Raaaarr, I’m a computer-generated lion, and I’m today’s guest movie reviewer!

The short summary is that if you’re in the mood for some outstanding art direction and lovely special effects, go see this film. And the computer-generated lion is pretty good too.
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Yes, it’s smashing magical goodness.

Go and see it, though not if you have already read the book 8 times, and will wince inwardly when the film omits a plot-point—because the film cuts out a lot. And because really, that’s no way to enjoy a film.

Basically the story this year at the magical Mallory Towers is that the Tri-Wizard Tournament is being held at Hogwarts. It’s a game of danger and skill and 3 magical trials, played by 3 randomly selected participants from 3 magical schools. (The 3 schools being Hogwarts, a French lot and a school from Bulgaria.) Strangely (though not surprisingly), Harry Potter becomes selected, magically, in addition to the 3 formal contenders. Equally unsurprisingly, his schoolmates turn against the righteous little git. Anyway, I give nothing away by telling you that he completes the three tasks and beats all the other contenders. (I spoil the story for real in the next paragraph.) Predictably everybody loves little Harry Potter by the end. Continue reading →

Disappointing.

Not awful, but disappointing.

The problem is that this film has been done before, in a hundred different ways, and better. The animation is smashing, of course, and the timing, art direction, etc, etc is all slick as you would expect for a big-budget animated movie. It’s just really uninspired.

What I saw as its core problem was that it doersn’t do anything interesting with the talking-animals idea. Are they animals or are they people? The film can’t make up it’s mind. On the one hand they’re zoo-animals-as-comment-on-New-Yorkers, which is all very witty, but on the other hand, when they’re released into the wild, the lion can hardly restrain his urges to eat his friends (except that he converts to a nice fish-based diet at the end—sorry, that’s the plot I’ve just given away).

Now if they’re really animals, I don’t buy the lion’s friendship with the zebra; if they’re really New-Yorker-proxies, I don’t buy the cannibalism. The film just doesn’t commit. And having watched Finding Nemo, I can’t see that eating fish is so much more moral than eating zebras.

You see, Jungle Book worked in that respect, because the ‘personalities’ of the animals fit reasonably well to their natural behaviour. Even The Lion King with its artifical notion of lions peacibly ruling the other animals on the veldt had a certain kind of mystical logic (even if it was never particularly clear in The Lion King whether the lions actually ate their subjects…) However, this film tries to have it both ways and for that reason loses its tension.

Still, the penguins are very funny. The penguins are there as obvious comic relief… and they are genuinely funny, in a Marx brothers, slap-about sort of a way.

Best to skip Madagascar and watch Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of The Ware-Rabbit instead—that film has an accompanying short, featuring the penguins from Madagascar, so you get one tremendous film plus the best bits from a mediocre film for the price of one.

Sublime, sublime movie. A classic in its own lunchtime. A classy old English comedy, rivaling the best of what Ealing had to offer, with knockabout action sequences which, in a fair world, would make Will Farrell give up and go home. Wordplay worthy of Wodehouse. A script which makes you care about the characters. To top it all, this film even managed to beat Peter Jackson to the punch: in many respects it is a King Kong for our time.

If you haven’t seen Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of The Ware-Rabbit, you should make it a life priority.

Basically this is a return-to-form for Wallace & Gromit after the not-awful-but-not-exactly-inspired A Close Shave. It’s as good as The Wrong Trousers, for many of the same reasons; it has a similar B-movie-schlock tone mixed in with the comfortable-England slippers-and-garden-shed-invention. The ill-starred good-intentions of Wallace set against the unsung nobility of Gromit.

Gromit really is the architypal Brittish hero. If it were Holywood, Gromit would not only save the day, but receive the plaudits and win the girl-dog at the end. As it is, his pluck and stoicism win the day and he goes completely unrewarded. What a dog.