- Emily: Still not my favourite Bronte, although Emma Mackey is brilliant and the moors look pretty.
- EO: What with Banshees of Inisherin, this may be the Year of the Donkey.
- The Fablemans: The making of an auteur. It's clearly very autobiographical and gives away a few secrets (putting pinholes in the film; allowing light through to simulate flashes from gun-shots). The personal and insular focus, with specific parental relationships, is the same kind of film-making therapy as demonstrated in Honeyboy. Lock-downs clearly led to lot of navel gazing and subsequent oversharing. This is great if you want to know all about your directors/ actors/ film practitioners, but a bit self-indulgent if you don't.
- Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: A cute and quirky animation in which a shell tries to find his family. As well as exploring the sense of identity and belonging to a community, the film also addresses the issue of on-line fandom and virtue-signalling activism. It's far more affecting than it has any right to be.
- M3GAN: Science-fiction horror, which is also funny and cine-literate with self-aware references to previous works in the AI-companion-goes-feral genre.
 |
| The Jungle Book |
I believe it's time for school holidays again. Do children ever actually go to school these days? It seems that they're always on holiday, and I know this because the films showing at the cinema cater entirely for them on their weeks and months off from the strenuous business of colouring in and sitting nicely on the mat.
As I haven't got children, I don't really watch children's films. The ones that I do see are either too mawkishly sentimental and obvious, or, even worse, they try to hard to also amuse the grown-ups with winks and nudges that go entirely over the young person's head. I think this is a bit patronising - adults have films of their own to enjoy, so in a children's film you would think they could at least focus entirely on their target audience. Having said that, Hugo was one of my favorite films of 2011, so feel free to ignore my not-so-well-structured argument.
 |
| Hugo |
And Him Outdoors refuses to watch animation. He claims that nothing can beat Tom and Jerry so they might as well not try. I have seen Up, The Simpsons, South Park, and films from the Shrek, Toy Story and Wallace and Gromit franchises. Usually I watch these on the plane or with other friends when Him Outdoors is busy doing other more important things, or running up hills.
Naturally when I was a child I watched children's films and I wasn't so cynical that I had grown to sneer at Disney. Indeed, I liked Walt Disney films, especially the ones about animals. I wasn't particularly fussed about the princesses waiting for their princes to rescue them from wicked stepmothers or dwarves. It's not really any surprise that all my favourites are from more than forty years ago - when I was the right age to be the target audience.
5 Favourite Disney Animated Films.
- Jungle Book (1973)
- Sword in the Stone (1967)
- Pinocchio (1940)
- 101 Dalmatians (1961)
- Peter Pan (1953)
 |
| 101 Dalmatians |
