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?

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? is okay shock

Maybe I'm just in an unreasonably happy holiday mood, or maybe my expectations had been lowered by the generally pisspoor reviews, but I rather enjoyed DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? It's the latest romantic comedy from writer-director Marc Lawrence, the man behind the phenomenally successful MISS CONGENIALITY and 2007's rather charming MUSIC AND LYRICS, also starring Hugh Grant. In DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play two successful New Yorkers on the verge of divorce but forced into the witness protection programme together.

This is a rather ludicrous premise on which to hang a relationship drama, but perfectly in step with typically farcial rom-com set-ups (see THE PROPOSAL or FAILURE TO LAUNCH). And, as you can imagine, there are plenty of set pieces where the effete liberal New Yorkers come up against the cruder delights of country living. Naturally, there is a third act crisis which prompts a happy ending. There's plenty to object to here. The laziness of the derivative plot, for one. The reductive politics in which city dwellers are cynical ne'er-do-wells and country dwellers are the keepers of Real American Values, is another.

But hidden underneath all these lazy genre tropes is a rather engaging romantic drama in which two mature people talk through issues from real life - the way in which difficulty conceiving can put a relationship under pressure. I found myself actually routing for Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant. Moreover, many of Hugh Grant's lines are genuinely witty.

So, whatever the rest of the reviewers say, I had a good time with this film. Underneath all that predictable attempted screw-ball slapstick lies a rather sweet relationship drama.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? is on release in the US, UK, Australia, France and Thailand. It opens next weekend in Argentina, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Sweden. It opens on January 20th in Egypt; on January 27th in Belgium, South Korea and Norway. It opens on February 5th in Brazil, Estonia and Finland; on February 11th in the Netherlands, Slovenia and Venezuela; on February 18th in Russia; on February 26th in Italy and Romania. It opens on March 5th in Poland and on March 12th in Japan.