Toy Story 3

We're doin' a sequel,
That's what we do in Hollywood.

I saw the first two Toy Story movies at the cinema; I don't really know why it's taken me so long to see the third and final* movie in the sequence.

Toy Story 3 picks up the theme of growing up and the abandoning of childhood playthings from Toy Story 2. Young Andy is off to college and the toys are accidentally sent not to the attic for storage but to be donated to the local daycare centre. Here they discover an apparent paradise, but with the inevitable serpent, setting the scene for a cunning escape plan.

The film maintains the standard of the series, with gorgeous animation and a witty script. It even maintains the emotional punch, building to a genuinely gripping climax and a payoff three films in the making.

It was well worth looking out on LoveFilm/Amazon Prime.

* Until about a month ago when they announced a fourth one, thus rendering The Muppets Most Wanted's satire slightly moot.

American Hustle

The hair! The clothes! The hair!

Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) is a jobbing conman who has worked his way up from the bottom of the pack after seeing his honest father ground down by bad people. He hits gold when he meets Sydney Prosser (Adams), a dancer whose turn as English aristocrat Lady Edith Greensly allows the pair to pull off increasingly high profile art and loan scams. Their life is complicated by Rosenfeld's estranged wife Rosalyn (Lawrence), who holds custody of their son over him, and then further when FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) catches them in a scam and ropes them in to help him get more arrests in exchange for immunity.

When the original operation offers the chance to net first Mayor Carmine Polito (Renner), then members of Congress and the Senate and a substantial mob operation represented by Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro), Richie starts to lose control. Obsessed with his own glory as an agent, and with 'Lady Edith', his growing ambitions threaten to spiral the scam into something that can not survive its own weight. With Irving's growing admiration for and friendship with Polito and Rosalyn's relationship with a mobster, the stage is set for disaster, or for the con of the century.

American Hustle is loosely based on the real-life Abscam operation conducted by the FBI in the late 70s and early 80s, but that's mostly background. The dramatic core of the film is the relationships between the protagonists, both professional and personal, and the lies that they tell to each other and themselves. The lies in this movie are almost characters in their own right, in particular the big one, the scam that begins with an attempt to hook an art fraudster and grows into a monster than can not be tamed. "No more fake shit," Prosser pants in her entirely false English accent while deflecting DiMaso's advances in a nightclub toilet cubicle. That's the quintessence of the movie, right there; lies, sex and squalid glamour.

Renner's hair in this movie can only truly be appreciated in
profile.

The script and story are good, but the film really triumphs on the strength of its look and its cast. The faded glamour of the 70s/80s divide is everywhere. Bright clothes clash with a grimy backdrop, the collapsing promise of the American dream as elaborate and unconvincing a pretense as Rosenfeld's extraordinary comb-over. The cast put in note-perfect performances as slightly grotesque versions of the real figures involved in Abscam, and every aspect of the production design evokes the era as something extraordinary and almost alien to a modern eye.

American Hustle is not a tightly-plotted scam picture in the mould of The Sting or Ocean's Eleven; the Abscam plot is more of a bar on which to hang the personal drama, and while there are twists they are not the point. It's a film about lies and love and above all about what is fake and what - if anything - is real, and a damn good film at that.

Secretary

Recently released from psychiatric care, Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is seeking an escape from her family home. She finds it in employment as secretary to eccentric lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader), and as the relationship spirals rapidly beyond the professional it provides more of an escape than Lee could have expected.

Secretary is another of those films that I really ought to have watched ages ago. In this case, I didn't because so many people raved so much about it, I was worried they'd be disappointed if I hated it (which in the end, I didn't).

The film is described (by Wikipedia, at least) as an erotic romance, although it also has elements of romantic and/or sex comedy. The film neither glamourises nor scorns the central BDSM relationship of the film, instead painting it with good and bad tones. Grey's pervasive and self-destructive sense of shame at his own nature is clearly painted as the deviance here (alongside the requests of the self-styled sadists Lee meets later in the film), and the continuation of her unfulfilling relationship with her 'normal' boyfriend the only blameworthy act on Lee's part. In many ways, it takes a subject that expects to be treated as kinky and weird, or played for laughs, and instead makes a conventional romantic comedy of office relationships out of it.

The relationship itself is nuanced and well observed, and the balance of power within it is beautifully portrayed. The distance between the sneering accusation of 'submissive' by Edward's ex and the determined, controlled persona that submission actually brings out of Lee is tremendous. Much of the film's subtext relies on wordless moments, where a lesser film would throw in a bunch of voice over, but Gyllenhaal and Spader carry it with their bodies and faces alone, with Lee's ordeal presented throughout not as degradation, but as triumph.

If the film has a notable weakness, it is that it is too successful in normalising the central BDSM relationship, to the point that it sometimes seems to have lost its USP. It might also have had more punch when it was made, that being a dozen years ago now. It remains an excellent film, however, and one I am glad to have finally seen.

Edited to add: In a more recent discussion of the film, I suggested that it is a film about two very unhealthy people, who are unhealthy in large part because the world tells them that they are and forces them to conform and to hate themselves, who come together and ultimately forge a healthy relationship together.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

All these, and more...

It's a well-known fact that Marvel has it over DC in terms of the movies these days, thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but ten years ago comics adaptations were all about the DC Animated Universe, a series of interlinked cartoon series which began with the nigh-perfect Batman the Animated Series.

After the end of the DCAU at the close of Justice League Unlimited, this must have placed a pretty hefty burden on anyone looking to make the next Batman cartoon. That series was actually The Batman, a far more conventional series, with toy-oriented gadgets and a less distinctive art style. It was not unsuccessful, but it was no Batman the Animated Series.

What followed the end of The Batman was something very different. Batman: The Brave and the Bold is usually described as a love letter to the Silver Age, a 'team-up' series characterised by four-colour heroics, an upbeat tone and a general air of silliness (with many plots, as well as characters, lifted directly from the pages of Silver Age comics.) It thumbed its nose at chronology, freely featuring Batman fighting Nazis in WWII, and made frequent use of time travel and alternate dimensions. It was wacky, it was joyful, it was a whole heap of fun.

Oh yeah; that happened. And then...

Halfway through season 2 came Chill of the Night, in which Batman is tempted to choose between justice and vengeance in confronting his parents' killer.

Dark and thoughtful, it was probably the shark jump of the series in the original sense (the shark jump is not the cause of decline in a show, but the high point to which it never ascends again). It was closely followed by The Siege of Starro and The Last Patrol, neither of which was short on dramatic punch. While it continued to be an excellent show, it certainly never matched this standard.

Season 3 was admittedly weaker, with aspects of the series becoming almost self-parody (barely an episode goes by without Batman referring to his fists as 'the hammers of justice'), and after only to and a half series the show wrapped up, to give way to Beware the Batman, a return to a more serious tone.

In its short run, BTBATB brought a real zip back to the Caped Crusader's mythos, and made Aquaman awesome again in the first time since... forever (which isn't entirely fair; the dude rules 2/3 of the planet and is stronger than pretty much anyone but Superman and Wonder Woman, but he gets treated like he's the Man from Atlantis.) It swiftly became one of my favourite things and looks set to remain so.

Date Night

On a recommendation from a friend which I can only accurately describe as glowing, Hannah and I watched the 2010 Steve Carell and Tina Fey romcom Date Night last night (thanks, LoveFilm).

Carell and Fey (thankfully not repeating her accent from Muppets Most Wanted, which we'd rewatched on Sunday) play the Fosters, Phil and Claire, a married professional couple with two children. When their best friends (played by Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, the first - but by no means the last - of many top flight actors who will be making a flying visit to this film) confide that they are separating due to the romance in their marriage deteriorating to the point that they are 'excellent room mates', the Fosters decide to be spontaneous and replace their usual movie and dinner date night with a trip to the city, where they steal an unclaimed reservation in order to eat at an exclusive restaurant.

This one act of dishonesty leads to a mistaken identity and a madcap chase across the city as corrupt cops and gangsters try to reclaim a flash drive that they believe the couple has stolen. At the same time, the Fosters rekindle their relationship and end up doing all the things they thought they'd left behind.

The story is unashamedly silly, and the film's life comes from the performances - mostly Carell and Fey, but also the unexpectedly prominent supporting cast, which includes Ray Liotta, Mark Wahlberg, James Franco and Mila Kunis, as well as a silent will.i.am as himself - and from a surprisingly adept action set piece featuring two cars joined at the front bumper. The gag reel in the credits reveals that a number of routines in the film were improvised by Carell and Fey from a broad premise, and the strength of the partnership tells in the end results.

All in all, Date Night was a lot of fun.

The Great Gatsby

Don't get blase; everything in the film looks this good.

It was a couple of years ago that I found out Baz Luhrman was making a new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, all art deco style and anachronistic musical numbers, and I said 'sign me up'. Hannah was also keen, which makes it odd that neither of us managed to watch it until a couple of weeks ago.

So, this is a Baz Luhrman film, so if you don't like Baz Luhrman, it's not going to be for you. It is a gorgeously stylised film, evoking the period of the novel through sumptuous art deco set design and costumes. The actors all look the part, in fact the casting is near-perfect, and the dialogue is snappy, while the plot rattles along at a rapid pace.

Di Caprio has now emerged from his difficult hearthrob phase and, like Brad Pitt, is now cheerfully excelling in the kind of character roles once denied him on account of his boyish good looks. Maguire is a perfect ingenue, and the supporting players - from Mulligan's self-centred Daisy and Edgerton as her brutish husband - to lesser parts such as Fisher's brassy moll and Debicki's enthusiastic socialite. The interaction between the characters - in particular the central triad of Gatsby's optimism, Carraway's blinkered devotion and Daisy's brittle reserve - is note perfect.

It's not a film with a great deal of depth, but it's slick and beautiful, and was definitely worth the wait.

Premium Rush, Happy Feet Two, Mr Peabody and Sherman and The LEGO Movie

Quite a parade this time out, as I catch up on some things I've missed posting on.

Premium Rush is a small-scale action movie, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a New York bicycle messenger. Postgraduate law dropout Wiley lives for his work, dodging traffic around the city to deliver packages on his single-gear, brakeless steel bike. Hired to courier a receipt across town, he finds himself pursued by a corrupt cop and unwittingly embroiled in the world of Chinese hawala moneylenders and snakeheads.

JGL is an actor I have a lot of time for, especially since Brick and 50:50 showed that his younger performances (Third Rock from the Sun, 10 Things I Hate About You) were just the tip of his range. Here, he kind of takes second fiddle, not to the plot but to the deadly labyrinth of New York City traffic. The city is shot at a breakneck pace, only slowing down when it comes off the bikes, or to illustrate Wiley's navigational skills through slow-mo projected courses in a style similar to the fight planning scenes in Sherlock Holmes.

The action is small scale, our heroes tiny figures weaving between the lethal, anonymous mass of the traffic, the story simple, but the film successfully portrays this small conflict as being as real and meaningful as any world-saving quest.

Happy Feet Two is a very different affair, although it too has its depths, in particular a strong environmental message. Once again, it is about a penguin seeking for his own method of self-expression, although in this case Mumbles' son Eric can't dance or sing in the traditional style, only finding his voice in a very different genre.

It's a sweet little film, with a fine voice cast and a decent message about global warming not too heavily delivered. As with the original, it has some good songs, although not every one works perfectly.

Mr Peabody and Sherman is a reinvention of a pairing from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, for those of us who remember that; a hyper-intelligent dog and his human adopted son.

After years of living with Mr Peabody and taking regular field trips into the past via the Wayback, a time machine remarkably similar to the one in Free Birds, but not voiced by George Takei, Sherman starts at school with other humans, where he immediately gets into a fight with a spoiled little girl, provoking a rabid overreaction from the monstrous child services rep Ms Grunion.

The film has some cracking sequences. Mr Peabody is dry and sarcastic, with a ready line in puns that appeals to me, and the slightly awkward father and son chemistry with Sherman is delightful. Penny is a complete bitch, but grows on you as she softens, and the historical characters are wonderful parodies of their most famous distillation. Ms Grunion...

Okay, so, wow; this is a character that deeply, deeply disturbs me. Horrid, racist, overbearing, self-righteous and, above all, violent towards children, she is almost too much of a grotesque for me to deal with. Fortunately, her appearances in the film are minimal, and the rest is highly enjoyable.

Finally, The LEGO Movie, a hyperkinetic, technicolour romp through every pop cultural phenomenon with a LEGO franchise and then some. It's a pretty hardcore nerdfest, from the relentless stream of references to the fact that it is computer animated in the style of stop motion.

Emmett is a generic construction worker in a LEGO city, until the Piece of Resistance (I lolled) gets stuck to his back and throws him into an adventure beyond his understanding and outside the instructions. Working with the Master Builders - people capable of reconfiguring ordinary LEGO buildings and vehicles into anything they can envisage - he must confront the evil Lord Business and his plan to freeze the world in his quest for perfect order.

For the most part, it's a fun ride, but what lifts the film above an extended advert for LEGO is that its central message is not that you should buy lots of LEGO sets, but rather than each LEGO set can be anything you want it to be, not just what is in the instructions. As someone who used to have an enormous sack of mixed bricks, I can get behind that message.

A Prairie Home Companion

One of the delights of the old BBC 7 - now Radio 4 Xtra - was The Garrison Keillor Radio Show, the international broadcast name for Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media's long-running (39 years and counting) radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. For those of you not familiar with the format, it's like The Muppet Show, if the Muppets were humans, on the radio, mildly sedated and really into country and American folk music. Garrison Keillor presents the show with the kind of warm milk delivery that lulls you into a sense of absolute comfort, and musical acts are interspersed with comedy skits and spoof advertisements for Powdermilk biscuits or the Professional Organisation of English Majors.

And then they made a movie of it.

To say that my mind was boggled would not be far from the truth. How, I wondered, could this be done?

Given the movie's limited release in the UK, it took me a while to find out. It was, in the end, the final movie directed by Robert Altman (The Player, Pret a Porter), and with an all-star cast portraying characters created by Keillor and the radio show's rep company (most of whom have cameo roles) it is a typically Altman ensemble piece, depicting the last broadcast of a fictionalised version of A Prairie Home Companion.

The action is limited to the stage and dressing rooms of the Fitzgerald Theatre (aside from a couple of scenes in Mickey's Diner). Kevin Kline narrates as Guy Noir, ex-Private Eye-turned-security guard, and the stories of the various characters - Keillor as himself, Woody Harrelson and C. Thomas Howell as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and Lindsey Lohan as members of a singing family - are threaded through by Asphodel (Virginia Madsen), an angel in a white trenchcoat come to escort someone to God. The camera moves from the stage to the backstage, from performance to 'reality', as the cast of the radio show face their impending cancellation with varying degrees of resignation and denial.

That's really all there is to it.

In a lot of ways, it's like the radio show. It isn't exactly daring, but it's not as bland and safe as it initially seems. There is not much plot and its humour is distinctly odd, but it knows it. At one stage, Asphodel actually discusses with Keillor a joke he once told (two penguins are standing on an ice floe. One turns to the other and says: "You look like you're wearing a tuxedo." The second penguin says: "How do you know I'm not?") and why it is, or isn't, funny ("It's funny because people laugh.") It is packed with great performers giving good performances, and if not exactly Altman's greatest work, it has much to recommend it if you're a fan of that sort of gentle, rambling experience.

Robot and Frank

Frank (Frank Langella) is a bad-tempered, increasingly sentile retired former cat burglar with a stubborn attachment to his own independence; robot is a mechanical health-care aid with advanced motor and cognitive abilities. They commit crime.

That's pretty much the plot of this independent film. OIn the near future, our elderly ex-fellon is bought a robot helper by his son (James Marsden) and, when it suggests a 'project' to give him structure and help maintain his memory, he teaches it to pick locks so that they can commit burglaries together. Complications occur in the form of the librarian (Susan Sarandon) he has a crush on and a radical anti-robot daughter (Liv Tyler), as the unlikely partnership provides him with a new lease of life.

I'm not a great fan of either James Marsden or Liv Tyler, but they were both pretty decent in this, and Langella and Sarandon are serious class acts. It's an odd little film, but rather sweet and not a little sad in parts, being not just a sci-fi buddy comedy about a man an his robot stealing jewels, but also a touching exploration of the nature and importance of memory, and of its loss.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Fire

In the final season of Avatar, Aang and his posse head for the Fire Nation, intent on bringing down the Fire Lord and his plans for world domination. This is a chance for an exploration of the series' long-running enemy up close, and introduces Team Avatar to the human face of the Fire Nation, both in the form of its civilian populace and through Prince Zuko's eventual face turn to become Aang's firebending master.

As with Earth, Fire becomes yet darker. The planned attack on the Fire Nation is crippled by the fall of Ba Sing Se and the near-mortal wounding of Aang at the end of Book 2. The Fire Lord goes from a brooding presence to an active menace, his monomaniacal drive dominating the series as the Fire Nation gears up for a war of annihilation on the remaining Earth Kingdom cities.

This is a pretty all-action conclusion to the series, maintaining a blistering pace, with more than a third of the running time taken up by three multi-part stories - The Day of Black Sun, The Boiling Rock and Sozin's Comet. In addition, the various characters each get their turn in the spotlight: Sokka in Sokka's Master and The Boiling Rock; Katara in The Puppetmaster and The Southern Raiders; Toph in The Runaway; and Zuko in The Beach.

The ending is a bit of a deus ex machina, but pays off the philosophy which has run through the series. It also features the open appearance of the Order of the White Lotus, a league formed of every kick-arse old person encountered in the course of the series, who essentially retake the largest city in the world with an army of five. All in all, it's been a satisfying run. I look forward to The Legend of Korra coming up on LoveFilm.

Arrow: Season 1, Episodes 1-5

With superhero movies and cartoons at something of an all-time high, it is perhaps surprising that there aren't more superhero TV shows, although doubtless the effects cost is a major consideration. Arrow is a fairly good bet on those grounds, taking as its central character one of the effects-light 'supernormals' of the DC universe; Oliver Queen, aka Green Arrow.

Speaking of supernormals, let's get this out of the way: Arrow is very, very Batman. Oliver Queen is a millionaire playboy who loses his father and becomes a vigilante in response, defending his city as hooded - not masked, although for added security he is heavily mascaraed - vigilante... the Hood. Yeah, we have yet to have Queen's alter-ego referred to as Green Arrow, or even Arrow, instead focusing on the visual and motivational parallels with Robin Hood. That makes a certain amount of sense, although honestly if you're leery of superheroes with silly names, I think you're probably working in the wrong genre.

Now, there are differences. Where Thomas Wayne was a martyred saint, Robert Queen was a fallen angel, and Oliver's mission is to redeem his father's sins more than to honour his memory. In addition, Bruce Wayne's world tour of unbelievably painful training is replaced by a gauntlet of survival on an island called Purgatory, which through a series of flashbacks is revealed to be full of horrible DC villains (and straight up, if you're going to try to have a more gritty, realistic look to your superhero series, Deathstroke the Terminator may not be the way to go).

Seriously, is this the torso of a millionaire playboy?

Good points:

Stephen Amell balances the playboy facade of Queen with the terrifying intensity of the Hood pretty well (and pretty is the operative word). He has the usual problem that he apparently manages to persuade people he's an idle dilettante despite having the body of the world's greatest athlete (see right), but the coincidence of his return is covered well, and I like that even in the first five episodes he is expanding his team and making it more about the mission than himself.

The supporting cast is also pretty strong, with Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance being a little weak, mostly because she has to vacillate wildly between trusting and not trusting Queen, and thus going from smart to pretty dumb depending on the needs of the plot. Colin Salmon is in it, and that's never bad, but as I have since Resident Evil I worry that he'll end up being cut into teeny tiny cubes.

Bad points:

So far, we're just building up the ongoing antagonists, and most of the baddies have just been corrupt businessmen with goons; the most interesting villain was the Yakuza hit woman and that's because her long, white hair broke the visual monotony of clipped professional cuts and dark grey suits, rather than because she was in any way well-rounded.

Well, and flashback Deathstroke, but he's just been in flashbacks.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Earth

The second series of Avatar: The Last Airbender picks up Team Avatar - a term used in fandom, but also coined in-universe by Sokka, during a period of envy over the cool names of elite military units - as they emerge triumphant from the North Pole to travel to the Earth Kingdom and study Earthbending.

Earth is in a lot of ways darker than Water. In particular, Prince Zuko is replaced as primary antagonist by his sister Azula, whose lethal confidence stops just short of parody, and finds himself an outcast, mired in an emofunk despite the best effort of Iroh, who remains the boss throughout this series. Aang's struggles with the nature of the Avatar's calling continue, as Earthbending does not come naturally to him and the awesome power of the Avatar state both places him at risk and demands that he give up the people he cares for most.

There are also a couple of especially dark episodes, such as the one which explores Zuko's childhood and Appa's Lost Days, which recounts the arduous and ultimately futile journey of the kidnapped Appa to be reunited with Aang.

This is not to say that the series loses its sense of humour. I would pay good money for a buddy cop series featuring Iroh and Toph, the blind Earthbender who joins the team; a well-bred but still ill-mannered self-made-waif who teaches herself to bend metal just to prove she could.

Earth also develops the philosophy of its universe, mostly through Iroh, although with contributions from Toph and mad Earth King Bumi, and the emotional and spiritual balance of the four elements.

The end of the series is a major downer, but we've moved briskly on to Book 3: Fire.

Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer

The Adventures of Captain Alatriste is a lengthy series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez Reverte. In Alatriste, director Augustin Diaz Yanes takes the sensible course of adapting only the first of these novels, introducing the character and his page/chronicle Inigo, their friends and enemies at court, and their involvement in the upper echelons of 17th century Spanish politics through Alatriste's unlikely rescue of the visiting Prince of Wales and Duke of Buckingham.

Oh, no; wait. what I should have said is that he shoves the central plots of the first five novels into a single, sumptuous two-hour-plus epic. At the very least, I can say that it never drags.

Make no mistake, this is a film that demands your attention and mocks you mercilessly if you let it slide. It's in Spanish, for starters, so if you're not a Spanish speaker, you'd better be watching the subtitles. The plot is also pretty Machiavellian, so try to keep up, and given that most of the characters are swarthy, mustachioed soldiers in the Spanish tercios, the casual viewer could easily get lost.

That said, it is a magnificently shot movie, with superb action sequences, and it never gets bogged down in all that politics. I suspect that I would have been in absolute throes of ecstasy over the cinematography if I knew more about Velasquez, and I was pretty impressed as it was.

Worth a watch, certainly, although it's two hours in which you won't really be chatting much.

Perspectives on Horror - Frailty and Red Riding Hood

 I strongly suspect that this is not going to be anyone's idea of an obvious movie double bill, but bear with me.

Frailty is actor Bill Paxton's directorial debut, a Texas-set paranormal thriller in which a young man (then mega-heartthrob Matthew McConaughey, looking disheveled and ragged) attempts to convince an FBI agent that his brother was a serial killer through a tale of their father's religious visions, while Red Riding Hood is a Twiclone based on the titular fairy tale, complete with a forced love-triangle and a heroine with largely self-inflicted problems.

Not, I confess, a logical pairing.

But...

Here's the thing. Neither film is exactly a horror film, but both draw a vein of horror from the manipulation of perception.

First up, spoiler-free reviews:

Frailty is a compelling drama, well-acted and directed, and by turns chilling and thought provoking. It is well-worth seeing.

Red Riding Hood wants to be Twilight, without being Twilight, and has far less to say than it thinks it does. It is still worth seeing, because it's fun, and being from the director of Twilight it is very, very pretty to look at.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would suggest choosing Frailty.

Beyond this point, I need to discuss particular plot points, so there will be spoilers.

Frailty opens with Fenton Mieks approaching the FBI Agent in charge of investigating the 'God's Hand' killer to announce that the killer is his brother Adam. He proceeds to tell a story of the two brothers and their father, a good man who one night announces that God has sent an angel to tell him that the end times have come and that he and his sons must hunt down and destroy demons in human form. Only they can see the demons and their sins, he explains, and Adam accepts this, even as Fenton sees his father's descent into madness and relentless pursuit of a random list of names.

And then the film turns everything on its head simply by shifting its perspective, with a twist that does the two things that a twist ought to do: It takes you by surprise, and then immediately convinces you that it shouldn't have done.

Red Riding Hood is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Valerie, soon to be given the eponymous cloak, a good girl in a village beset by a werewolf. After the wolf kills her sister, a professional hunter is summoned and the long 'truce' with the beast breaks down, with Valerie caught in the middle of it all.

Except... if viewed from anyone else's perspective, the story is somewhat different. Valerie isn't the innocent people think, or that even she views herself as. She is actually resented by her friends, bears some indirect guilt for her sister's death, and when pressed proves to be selfish, vicious and somewhat amoral. She scorns the village catch, Henry (rich, handsome, honest, sharply intelligent and devoted) for her long-time inappropriate squeeze, Peter (moody, surly, emo hair, although he is at least also loyal to a fault), but won't do so openly and is then willing to stab Peter on a hunch that he might be the wolf, but when he is infected, decides that he's so dreamy he gets a pass. At the end of the film, she is also immensely dismissive of people who, despite their own fears, envies and frailties, when push came to shove were willing to stand up for her against a monster, be that the wolf or the hunter.

It also has a twist, which again I didn't see coming, but I'm not sure that I should have done, which makes it a little less sound.

And there's a rave scene in the middle which is as jarring as the one in the first non-existent Matrix sequel, and even more anachronistic.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Water

We've had some disagreements about M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar: The Last Airbender in our household. Hannah thinks it's great, and that the anime bores unfairly dismiss it as different to the series; I think it is a beautiful film with some very real problems, especially in terms of pacing and failure to 'show, not tell'. I also point out that Avatar: The Last Airbender is actually not technically an anime, but a western 'anime style' animation, but that just gets me glowered at, and rightly so.

Anyway, that's not why we decided to watch through the series on Lovefilm, but it's something to bear in mind.

Avatar is set on the world of Pandora, where the peaceful Na'avi...

No, wait; I'll start again.

Avatar is set in a fantasy world (and it is the entire world, Book 1: Water takes us from the South Pole to the North in 20 episodes), divided between four great cultures, the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes, the Fire Nation and the Air Nomads. Each culture has its own signature mystical elemental martial art, or bending art, allowing them to control their nation's element. For centuries, the four were in balance, watched over by the Avatar, who mastered all four elements, and was reborn - like the Dalai Lama - into each culture in turn in a never-ending cycle: Water, Earth, Fire and Air.

A century before the start of the series, the Fire Nation mobilised its vast military and set out to conquer the world. The Avatar vanished, only to be found by a brother and sister of the Southern Water Tribe in episode 1. Book 1, like the film, then charts the journey of the Avatar - Aang, lone survivor of the exterminated Air Nomads and titular Last Airbender - and his comrades, Katara and Saako, from the South Pole to the North, in order for Aang and Katara to learn Waterbending.

In some places, the series is much better than the film; in particular, it tends to be more willing to think big, especially when it comes to Earthbending. Moreover, the Earthbender prison makes more, which is to say any sense in the series. Far more time is devoted - because it is available - to Aang's growth as a character, and the same goes for Katara and Saaka. My biggest complaint - the condensing of the key relationship between Saaka and Princess Yue to a single line of narration - stands, although the series still only gives it a few establishing scenes.

The arc story is compelling, although the quality of the individual episodes varies, with a few employing pretty blatant straw man aesops, but when it is good it is good. Certainly, I am looking forward to moving on to Book 2: Earth.

The one thing I feel that the film did noticeably better than the series is the final siege at the North Pole. While not perfect, I found that the great wave in the film worked better for me than the series' giant glowing aqueous carp man. Your mileage may vary.

The Lion in Winter

Prince John: "He's got a knife!"
Queen Eleanor: "Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians.

Based on James Goldman's play (and, with Goldman writing the screenplay, preserving pretty much all of the dialogue), The Lion in Winter is a domestic comedy-romance transformed into grand tragedy by the fact that the family in question are the Plantagenets; Henry II (Peter O'Toole), his scorned wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), his rebellious children, Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry), his mistress Alais (Jane Merrow) and her brother, King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton). The play was not successful prior to the release of the film, but unusually it did very well afterwards, due in no small part to the strength of the script.

The cast, as you can see, is spectacular, and the production design is lavish, but it is Goldman's dialogue that sparkles, in particular in the many confrontations between the two leads. O'Toole as the mercurial Henry goes from playful to curmudgeonly to snarlingly overbearing with barely a pause and never the slightest warning, while Hepburn plays Eleanor with a sharp and brittle strength. The rest of the cast are no less worthy of note, many of them in very early film roles preceding long and distinguished careers. Hopkins' Richard is a picture of chivalric nobility, and in his moments of defeat has a truly affecting look of wounded pride. Castle's Geoffrey is overtly the weakest performance, so much so that its strength only shows when one realises that Geoffrey is supposed to be the forgettable - and forgotten - one. Terry, later to play Excalibur's Arthur, is here a weasely presence, appearing very much as a lesser analogue to Dalton's beautiful, reptilian Philip. Merrow is sort of the straight man of the piece, never really knocking heads with anyone, but plays Alais and her devotion to Henry with conviction.

The action of the film is limited to one castle and a few days over Christmas in 1183, with eldest son Henry, the Young King, recently dead and the older Henry yet to name another heir. Plot and counter plot fly back and forth, secrets are revealed and past cruelties raked over as Henry pushes John, Eleanor pushes Richard and Geoffrey pushes himself.

Tightly directed and superbly played, the film is a corker, well worth viewing, if it's new to you, or re-viewing if it isn't.

Pete's Dragon

So, I suspect that I'll be watching a lot of old Disney films with Arya-Rose over the years. Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, The Three Lives of Thomasina, Darby O'Gill and the Little People; you know, the terrifying ones.

Pete's Dragon is the tale of a yougn boy and his friendship with a magical dragon named Elliot, whose ability to become invisible makes most people assume he's imaginary. Pete and Elliot stumble into a quaint little town, where Pete is taken in by the lighthouse keeper and his daughter, while being pursued by the violent redneck family who in some means purchased him and wish to assert their ownership. Meanwhile, Dr Terminus is in town, a quack doctor looking to go 'legit' by selling remedies made from slicing up Elliot.

Both the child slavery angle and the violent dismemberment of a sentient being are, of course, discussed through the medium of jaunty, upbeat singing.

At the end, Pete has a family, and so Elliot goes off to help the next child in need, as magical friends in disney movies of the era were wont to do.

It's not terrifying like any of those others I mentioned, but it is weirdly dark given the tone of the songs, or possibly vice versa. In particular, We Got a Bill of Sale right here - and the fact that no one seems to question this on legal grounds, worries me. Hannah suggested that the bill was in fact adoption papers, but they certainly never refer to them as such.

70s Disney; it's its own brand of messed up.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is not the film advertised by its trailer, hence my inclusion of the trailer here instead of the poster, so we can look back at the merry jaunt through the end of existence we were promised, but not delivered. It's not a fault of the movie; rather this is a movie that could probably not have been properly trailed and the trailer makers did what they could.

Bittersweet is a word that I don't use too often; like 'comedy drama' it's usually used idly to describe something that doesn't fit into the usual categories.In this case, however, both of those terms are apt. Seeking a Friend... takes a serious subject and treats it with appropriate dramatic weight through comedy. It balances fatalism and hope, even in the most hopeless of scenarios, in a sedate exploration of the things that are truly important.

It is a film, one of the few, that actually made me cry.

Steve Carrell is perfect here, his trademark hangdog expression evoking with Dodge the passive despair of a man whose life fell apart years ago but he's only just starting to realise it, especially compared to the brittle energy of Kiera Knightley's unfulfilled extrovert Penny.

The supporting cast are equally effective, each group representing a different response to the coming apocalypse: Dodge's friends desperately trying to escape the futility of what they've worked for, the manic energy of the Friendsies crowd, the stoic avoidance of the survivalists; William Petersen's brief turn as a truck driver with a terminal illness who has found new life in knowing that his prognosis is now longer than the world's. And then there is Martin Sheen in a quietly affecting almost-cameo as Dodge's father.

There's no flash, even the end comes without effects shots, and it's the stronger film for it.

LoveFilm Capsule Reviews

These are the things I have rented from LoveFilm.

Lawless - Never got around to watching it. I suspect it will be good, but I wasn't in the mood.
Taken - I've been to Paris; it wasn't like this.
Dredd - Exploding bodyparts FTW, but we felt uncomfortable watching with the baby in the room.
Looper - Nonsense, when you get down to it, but sufficiently compelling nonsense to let it go.
9 - High-concept, mostly successful.
John Carter - So much fun.
Surrogates - I struggled to get past 'surrogate Bruce Willis is creepy'.
50/50 - Possibly the most fun you'll have watching a film about chemotherapy.
Monsters vs. Aliens - My PhD is in dance!
Monsters - Wow. That was... What was that?
Prince of Persia - Is anyone in this film Persian?
The Walking Dead - Very good; not much fun.
Falling Skies - More please!
Pathfinder - Vikings vs. Native Americans. Karl Urban wins.
Ghost Rider - Spirit of Vengeance - Keeping Christopher Lambert in wine.
The Cabin in the Woods - Rarely have the tropes of horror been so effectively followed and critiqued at the same time.
GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra - The Baroness is not a brainwashed goodie! She's evil, damnit! Look at her outfit.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - After four installments, the MI reboot finally realises how silly it is, and becomes awesome.
Underworld - Awakening - I want this time back.
Conan the Barbarian - I'm actually not sure I didn't just imagine this film based on bits of other films.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice - Has a certain something, but fails to be epic.
Alice in Wonderland - Much better than I expected.
Ironclad - History is something that happens to other people, apparently.
Solomon Kane - Much sillier than it knows.
Castle - Good, lighthearted murder-fun.
Green Lantern - Worst film with green in the title ever.
Green Hornet - Benefits from the above.
How to Train Your Dragon - DR-Rag-ON!
The Last Airbender - Rather epic.
Drive Angry - Funny as hell.
Season of the Witch - We're going to need more holy water.
Tron: Legacy - Shiny.
Kung Fu Panda 2 - Awesome. And attractive.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Like a very low key X-Files in a bad hat.
Inkheart - Not as good as I had hoped.
The Expendables - Self-awaredly cretinous fun.
Iron Sky - Some good moments.
Drive - Very good; very nasty.
Predators - Much, much better than I had expected.
The Secret of the Unicorn - Thrilling adventures in the uncanny valley.
Game of Thrones - Proper epic.

Looper

Warning: Contains spoilers

Looper is a film about time travel. And telekinesis. Sort of. And crime.

It has good and bad points in all of those categories.

Its time travel mechanic is one of variability. The future in Looper is in a state of constant flux, with past events affecting the course of post-history for those who travel back in time. The Bruce Willis version of the main character has a good description of the way it works: his memories between 'now' and the time he left from, he explains, are no longer memories; they are a haze of possibilities, the older the hazier, until the moment passes when they become clear again. This is as clear as the film gets, which is all to the good, as it is rarely helpful to go into too much detail unless the time travel is the point, and in Looper it isn't. Neither is the telekinesis, which makes it a little odd that it's in there, save to make a small child into a threat.

The point of the film is about sacrifice; what people are prepared to give up and for what. Young Joe starts off not wanting to give up his future comfort for a friend, while Older Joe will kill children to get his life and his wife back, but not to give her up to save her. By the end of the film, Joe gives up his life to give the future - and a child - a chance.

The performances are strong, with JGL and Willis presenting the two Joes with an balance which means neither comes off as 'right', or even significantly better than the other. Emily Blunt is always good, although special mention has to go to the kid, who is wicked creepy. On a technical note, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Bruce Willis make-up is a little creepy and I like the heavy use of practical effects.