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I’ve been meaning to write about a couple of excellent and unusual animated films I’ve seen recently. The first was shown over Christmas, and was a BAFTA-nominated retelling of the story of Peter and the Wolf by a joint UK/Polish team. There’s no dialogue, but it uses Prokofiev’s score for the story, fitting the action in the visuals to the musical themes. It’s hard to say what is so enchanting about it, but the characters are so engaging (Peter in particular) that you’re genuinely upset when the duck gets eaten by the wolf (I know — a spoiler — but I’m assuming that most people already know the story). The film manages to have a dark, contemporary feeling, without losing the timelessness or charm of the original story.

The second animation — The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello — is much more unusual visually speaking, but also features fantastic story-telling. Jasper Morello is a navigator who has lost his professional reputation after a tiny mistake lead to the death of a man. He’s been given another chance to prove himself on an airship voyage to unknown territory. The passenger — a ‘controversial scientist’ — is performing experiments to try to find a cure for the incurable plague which is killing much of the population.

The visual world that Jasper inhabits is a wildly imaginative riff on Victoriana, with gothic touches worthy of Mary Shelley, M. R. James or Conan Doyle. The world is rendered in rich, dark sepia, with etiolated, silhouetted Giacometti-like characters. This darkness makes the occasional splashes of red or orange, or changes of lighting, all the more striking. The technology is Victorian engineering gone mad: there are gears, cogs, steam engines, steel beams, rivets and wrought iron everywhere, and wonderfully excessive ornamentation on every structure. Jasper’s narration sounds like a Victorian gentleman’s journal, and fits well with the visual feel.

The animation is superb, but what holds your attention is the wonderful, old-fashioned story-telling. It feels like someone telling you a gothic horror story (the kind that is enjoyably creepy, rather than terrifying) around a cosy winter fire, and we were gripped by the tale. It was rightly nominated for an Oscar, and is well worth a watch if you can track it down.

A film about a group of young people obsessed with guns didn’t sound like the kind of film I’d enjoy at all, but something about the trailer and description (not to mention a writing credit for Lars Von Trier) suggested that it wouldn’t be a run of the mill gun-glorifying story. It’s actually quite a subtle film, full of contradictions.

Dick Dandelion (Jamie Bell doing a very passable American accent) is a quiet young man growing up in a mining town, who is widely viewed as a loser because he refuses to work in the mine. He has more or less resigned himself to a loser’s life as a lowly store clerk when Stevie (another clerk at the store) tells him that the gun he thought was a toy is a genuine weapon. Wendy (as he names the gun) becomes a talisman and a confidence giver—-a ‘moral support’, as he puts it. Dick and Stevie become friends and bring together the town’s other ‘losers’ to join their paradoxical society. ‘The Dandies’ are gun-toting pacifists, obsessed to a creepy degree with guns, the history of warfare, and gun crime forensic reports. They carry guns to give them confidence, to help them grow, but pledge never to ‘brandish’ them in public, and never to use them for violence against anyone.

It works, for a while. They hold themselves more upright, walk more confidently, and look others in the eyes as equals. Huey, who wears leg braces, even starts to attract girls. But then Sebastian—-a young man who has actually killed someone with a gun—-arrives, and Dick inducts him into The Dandies to try to instil a sense of responsibility into him. You sense that things will go wrong, and they do, but the precipitating event is so surprising that you’ll probably yell “What?” out loud when it happens.

Guns are the apparent subject of the film, but really it seems to be about confidence, courage, power and fear.

I’ve been an ardent Aardman fan since the first Wallace and Gromit short (A Grand Day Out), adored the short-lived Rex the Runt series, and—-while I thought ‘Chicken Run’ didn’t quite hit the spot—-I was itching to see this full length film film. It is, quite simply, brilliant. All the charm of the short W & G films is there, and the pace barely slackens over the entire 85 minutes. As usual, there are visual puns aplenty, as well as a lot of literary and film allusions, and you really need to watch it several times to pick everything up.

The plot concerns our heroes’ latest money-making venture: a pest control service called Anti-Pesto, which seems mostly to involve installing complex, hi-tech anti-theft devices in vegetable gardens and greenhouses to stop rabbits eating prize veg destined for the village Vegetable Show. Viewers unfamiliar with the world of giant leeks and prize marrows will think this is a joke, but it’s probably not too far from the truth. Wallace and Gromit, being gentle souls, can’t quite bring themselves to kill the rabbits they catch, so their home is overflowing with ultra-cute but ravenous bunnies.

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Some films (and books, for that matter) are not especially promising in the first few minutes, and you have to be patient and give them a chance to draw you in. When we watched “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (“MAYAEWK” to save my typing fingers a bit) at the weekend, Mr. Bsag asked after ten minutes “Remind me why we decided to rent this again?”. However MAYAEWK is well worth a little patience.

The plot has a number of strands, following a group of inter-related characters. Christine (played by director Miranda July) is a video performance artist, giving a voice and narrative to people’s family snapshots, and trying to get her work exhibited by a local gallery. Her work reminded me of Laurie Anderson’s slightly, and there were other touches in the dialogue here and there that made me think of Anderson. I wonder if July is a fan? In her day job Christine runs a taxi service for elderly people, ferrying Michael to meet his new love, Ellen, who is very ill in a care home.

Christine meets and falls in love with shoe salesman Richard—-recently separated from his wife Pam, and trying to keep things together for his two sons, Peter and Robby—-when she takes Michael shopping. There are also two (underage) teenaged girls who flirt dangerously with Richard’s work colleague and friend, Andrew, and little Sylvie—-a serious young girl with a fetish for kitchenware to fill her trousseau.

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I added Tarnation to my film queue on Lovefilm quite some time ago, and if I remember rightly, I was interested in it for the very shallow reason that it was entirely made using iMovie. However, it turned out to be a somewhat unique film for other reasons, and well worth watching. I should point out that it’s not the kind of film to watch if you’re in the mood for a light, entertaining film. It’s probably one of the most harrowing, disturbing films I’ve seen recently.

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Yesterday we saw Elling again, courtesy of a special edition, exclusive to Lovefilm (of which more later). It was just as good as the last time we saw it, and I get the feeling that it’s one of those films like ‘The Big Liebowski’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ that I could happily watch many times, particularly when I’m feeling a bit cheesed off with life.

What I can’t understand is why this film—-which had a cinematic release in 2001, and which has won a clutch of awards—-hasn’t been released as a subtitled version in the rest of Europe yet. At amazon.co.uk, you can buy a US version, but it’s both a Region 1 disc (which isn’t too much of a problem for most people in the UK) and in NTSC format (which is).

I notice with a slightly sinking heart that a new version is being made in the US. Yet again, it seems, Hollywood has decided to try to remake a masterpiece unnecessarily, just to get English speaking actors in the roles. But the original actors were brilliant, and I thought that hearing the original Norwegian added enormously to the appeal. Part of the charm is hearing the way that the actors stress words and pronounce things, even if you don’t understand a word of Norwegian. If anyone knows where I can buy an English subtitled PAL format DVD of this film, do let me know.

I went to see Serenity this weekend. Mr. Bsag was away, but I just couldn’t wait, having heard great things about it. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m keen to see it again with him, because I think I would get even more out of it second time around.

I should say at the start that I’ve never seen the series Firefly on which the film was based. I’d queued up some of the DVDs on LOVEFilm, but they haven’t yet come to the top of my list. I’m sure that I would have experienced another level of depth if I was already familiar with the Firefly universe and characters, but I still found it an amazing film. In fact, I’m now keener than ever to get into Firefly. I am however, a big fan of Farscape; another highly original and unusual Sci-Fi series that—-like Firefly—-had a passionate cult following, but was dropped by the network after they treated it badly, and was then granted a brief, feature-length reprieve, partly because of its vocal fan base. So I have some inkling of what it must be like for a Firefly fan, who has a built up an understanding of the characters and their backstory, to watch Serenity.

The plot concerns a bunch of mis-fits aboard a ship called Serenity, trying to pull off heists to pay for repairs to their clanky old ship, and sheltering a girl called River. River’s brother, the ship’s doctor Simon, rescued her from an Alliance facility where she was being subjected to horrific brain experiments which made her psychic and a bit—-well—-mad¹, and now they are all being hunted by an Alliance assassin known as The Operative. Oh, and they all speak rather like characters from a Western, with chunks of Chinese thrown in for good measure. If that sounds cringe-worthy, it really isn’t.

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We’d had this film sitting next to the DVD player (via LOVEFiLM.com) for several weeks. We obviously thought we’d enjoy it when we put it in our rental queue, but somehow when it came time for us to put a disc in the player, we kept choosing other films. I put it down to a touch of Carey-phobia. Anyway, we finally watched it last weekend (only—-it has to be said—-because the copy of The Ladykillers we’d ordered was scratched to blazes and wouldn’t play in our machine), and really enjoyed it.

The first thing to say is that Jim Carey is thankfully quite low-key in this film, and actually rather good. So even if you have a bit of an aversion to his usual face-pulling routines, this is probably safe to watch. The plot concerns a man who finds out that his girlfriend has paid a company (called ‘Lacuna’, geddit?) to erase all memory of him from her mind after they’ve had a row. In grief and retaliation, he does the same for her, but then gets cold feet half way through the process.

The pseudo-science part of the premise is a bit silly (I don’t think we’ll ever be able to isolate the location of individual memories, and particularly those for complicated things like relationships), but it raises some interesting questions. If our memory of someone could be erased, would we keep on meeting them and falling in love with them again and again? What is memory anyway? Would erasing painful memories ease the pain, or would we still feel hurt and not know why?

The structure of the film takes a bit of concentration to get to grips with, but there are interesting effects to symbolise memories being erased. At several points, our hero and heroine have to run to escape the blankness that is consuming the landscape around them as the memory erasure is progressing. It’s also quite a sweet—-but not sickly—-love story. And it’s just won an Oscar, I believe, not that winning an Oscar is necessarily a recommendation in itself.

When A Mighty Wind came out last year, it received a rather lukewarm response from the critics. I was really disappointed because I had enjoyed Christopher Guest’s previous film (Best in Show) enormously. I didn’t go to see it at the cinema, but since we subscribed to LOVEFiLM we’ve been catching up on a lot of films that we missed when when they came out. I have to say that the critics were talking utter tosh. A Mighty Wind is a wonderful film. It’s true that there aren’t quite as many ‘laugh out loud’ moments as Best in Show, but it’s still very funny, acutely observed and unexpectedly touching.

The film is a mock documentary about a reunion folk concert held in memory of a recently-deceased folk impresario. The details of the costumes, old album covers and album titles are so perfectly judged that you start thinking that they must be real. The semi-improvised dialogue works brilliantly, and there are some fabulous moments when a character comes out with something completely bizarre or outrageous. The part that worked best for me was the tender relationship between Mitch (completely dazed after his recent release from a mental institution) and Mickey (his one-time musical and romantic partner, until they had a huge row). Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara judge their performance perfectly, as Mitch and Mickey tentatively get to know one another again. It’s a bonus that the music is actually pretty good, and I even found myself humming Mitch and Mickey’s slightly sickly hits for a while after watching the film.