney respected the original designs and the camerawork of David Fincher's DP, Claudio Miranda, particularly skilled at working in DV. But most of all, the seamless use of CGI. Take, as just one example, the way in which Jeff Bridges' younger self plays CLU, retro-aged using the same technology that made Brad Pitt old in Benjamin Button.

The second good thing to say about TRON: LEGACY is that the story makes absolute sense. In other words, the screen-writers didn't mess up the logic or the lines of the original but extended it forward in a perfectly reasonable manner. That might sound petty but I've seen many a movie "opened out" by careless writers trying to over-shoot themselves. Edward Kitsis and Adam Horrowitz (veterans of LOST) don't make that mistake. And whenever there's a nod to the outside world - the world outside the movie - it makes sense and doesn't break the fourth wall. So, for instance, TRON the video game exists in the world of TRON: LEGACY but as an Encom product. Another example is using Daft Punk as the house-DJs in the Grid's End of the Line club. This might've been distracting were it not for the fact that Daft Punk's whole style, clothing and music is so Tron-like anyways that they fit right in.

The third good thing to say about TRON: LEGACY is that despite all the technological wizardry, a number of the key cast members give really powerful, believable performances, not least Jeff Bridges as the young, self-assured CLU and the older, wiser, more regretful Kevin Flynn. In the scene where he acknowledges his youthful pride and his love for his son, as the only true "perfection" that can be attained, Bridges just acts everyone else off the screen. Perhaps more surprising is that Olivia Wilde, as Quorra, is actually rather good. Wilde has the kind of linear, hard beauty that makes her superb casting as a computer programme. And the surprise for those of us who knew her from her role as Mischa Barton's love interest in The OC is that, when given half a chance, she can actually act. As Quorra she displays a certain wide-eyed excitement about the real world - what's Jules Verne like? what's the sun like? - that's captivating and engaging. And the movie desperately needs characters we can feel for to counter-act and humanise all the technology and CGI stylings.

But this movie really does have problems too. First up, first-time feature director Joseph Kosinski uses every directorial cliché in the book, especially in the 2-D live action scenes. For example, when Sam rides his motorcycle up to his dad's old arcade hall, we see his reflection in the motorcycle mirror. Why? What for? Except that's what directors usually do. Moreover, while Kosinski can direct high-paced thrilling Grid battles, he can't film a thrilling live action motorcycle chase. The opening cops versus Sam chase is simply dull.

Second, and far worse, two of the key performances are seriously off-beam. Michael Sheen's Castor/Zuse looks like a cross between an Albino and an Oompa-Loompa and he plays the character like Alan Cumming as MC in Cabaret. His performance is so camp, frenetic and outré, that it's begging to be called "scene-stealing" but instead I found it out of place and distracting. But far worse, and the biggest weakness of TRON: LEGACY by far, is the casting of Garrett Hedlund (Patroclus in TROY) as Sam Flynn. According to IMDB, Ryan Gosling was in the running, and would no doubt have pulled off the scenes of emotional heft with greater depth than this wooden-surfaced, persistently-smirking young man. Seriously, this guy gives Mark Hamill in NEW HOPE as the most wooden, peevish sci-fi protagonist of all time. He truly grates. And I guess it's the director who ultimately has to carry the can for a) casting him and b) not directing him better. If you need evidence check out the scene where he meets his father - the person he thinks walked out on him and left him an orphan - for the first time in 27 years. He should be angry, happy, confused, questioning, bewildered - any or all of these things. Garrett Hedlund's Sam can only register far off angst or a smirk or bland acquiescence. Shame, shame, shame.

It says a lot for the visual brilliance of TRON: LEGACY that I still think it's worth checking out despite the ham-fisted live-action direction and Garrett Hedlund's lack of acting ability. But it's desperately sad that a movie that had so much right, has been pinned back from true greatness by poor casting.

TRON: LEGACY will be released on December 15th in Egypt and the UAE. It is released on the 16th in Argentina, Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Russia and Singapore. It is released on the 17th in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, India, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Venezuela. It opens on December 23rd in Hong Kong and Russia; on December 24th in Lithuania and Poland; on the 25th in Colombia; on the 26th in Iceland and on the 30th in Estonia and South Korea. It opens on January 6th in Slovakia; on the 12th in Italy; on the 13th in Portugal; on the 26th in Belgium and the Netherlands; on the 27th in Germany and on the 28th in Turkey. It opens in France on February 2nd.

TRON (1982) - Avatar

We all have movies we are obsessed with as children. For me, it was STAR WARS. Star Wars the movies, the toys, the computer games, the novels...TRON passed me by. Not so for a generous of incipient sci-fi freaks and computer nerds, not to mention Daft Punk. For those kids, TRON the movie and even more so, TRON the arcade game, are nostalgia-inducing, iconic, pop-cultural artefacts. So, the other night I Sky-plussed the original 1982 movie and finally sat down to watch a movie, loaded with the baggage of knowing that it was iconic, and the slightly odd recognition from having watched TRON: LEGACY on preview earlier in the day. The movie felt familiar and strange - archaic and modern - technical and emotional - all at the same time. I had a truly great time watching it, and while the visual effects might seem old hat today, the sheer beauty and austerity of the design is still impressive, nearly thirty years later.

The plot is simple but works on two planes - reality, and within the grid - with the same people fighting the same battle in both worlds by means of avatars. In the real world, ruthless Dillinger has plagiarised the work of talented computer programmer Kevin Flynn and then forced him out of Encomm. Now, he is being blackmailed by the Master Control Programme he created to run the company. MCP, like HAL, thinks Programmes are superior to Users, and is hacking military computers to gather programmes. Flynn's friend and fellow programmer has, thankfully, created a security programme to patrol MCP, called Tron, and when MCP ruthlessly lasers Flynn INTO of the grid, using another friend, Laura's super-gadget, he will be helped by their avatars, Tron and Yori, to defeat the evil MCP/Dillinger.

Everything about the film must've seemed amazing and pioneering at the time. Just the fact that writer-director Steven Lisberger thought that the guts of a computer would be an interesting place to set a film would've been radical, decades before MATRIX. And while he didn't have CGI, the way in which he mashed up live action, painted animation, roto-scoping, and good old visual effects is quite superb, and still visually striking. And no wonder, when you realise that the creative vision was the result of collaboration between Meobius and BLADE RUNNER's Syd Mead. It's thanks to them that we get the iconic grid structure, light-cycle races, uniforms and discs. But the key strength of TRON - the reason why we still love it - is that the technical wizardry isn't all their is to it. Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird have created characters we empathise with - whether it's the youthful enthusiasm of Bridges' Flynn, or the love story between Tron and Yori, or the most moving scene in the film which - radical at the time - involved the death of what is basically a computer programme.

So, for me, TRON has it all - visual purity, radical creativity, pioneering technology, but always, most importantly, real heart. I can't believe I waited this long to watch it!

TRON was released in 1982. It was nominated for Oscars for Best Costume Design and Best Sound but lost to GANDHI and ET respectively. Apparently it wasn't nominated for an Oscar because the MPAA, in all its wisdom, thought the film-makers had cheated by using computers! This says a lot about how threatened the academy felt by new technology.

MEGAMIND - A pocketful of Kryptonite

Right, you've all seen Superman? in every episode or comic strip, evil Lex Luthor kidnaps the feisty journalist Lois Lane in order to lure Superman to rescue her. Lex is clever, but truth, justice and the American Way wins out. Superman rescues Lois and she goes back to work with the trusty dull Clark Kent, unaware that he is really Superman. And poor photographer Jimmy Olsen never catches anyone's attention, as the Spin Doctors rightly observed. So, imagine what would happen if one day Lex Luthor actually defeated Superman and took over Metropolis. No Superman, Lois at a lose end, Jimmy tries to make his move, but is rebuffed, and Lex bored without an arch-enemy, tries to create a new superhero by zapping Jimmy with Superman's DNA. Only, turns out Super-Jimmy has been brooding with resentment all these years, as the Spin Doctors told us, and uses his powers for Evil, which of course, gives Lex the chance to...er....do good?!

Of course, you can't imagine DC Comics letting Superman get publicly mauled like this, so instead, you get MEGAMIND, wherein Superman isn't so much spoofed as Alan-Moore'd except, of course, with about a tenth of his wisdom and Tina Fey's jokes. The end-result is a ball of laughs, rather sweet, and definitely worth watching.

Will Ferrell plays Megamind - the Evil Genius who thinks he might just want to be nice for a change, wooing the feisty chick Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey). It's a a role Ferrell has played a number of times in recent years, typically in movies that alternate with his cruder SNL comedy skits-turned-features. MEGAMIND is one of the few films that allows him to be both vulnerable-sweet AND grossly-comical and the mix is a treat. The typecasting continues with the rest of the cast. Tina Fey does her usual sweet, neurotic, charming thing as Roxanne - Jonah Hill does his creepy, slacker, irritating schtick as Jimmy/Hal - and Brad Pitt basically plays Superman, sorry, Metro Man, as Brad Pitt - a famous star tired of the limelight.

The comedy is definitely three steps wittier and more consistent than DESPICABLE ME. I mean, just look at how good the physical comedy is when Megamind is pretending to be Bernard in his Evil Lair. Or just look at how funny the Minion losing oxygen scene is. That stuff doesn't happen without the intervention of a director like Tom McGrath (MADAGASCAR 1 and 2) and actors like Fey and Ferrell. But for all that, Megamind doesn't have the heart of a movie like DESPICABLE ME, and I really wonder how far young kids will keep up with a movie in which a major plot point is that characters can switch bodies at the touch of a wristwatch - or where a large part of the humour, and a major plot point comes from the lead character putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable of words?

MEGAMIND is on release in the US, Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Kuwait, Georgia, Portugal, Argentina, Croatia, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in Australia, Venezuela, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on Christmas Day in Finland and Sweden, on December 26th in Norway and on January 7th in Poland.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

Late review - THE ILLUSIONIST / L'ILLUSIONISTE - Will you still love a man out of time?

Sylvain Chomet is a wonderfully old-fashioned animator. He still draws his characters by hand, rather than using CGI. And he uses very little dialogue, relying instead on subtle suggestion and sight-gags. The result, in BELLEVILLE RENDEZ-VOUS, was a film full of whimsy, charm and real heart. Viewers looking for that same odd-ball humour in THE ILLUSIONIST will be wrong-footed, as I was. For THE ILLUSIONIST, while similar in technical style to BELLEVILLE, is quite different in tone. Whimsy and charm are replaced by a rather unrelentingly bleak and depressing feel, and while THE ILLUSIONIST is just 80 minutes long, it felt far longer because the material was tough and problematic.

The movie is based on a script written by the legendary French vaudevillian and film-star, Jacques Tati. Written in the late 50s, it is the script of a man painfully aware that modern culture - the creaton of the "teenager", pop idols and film-stars - was rendering Vaudeville a dying art. As M. Hulot, his supremely popular film alter-ego, Tati had shown an anachronistic man struggling to deal with modernity in a comic light. But in his script for THE ILLUSIONIST, he confronted the true tragedy of the Man Out Of Time. It is no surprise to me that Tati never filmed THE ILLUSIONIST. It is a film so full of bleak reality - so self-negating - that it feels more like a shadowy form of therapy than a realistic project. And so it fell to Sylvain Chomet to finally bring the film to screen.

THE ILLUSIONIST sees a M.Hulot magician called Tatischeff - Tati's real name - performing to small indifferent crowds in music halls now filled with teenagers screaming for pop music. He leaves Paris, and then London, in search of work, and finds himself in Mull and Iona. There, the locals are still enamoured of his tricks, although it's only a matter of time before he's obsolete there too: they applaud him, but the jukebox is being installed. So ends the pre-amble. The story really takes off when a teenage girl called Alice believes Tatischeff really is a magician, and follows him to Edinburgh. They take up together - he is perhaps trying to recreate a father-daughter relationship - and he desperately tries to maintain the illusion that he really is a magician. Tragically, the production of coins from behind her ear, or pretty dresses and shoes, requires real, degrading work that he hides from her. It is exhausting, ultimately unsatisfying, and cannot be sustained.

The film - in particular its ending - makes a number of key statements - all of which are bleak. First, vaudeville is dead:  the crowds that once laughed have discarded it and its artists most cruelly, with desperately tragic consequences. Second, vaudevillians gave happiness to others at a great price - the travelling deprived them of real personal relationships, and left them economically at the mercy of rapacious agents and fickle audiences. Third, that the illusions that once gave happiness can become a source of dangerous delusion, enabling a deeply damaging relationship. By the end of the film Tatischeff has realised this - all of this. Little Alice will have to struggle with these lessons after the film ends.

Maybe if I'd been better primed I would have liked THE ILLUSIONIST more. I love the idea of exploring tragedy through animation. But even if I had been warned, and as much I appreciate the intention of the film, I still found it deeply problematic. The relationship between Tatischeff and Alice seemed to me sinister. It wasn't clear to me that she really thought the money appeared my magic. Rather, that she was simply playing him for money. Was she really so self-involved that she couldn't see what it was costing him? And if he could really magic money for clothes and shoes why wouldn't he magic money for rent in a better lodgings? Alice is either stupid or conniving - either way - a gaping hole where empathy should be at the heart of the film. Or maybe that was intentional? Maybe Tati wanted to show that Alice was just another example of fickle youth screaming for pop? Hard to square this with Chomet's contention that Alice is a stand-in for Tati's real-life daughter Sophie. Stylistically, I also thought there were some mis-steps. I loved the attention to detail in recreating 1960s Edinburgh, but why break the beautifully hand-drawn world? There is a scene where Tatischeff releases his white rabbit into the wild and the camera lifts up and gives us a whirling panoramic aerial view of Edinburgh. It's stunning, but it feels very CGI and quite out of keeping with the rest of the film.

Overall, then, I found THE ILLUSIONIST to be a bleak, often dull, and problematic in terms of the central relationship, and occasionally the technique. A great disappointment, and greater still because the central ideas are so powerful.

THE ILLUSIONIST played Berlin, Telluride and Toronto 2010 and was released earlier this year in France, the Netherlands and the UK. It opens in Turkey on October 29th; in Italy on December 3rd; and in the USA on Christmas Day.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - SURVIVING LIFE (THEORY AND PRACTICE) / PREZIT SVUK ZIVOT (TEORIE A PRAXE)

SURVIVING LIFE is a classic Svan Jankmajer film: animation interspersed with live footage to create a surreal vision of life - at once a Kafka-esque nightmare, and very, very, funny! In this particular flick, Eugene is a middle-aged, happily married man, who has a surreal dream about a young, beautiful, sexy woman in red (Klára Issová). In his waking life he tries all manner of old-wives tales to recreate that dream, and even resorts to psychotherapy to find herself again. The problem is that the psychotherapist is basically using techniques that answer what the dream is really about and so eliminate it. All under the mocking gaze of portraits of Jung and Freud who alternatively laugh, roll their eyes and applaud.

SURVIVING LIFE is witty, funny, imaginative, surreal but also somehow authentic in how it portrays the way in which we can still be bowled over by a crush way past our teenage years. I really believed that Eugene was captivated by his lady in red, but also that he was a decent guy. And even though Czech art-house animation might not leap out at you, I would encourage anyone who wants a more sophisticated version of a rom-com, with a light touch of the Terry Gilliams, to check this out.

SURVIVING LIFE played Venice and will be released in the Czech Republic on November 4th 2010.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D - what is Tim Burton trying to say here?

My response to ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D was much the same as my response to Tim Burton's Roald Dahl adaptation, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. The production design, costumes, and sheer visual imagery were wondrous to behold. But Tim Burton had made poor choices regarding the narrative structure, tone and very heart of the subject matter.

So let's go back to the beginning. This movie originates in the children's novels Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The novels were written by Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, better known as Lewis Carroll. On one level, the novels fall into the category of nonsense literature, in the same vein as Edward Lear. When the little girl Alice chases a small white rabbit, clothed in a waistcoat, down a rabbit hole, she enters a world that is surreal, sometimes sinister and that defies narrative logic. Potions and mushrooms make you larger or smaller. Animals talk, have tea parties and smoke hookah pipes. There are riddles, logic puzzles and chess moves; wonderful explorations of mirror-ing, double-ing and mathematical concepts; satirical sketches of donnish Oxford life; references to the Wars of the Roses - but ultimately, it's all just one giant non sequitor. Anything can happen because anything can follow. For a little child, this is a wonderfully liberating, but also an extraordinarily frightening concept. (The same conflicting reaction is at the heart of the most sinister of all the very sinister late Victorian and early Edwardian childrens' novels - Peter Pan. To this day, I am shocked that this is marketed as a children's novel rather than as horror.)

The genius of the original illustrations by Tenniel was to capture that strangeness - at once captivating and repulsive. Alice with her dark eyes and obnoxious self-confidence - the stern Victorian politicians anthropomorphicised into baffling characters. Wonderland is a world where one can fear drowning in a sea of one's own tears and where power is abused by a series of tyrannical and clearly insane aristos. It's hardly Disney. Unless of course you are watching the bland saccharine Disney version of the film. As adaptations go, it was faithful in the superficial - the characters were all there as were the each of the famous scenes in the right order - but completely failed to capture the sheer oddness of the world. To that end, Jonathan Miller's BBC film is my adaptation of choice - he fully explores the concept that Wonderland is really Oxford and makes the characters there so very close to real people, Wonderland isn't "other" or "under" but sits alongside reality.

Given how dark and surreal the source material is, I would've thought that Tim Burton would've been the perfect director for ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D. And as the publicity stills were released I got more and more excited. I loved the make-up for Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter - he looked like a psychedelic version of McAdder. Helena Bonham Carter's encephelatic head as what I thought was the Queen of Hearts looked superb. Matt Lucas, who I'll always think of as the baby on Shooting Stars, looked born to play Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. And when you looked down the cast list you could see lots of high-class British character actors in the voice roles, from Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat to most surprisingly and perfectly Barbara Windsor as the Doormouse. Most wonderfully of all, I was longing to Crispin Glover - a fascinating but little seen actor - as the Knave of Hearts. I suppose my suspicions might have been aroused by the casting of Australian Mia Wasikowska as Alice - not on the grounds that she can't act - she makes a perfectly decent fist of her role - but because she isn't a child. So there was obviously some serious re-writing at hand. And then, with the very appearance of the Tweedles and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) they were clearly conflating the two novels, most notably in the character that looks like the Queen of Hearts but is called the Red Queen.

The resulting film is a strange beast indeed, but in all the wrong ways. Script-writer Linda Woolverton (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, MULAN, ALLADIN) has made Alice a teenager being pressured into marriage. She runs away from her fate and down the rabbithole, but refuses to believe that she has been there before, as a child, despite being haunted by recurring nightmares of talking caterpillars and smiling cats. When she reaches the Underland, which she had mistakenly called Wonderland, she finds a landscape of scorched earth, stormy skies and familiar characters suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. To echo LA Times reviewer, Kenneth Turan, the Mad Hatter's tea party seems to be set in a sort of ill-conceived Mordor and the Mad Hatter himself has lost his mind in reaction to the Red Queen's hostile take-over of Underland. When events get too much for him he trips into a pitch perfect Scottish accent, but this only serves to make him even more McAdderish! The loose plot sees Alice journey to the Red Queen's palace to capture the Vorpal Sword and free the Hatter. She then visits the White Queen and summons the courage to defeat the Jabberwocky on the frabjous day (calloo callay!) in a finale that would've mean more appropriate to LOTR.

Despite the lovely creations that are the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and the lovely costumes for Alice, the movie feels rather dismal and flat. I suppose that can't be helped as this is a vanquished world, but somehow, that wasn't a problem for Narnia or Rohan. Alice is supposed to find herself but the transformation isn't particularly convincing. Back in the real world, the idea that she would then become a neo-feminist adventuress is ludicrous. I think the problem is that the movie shifts in tone rather abruptly. In the same scene, you'll have Johnny Depp playing it utterly straight as the traumatised hatter, but Anne Hathaway pastiching the idea of the pure, slightly unpractical, narcissistic White Queen, with her pure white dress but scarily black lips and nails. Both are fine, but do they belong in the same film? And the sheer ill-judgement of the 1980s dancing that the Hatter roles out in the penultimate scene defies description.

Overall, then, while I can see consistency of design, I didn't see a consistency of vision as to what this movie was really about and what it was trying to say. A fatal flaw, no matter how lovely the costumes. Burton refuses to let ALICE be a wonderfully nonsensical nonsequitor. He wants to give characters a back story and feeeeeelings. But at the same time, he doesn't take the time to actually explore them properly. Worst of all, with the exception of the rather lazy introduction of some real-world twins, nowhere do we see Alice's visions as subconscious reworkings of people she has seen in the real world.

Additional tags: Mia Wasikowska, Dariusz Wolski, Christopher Lee, Geraldine James, Tim Piggott-Smith, Frances de la Tour, Marton Csokas, Barbara Windsor, Leo Bill, Linda Woolverton.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND is on global release.

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG - the best of both worlds

Watching THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG is a deeply nostalgic experience. It reminds you of how wonderful the old Disney classics were, and the simple delights and warmth of hand-drawn animation. Just as in the good old days, this movie doesn't depend on post-modern pop-cultural references or 3-D gimmicks. Nope. Here we have a lovely story, charming characters, true love and some sweet songs. A charmingly earnest, hard-working waitress called Tiana kisses a charismatic but lazy Prince turned Frog. As they journey through the Bayou to have the voodoo overturned, the Prince learns that for the woman he loves, he'd be willing to work, or to sacrifice his own happiness. And so, true love blossoms, inspired by a sweet little Cajun firefly called Ray, who is in love with a star in the sky - an absolutely adorable side-plot. The lovers are aided in their journey by a trumpet-playing alligator called Louis - who is clearly inspired by Balou the Bear from THE JUNGLE BOOK, and wants to be human a little bit like King Louie from the same film. There's the aforementioned firefly Ray, who is so wonderful, and the wise old Mama Odie.

If nostalgic in style and feel and look, the movie is also nostalgic for a time when New Orleans was the old Big Easy, associated with beignets, Hot Jazz and A Streetcar Named Desire, rather than being a symbol of Federal incompetence. But at the same time, the movie is rather modern. It's not just that Disney has finally given us a coloured heroine, (though sneakily still sidestepping issues of economic inequality by setting the film in the 1920s). It's that it supplements the traditional wishing on a star with hard graft and shaping your own destiny. I like the new empowering Disney. But I like the old-fashioned hand-drawn Disney even more. Long may it continue!

Additional tags: Randy Newman, Anika Nonie Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Michael Leon Woolley, Ron Clements, John Musker

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG is on global release bar Japan where it is released on March 6th.

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.