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Reviews
A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)
A modern fairy tale - Brothers Grimm style
First of all, it's a beautiful movie to look at, in a dark, sepia-toned kind of way. The visual style is very similar to the Borrowers movie (come on, surely someone remembers that?). The location and period are indeterminate, with a mish-mash of anachronistic props, confusing dilations of time and distance, and a mixture of British and US actors adding to the lack of any sense of place or time. Then there's the plot - obviously ludicrous, and full of adults whose inability to identify a thinly-disguised Jim Carey at a hundred yards requires a serious suspension of disbelief.
But then, that's the point. This is a fairy tale, and like most fairy tales it picks and chooses between reality and fantasy as required. The closing credit sequence, reminiscent of shadow-puppet plays, reinforces the message: we are in a dream world of heroes and villains, where nothing is as it seems. Also, like most traditional fairy tales, it features a fair amount of nasty moments.
Once you accept this basic fact, the film's not bad at all. Jim Carey is - for him - very restrained (though by anyone else's standards it would still count as gross overacting) while the lead children put in excellent performances. Timothy Spall continues to stake his claim as a top character actor, while Billy Connolly unfortunately seems to be doing a Jim Carey impersonation.
This is a sophisticated film - far more so than Harry Potter - and I'd suggest that kids below 10 won't get it unless they're particularly tuned to it. Younger children will be more frightened by this movie than they would be by more overtly violent movies, if only because of the sense of menace that pervades. Conversely, if you're an adult, you'll need to abandon any attempt to make sense of the story and accept it with a childlike sense of wonder. If you can do that, you'll enjoy yourself.
It's not a classic, but it's reassuring to know that Hollywood still has space for eccentric goodies like this.
Thunderbirds (2004)
(SPOILER - refers to plot events) Not COMPLETELY awful...
Yeah, yeah, it's true what all the other reviews say, and you can see why Gerry Anderson publicly disassociated himself from the movie, but it's a bit of harmless entertainment. The problem is the expectations of an audience who grew up watching Thunderbirds on TV (and let's face it, with the frequent and popular re-runs that's every generation of kids from 1967 onwards, at least in the UK and US).
But if you can detach yourself from the emotional baggage the film is moderately entertaining. Let's look at the pluses for a moment. (It shouldn't take much longer than that.) It's fast moving, the special effects are competent, there are some good performances - Ron Cook as Parker in particular manages to capture the role's dead-pan humour without slavishly imitating the original - and some of the in-jokes for Thunderbird fans are okay. If you've got nothing else to do for an hour or two it's undemanding entertainment.
My 9-year-old daughter is a fan of the original TV series and she enjoyed the movie, though she felt let down by the tiny part played by the older Tracy brothers, who were the stars of the TV series. And that points to one of the two basic problems with this film.
With Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet, Anderson proved that kids' shows don't have to be ABOUT kids. They will happily identify with a group of adults so long as there's excitement and adventure to be had. There was no need for the whole Harry-Potter-esque bit (yes, we did notice that the characters of Alan, Tin Tin and Fermat correlated far too neatly to Harry, Hermione and Ron). It simply undermined the basic premise of the story and left fans feeling cheated.
Anderson's second great achievement was his no-compromise approach to production he didn't want to be producing puppet shows, and he pushed his team to new limits in making the series as realistic as they could, on relatively tiny budgets. The movie turns this on its head, and tries to make the human actors look puppet-like; where Anderson's designers paid meticulous attention to detail, the movie just doesn't bother. They even rub the message in with an excruciating scene where the Hood makes Brains walk like a puppet (accompanied by the classic line "I can control you like a puppet on a string," just in case anyone was still too stupid to get the joke). Anthony Edwards as Brains spends most of the movie looking like he wishes he was somewhere else, but in this scene in particular the actor's embarrassment is tangible. Let's not even go into the stutter.
Look at the London scenes: here we are, half a century into the future, yet the crowds round Jubilee Gardens are dressed in 2003 styles (retro-chic, maybe?) and the Police are driving 50-year-old Ford Focuses (must have been some serious cutbacks in the Met's budget!). The only change to London in 50 years is a new monorail which looks much like the 1970s model still to be seen trundling round Britain's National Motor Museum at Beaulieu (another in-joke Thunderbirds sometimes seemed to be monorail-obsessed, but perhaps we all were in 1967). It's sloppy and points to a production crew who just weren't taking the whole thing seriously.
And that, I think, why this movie has been panned so badly. It was made by people with no affection for their subject matter, and no respect for Anderson's achievement - and it shows. Perhaps they didn't realize just how much of their potential audience that attitude would upset. If you can overlook that, or if you have no strong feelings either way about Thunderbirds, you'll get a few laughs out of it.
True fans, meanwhile, should avoid this film if easily upset - they'll just have to wait patiently for the new Anderson-backed TV series of Captain Scarlet to emerge...
Eraserhead (1977)
The worst film ever made. Ever. Ever ever ever.
Pretentious, portentous nonsense from beginning to end. The kind of stuff that a certain type of student likes to discuss late at night to prove how "alternative" he is.
Some things happen in this film. (Don't ask me what, I can't be bothered to remember.) They happen very slowly, and for no discernible reason. Some consider that this gives it a dream-like quality; others might argue that this gives it more the quality of a pile of manure.
To qualify as a True Film Buff you have to watch this film five times without without tearing your own eyeballs out, then pretend to see some deep inner significance and dramatic worth in it. There is none. It's the Emperor's New Clothes of the movie world.
(No, I didn't like it much. Can you tell?)