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?

GREEN ZONE - too simplistic, too late

GREEN ZONE is Matt Damon and Peter Greengrass' risible attempt to sucker the fanbase of the BOURNE films into watching a movie with a more avowedly political subject matter. Which just goes to show that the mainstream audience isn't that dumb. Just because it's got shaky handheld camera work and Matt Damon running around looking earnest and puzzled, doesn't mean that a movie is suspenseful or fundamentally politically interesting. I think the basic problem with GREEN ZONE, other than that it's not BOURNE 4, is that it's trying to make something we now taken as read look interesting. Yes, yes, it's a crying shame that we were taken into war in Iraq on the false premise that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. But, seven years later, I think the public is too jaded to really care. We were lied to - we're in a mess - now what? Kathryn Bigelow broke through the apathy with her micro-psycho take on the archetypal figure in a street-fighting war - the bomb disposal expert. Her film, THE HURT LOCKER, was tense, but also took us into a side of the war that we genuinely might not have know about before. But GREEN ZONE, for all its earnest good intentions, tells us nothing new, and shows us nothing new. Roger Ebert says that GREEN ZONE looks at war in a way no other war film has, insofar as the US is the dupe not the hero. I beg to differ. Hollywood has been making great films about the vicious lie at the heart of most wars for decades, not least about Vietnam and more recently with THREE KINGS. Ebert also damns with praise here: "By limiting the characters and using typecasting, he [Brian Helgeland] makes the deceit easy to understand". Respect to Ebert, but no. If you have to debase yourself with typecasting, then you're just not up to the job. And at any rate, this film really just isn't that complicated. The trick missed is to show the personal human price paid. As THE HURT LOCKER took inside the insane world of the lead character, we should've seen more about how a stand-up guy like Damon's CWO Roy Miller would've reacted psychologically to realising that he'd been duped. What happens when the naive man grows up? That to me is more interesting than how fast and where he runs around.

GREEN ZONE is on release in Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore, Canada, Finland, Indonesia, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Egypt, Germany, Kuwait, Switzerland, and Austria. It opens this weekend in Denmark, South Korea and Estonia. It opens on April 14th in Belgium, France, Argentina, the Netherlands and Brazil. It opens in Italy on April 23rd, in Turkey on April 30th, in Japan on May 14th, in Hungary on June 3rd and in Poland on June 4th.