An Inspector Calls

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Many of us will have studied An Inspector Calls for GCSE English. I did, and l liked it, but it’s not a play I had given much thought to for quite some time. This adaptation reminded me how much I liked it and that I’d quite like to see the play again. I hope it enjoys a revival.

The play was written by J.B. Priestly in 1945, but set in 1912. This adaptation part of the BBC’s Literary Classics season, was broadcast appropriately enough on the 13th of September, which was J.B. Priestly’s birthday. The play was adapted by Helen Edmundson, directed by Aisling Walsh and filmed in Saltaire, a Victorian model village in Bradford, West Yorkshire. To those unfamiliar with the play it may have looked at first glance to be a Sunday evening murder mystery drama, but while it features a detective, an investigation into a death and a stately home, the story is something quite different.

Rich industrialist Arthur Birling (Ken Stott) is holding a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of his daughter Sheila (Chloe Pirrie) to Gerald Croft (Kyle Soller), the son of a business rival. Also attending are Arthur’s wife Sybil (Miranda Richardson) and their son Eric (Finn Cole).

Inspector Goole (David Thewlis) arrives, investigating the suicide of a young working class woman, Eva Smith (Sophie Rundle). As the evening unfolds, it turns out the Birlings and Gerald were all involved in her life in some way, and all contributed to the downward spiral she found herself in.

Eva had once worked for Birling & Co. When the workers went on strike she was seen by Arthur as the ringleader. Eva tells him that the employees can’t afford to live on the low wages he is paying them. Their rents are going up all the time, but they haven’t had a wage increase in two years. Arthur at first offers her a promotion with higher pay, but Eva wants all of the workers to get a wage increase. Arthur knows that his employees won’t be able to last long without any money coming in from being on strike, so they’ll have to come back soon. They do, and he sacks Eva, to get rid of her and to make an example of her.

Eva later found work in a shop, Milwards, which Sheila and Sybil are regular customers. One time they were out shopping. Sybil constantly put her daughter down, saying she doesn’t suit fashionable clothes and that a dress Sheila likes would look better on Eva. Sheila wants to try it on, and already jealous of Eva’s looks, she interprets Eva smiling to be mocking her. Sheila tells the manager of Milwards if she ever sees Eva in the shop again the Birlings will take their custom elsewhere, so Eva is fired from another job.

She decides to change her name to Daisy Renton. At the Palace Theatre Bar she is being harassed by lecherous Alderman Meggarty. Gerald Croft spots this, and rescues her by pretending she is his girlfriend. After finding out she has nowhere to live and is hungry he buys her dinner and lets her stay in some rooms a friend has asked him to look after. Gerald is courting Sheila at this time, and Daisy becomes his mistress. But she begins to fall deeper in love with him, and Gerald decides they should end the relationship. Daisy decides to move out of the rooms.

She still goes to the Palace Theatre Bar, having turned to prostitution as a last resort, and is picked up by a drunken Eric. He knows her as “Sarah”. They see each other several times, and she becomes pregnant. Eric offers to marry her, but “Sarah” knows it just isn’t a realistic proposition for someone of Eric’s social class to marry her. He gives her money to help her, but after she finds out he stole the money from one of his father’s clients, she tells him it’s best for him if her just leaves her alone.

She then goes to a charity set up to help women in trouble, calling herself “Mrs. Birling” saying her husband has abandoned her. Unfortunately, heading the organisation is a real Mrs. Birling, Sybil, who takes offence to her using the name. She then tells them her name is “Alice Grey” and tells them the truth about her situation. Sybil refuses to give her any help.

The Inspector tells the Birlings and Gerald they can no longer do Eva any harm, but they can no longer do her any good either. They should remember that there are many Eva Smiths and John Smiths, that people’s lives are linked and that we should all take care of one another, and if we don’t learn that lesson now it will be taught in “fire and blood and anguish”.

The Inspector leaves, and the family are devastated after all their secrets have come out. The older ones, Arthur, Sybil and Gerald, feel very little if any remorse and are desperate to try and cover it all up. The younger ones, Sheila and Eric fell ridden with guilt at what they have done and see no way back. Sheila in particular seems impressed with the Inspector and determined not to forget what he has taught them.

After making a couple of phone calls, the party finds that there is no Inspector Goole in the local police force, and there is no record of a woman committing suicide that day. Again, Arthur, Sybil and Gerald are overjoyed, thinking they are off the hook, but Sheila and Eric aren’t, as what they all told each other still happened.

We then see Eva writing her final diary entry and drinking disinfectant as a way of killing herself. She is taken to hospital where the doctors and nurses try in vain to save her life. She sees the Inspector as she dies. The Inspector is in the morgue with her body, but then we see a nurse talking to another police constable and the Inspector is no longer there. He is some sort of spirit rather than a living person.

The Birling household gets a phone call informing them about Eva’s suicide and that a police inspector is on his way to ask some questions.

In some ways, I think adapting a play or theatre piece to screen is more difficult than adapting a book to screen. A book has more details in the text and it’s a case of how you ”bring it to life”. But plays are written to be performed on stage and written with the strengths and restrictions of theatre in mind. Adapting a play rather than a novel also means people may have an idea of how it is to be performed anyway.

In the play all the action takes place in the Birling’s house. But a TV film allows us to see more locations, such as the Birling & Co. factory. The biggest change is that we see Eva Smith. In the play she is only referred to in dialogue. We see flashbacks featuring her interactions with the family. This will probably be the main point English teachers will debate when they think of how good of an adaptation it is. Showing Eva Smith might be seen as a bad choice, as the point is that Eva Smith could be any working class person. From a dramatic point of view though, I think it was a good idea to show her. Seeing Eva’s life unfold emphasises the tragedy of it. It just gets worse and worse, mostly through the actions of others, and sometimes because she wanted to do the right thing. The scenes of her slow and painful death are particularly upsetting.

For how the other characters are portrayed, Sheila is quite interesting. In many adaptations she’s fairly ditsy and bubbly, here she is presented as very repressed and with a thinly veiled unhappiness. Similarly, Eric often is depicted as having a carefree jack-the-lad facade at first, but here, like his sister, he seems quite repressed and barely masking unhappiness from start, though in his case he masks it through drinking too much.

Arthur Birling is not quite as overbearingly pompous in this version, but he strongly believes in looking after number one and hates the word “community”. He has connections in high places, playing golf with the chief constable. He tries, unsuccessfully, to use his status and connections as a tool to get Eva to stop the strike and to get the Inspector to stop questioning the family.

Sybil Birling is an out-and-out snob in pretty much every version, but she is quite notably callous and cold-hearted in this adaptation. Perhaps it’s because we see her refusing to help Eva. Eva is desperate for help, but all she gets from the charity is contempt from a judgemental, unsympathetic Sybil.

Gerald is quite foppish in this version, and stands out somewhat as coming from a slightly more upper class background than the “new money” Birlings. This social class division even within the upper class is noted to, with Arthur mentioning that Sybil was of a higher social class than him and her parents had some reservations of him marrying her for that reason.

Inspector Goole is a supernatural being. His name ‘Goole’ suggests ‘Ghoul’. When I was taught this play, our teacher suggested that the Inspector was some sort of time traveller. A version of the play I went to see once had the Inspector dressed in more of a 1940s costume than a 1912 one. Some people who watched this TV version thought Inspector Goole might be some sort of guardian angel or a ghost of a relative of Eva. But what exactly the Inspector is open to interpretation. What’s more important is what he does, he gets the Birlings and Gerald to confront their actions.

The play was set in 1912, a couple of years before the First World War, but performed in 1945, just after the Second World War, and that gives it an interesting context. Arthur Birling believes that only good times are ahead, but the Inspector knows that what is to come is “fire and blood and anguish” with the two world wars.

But a lot of what is raised in An Inspector Calls is still very relevant today. The simple message of not being selfish and that we are part of a big wide world and should show more thought and consideration for each other is one that definitely applies.

This adaptation was fine. It was a ratings hit, winning its slot, and was generally well received by audiences and critics alike. I wouldn’t have minded more humour, which the play has. It’s good to have a bit of light and shade. It is popular to perform, many actors having fun with the characters. Having said that, I think it was a deliberate choice to make this version of the play very understated and focusing on the serious issues raised. It put the central themes over well. The whole cast was good, but David Thewlis in particular was great, giving a very authoritative and haunting performance, and a lot of gravitas to the Inspector.

Esio Trot

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Many Roald Dahl  stories have been adapted into films, some more than once, but Esio Trot hasn’t before. It isn’t one of his most well known. Being a massive Roald Dahl fanboy growing up, I have read it, and I was surprised at the length of this film adaptation. 90 minutes! The book is very short. Given that they’re making a feature length screen adaptation of a very short book, I knew that they’d have to make some changes, but the basic premise is the same in both.

It features a retired old man named Mr. Hoppy, who lives in a block of flats and is very lonely. He has fallen in love with the woman in the flat below, Mrs. Silver. They talk very often, but Mr. Hoppy is too shy to let her know he is in love with her, or even to invite her up to his flat for a cup of tea. Mrs. Silver has a pet tortoise named Alfie, and she loves him but wishes he could grow faster. Mr. Hoppy comes up with an idea. He gives Mrs. Silver a poem called ‘Esio Trot’ to read to Alfie. It’s written backwards (“esio trot” being “tortoise” backwards), and he tells her it will encourage Alfie to grow. Then he goes and buys hundreds of tortoises himself, and swaps Alfie with a tortoise slightly bigger. He continues swapping tortoises with slightly bigger ones, making it look like Alfie is growing, as when things grow gradually people don’t notice it until the difference becomes obvious. The plot of book and the film differ slightly towards the end, but they reach more or less the same conclusion.

This film version was broadcast on BBC One on New Year’s Day, with the script written by Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, directed by Dearbhla Walsh and starring Dustin Hoffman as Mr. Hoppy and Judi Dench as Mrs. Silver. Having a very light plot and a lot of time allowed them to develop the two principal characters. More is made of the emotional gravity of their situations. Mr. Hoppy’s loneliness is emphasised with shots of him sitting alone in his empty flat, while the fact Mrs. Silver is a widow is shown via her looking at a photograph album with Alfie and telling him about her late husband, and it’s clear she misses him. In both cases it is done very subtly, but it gets the message across.

The film also fleshes out their personalities by adding some interests not mentioned in the book. Mr. Hoppy’s other great love in life apart from Mrs. Silver is his garden on his balcony, which is in the book, but in the film he also enjoys fishing. This led to one of my favourite running gags in the film. He has a box of money he is saving up which is labelled “Canadian fishing trip”. He has to keep using money from there for various reasons, so the label changes as the funds are depleted. It goes from “Canadian fishing trip”, to “Scottish fishing trip” to “New fishing rod” to finally “Some bait”. Mr. Hoppy is also a big fan of jazz music, especially Louis Armstrong, and a few songs by him are used on the film’s soundtrack. Mr. Hoppy is also shown bonding more with the tortoises he has in his flat, naming them.

Mrs. Silver is a bit more eccentric than the book version, she likes putting her Christmas tree up in August and wearing bunny ears on the first day of Spring. She’s also active in her local community, doing things like charity dance marathons.

There are minor alterations to their careers. In the book, Mr. Hoppy is a retired mechanic, while in this film it is implied he worked in aviation (either that, or it’s another interest of his, as he has a lot of aeroplane themed stuff in his flat). Mrs. Silver here is a retired midwife, while in the book she worked in a corner shop. These aren’t really significant changes, but I found it quite interesting.

The main change in terms of plot is towards the end. In both versions “Alfie” becomes so big that he can no longer fit through the door of a little wooden house Mrs. Silver keeps him in. In the book, Mr. Hoppy gives Mrs. Silver another poem to shrink “Alfie” back down to bigger than he started out but small enough to fit through the door, and he swaps the tortoises accordingly. This doesn’t happen here. Perhaps they thought this was a bit of a stretch as far as suspension of disbelief goes.

Then there’s the ending, in the book Mr. Hoppy’s plan succeeds, he proposes, with Mrs. Silver telling him “I thought you’d never get round to asking me!” and they get married. In this film, after Mr. Hoppy proposes, before Mrs. Silver can answer, his plan is discovered, and Mrs. Silver is upset, feeling that he has made a fool of her. Mr. Hoppy decides to leave, but Mrs. Silver comes to see him and tells him while she did find it hurtful, she considers that he did it as a way to try and make her happy, and then tells him that she has had feelings for him for some time. She had been dropping hints throughout the film, and here she reveals that apart from when they first met, she planned every time she and Mr. Hoppy “accidentally” ran into each other in the lift. They then get married, and keep Alfie as their pet.

I am pleased with the change. Even as a kid, the way Mr. Hoppy tricks Mrs. Silver and gives her beloved pet away to a pet shop (along with the other tortoises) without her knowing never quite sat right with me. Don’t get me wrong, in the book you still root for Mr. Hoppy, and you’re prepared to go with it because the story is so light, and the tone is more humourous and fairytale-ish  (the book even says that Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver “lived happily ever after”). But with this adaptation considering they went to such an effort to make Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver more 3-Dimensional I think it would probably not have been well received.

In the book there are no other significant characters apart from Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver.  There are some pet shop owners mentioned, and there is a coda of what happened to Alfie. He is bought in a pet shop by a little girl named Roberta, who grows up and has two children of her own,  and Alfie becomes their family pet, with it being noted that he did eventually manage to grow to twice the size he was when Mrs. Silver had him, even though it took him decades. As Alfie is kept by Mrs. Silver in this version, this doesn’t happen, but there are similar characters in the film.

There is a family with a father, a mother and two children who are residents of the block of flats. The father is played by James Corden and is the narrator of the story (as Mr. Hoppy told it to him once). This part of the film wasn’t very popular to a lot of viewers. I don’t hate James Corden the way a lot of people seem to, but I wasn’t keen on his part of the film either. His narration is a bit jarring, slightly smug, and annoying. It unfortunately comes off as getting in the way of the main story, which is the last thing a narration should do. The mother doesn’t really appear much, but the two kids come off a bit as precocious brats, particularly the daughter, who is named Roberta. She isn’t very likeable as she spends a lot of time making bitchy observations to her dad about how stupid Mrs. Silver must be to fall for it all, and that Mr. Hoppy will be dead soon because he is OLD. “I give him a year, tops”.

The other character added is a next door neighbour Mr. Pringle. He is also unlikeable, but it is intentional. He’s a contrast to Mr. Hoppy, being everything he isn’t. Mr. Hoppy is short, thin, shy, unassuming and kind-hearted, whereas Mr. Pringle is tall, fat, arrogant, overbearing and self-centred. He has dinner with Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver a few times, and spends each time dominating the conversation talking about himself. He has a habit of eating other people’s food off their plate (or when Mr. Hoppy offers him a crisp, Mr. Pringle takes the whole crisp packet!). He at one time eats some tortoise droppings, believing them to be nibbles. His other function is to be a rival for Mrs. Silver’s affections, though she never shows much interest. He isn’t actually that mean-spirited a character really, he’s more comically unpleasant. I don’t mind his addition, but I’m not sure he was necessary.

Though I am pleased with a lot of the changes made in this adaptation, I think it would have been better to keep to mostly Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver. I’m not saying there should have been no other characters at all, but they were by far the best part of this film.  It’s probably difficult for actors to try and portray introverted characters, as by nature introverts aren’t expressive, but as a line in this film says, “Often it’s the quiet, unassuming ones who turn out to be the most interesting”, and Dustin Hoffman manages to convey a lot of personality in Mr. Hoppy. Mrs. Silver’s character is in contrast very lively and effervescent, which Judi Dench does well, but I think she manages to make the character down-to-earth too. Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench were both brilliant, and had a good chemistry together.

As a side note, this film reminded me of the very dark, satirical 2000s cartoon series Monkey Dust, not so much in tone, but with the fact both have characters called Mr. Hoppy (in Monkey Dust Mr. Hoppy is the orange spacehopper ridden by Ivan Dobsky the Meat-Safe Murderer, only he never done it) and Mr. Pringle (in Monkey Dust he’s Clive Pringle The Liar who was always home late because he had been doing something depraved, and gave his wife an excuse based on the plot of a film, which she always saw through).

A random line from the book which I wished they’d used is when Mrs. Silver is talking about Alfie being too small. “I’ve seen pictures of giant tortoises that are so huge people can ride on their backs! If Alfie were to see one of those he’d turn green with envy!”.

The film looks very good visually, with a lot of scenes of a gorgeous dark blue night sky and Mr. Hoppy’s beautiful garden with colourful flowers and tomato plants, and an avocado plant he grew from the pips.

In its own right, this film was refreshing in some ways, having a warmth and just being a nice, simple love story. But it perhaps could have done to have been shorter, as the very light plot meant the film was very slow and padded out, and the narration should probably have just been a voice-over, if included at all. But the central focus of it, the relationship between Mr. Hoppy and Mrs. Silver and the way the characters were realised was very good.

The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones

*** out of 5

3 stars out of 5

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones was originally part of Hanna-Barbera‘s Superstars 10 series in the late ’80s. This was a series of ten made for TV movies featuring some of their popular characters in feature length adventures, others in the series included Yogi Bear flying the Howard Hughes flying boat the Spruce Goose, Huckleberry Hound in a parody of High Noon, and Judy Jetson falling in love with a rock star, yet again.

This one was the sort of cartoon crossover that was bound to happen at some point. Hanna-Barbera’s modern Stone Age family and their modern Space Age family. Very similar families with differences that are opposite, and that difference offering a contrast between the past and the future. When people think of  opposing concepts such as “the past” and “the future”, they tend to put them into extremes, and so are likely to think of the past as cavemen and dinosaurs (despite the fact that they existed in very different eras) and think of the future as outer space, robots, jetpacks and so on.  It’s still a popular idea for comedy, such as in Viz comic the one-off strip Ronnie Corbett’s Crap Time Machine in which the comedian takes someone to the future but ends up going in to the time of dinosaurs instead. Similar ideas are in this film, as the time machine which allows the two shows to meet has a lever which simply goes “past” or “future”, and the Jetsons are intending to go even further in the future but end up in the prehistoric Flintstones time.

I imagine getting The Flintstones and the Jetsons together was one of the earliest ideas for a special episode, because it’s quite a tempting idea. Even today you get fanart which swaps the clothes and settings of Fred Flintstone and George Jetson. Many of the posters and video/DVD covers for this film do that, including the one shown at the top of this review which has the Flintstones flying around in the Jetsons spaceship and the Jetsons in the Flintsones car, with the background filled with prehistoric and futuristic elements in the same place.  No such scene appears in the film, indeed most of the posters and covers for this film don’t really show things that actually happen in the film. What sells this film is the thought of it, kind of like when two major pop stars do a duet together. Those duets tend to be disappointing, but is this film that?

Let’s get to what does happen in the film, it begins with two morning scenes in the future and prehistory, and has a robot cockerel crowing in the future dissolving into a pterodactyl doing the same in the past. The film gets a little disorientating for a while though, as it flashes back and forth between the future and the past, each having separate storylines. For Bedrock, it’s Fred and Barney trying to get money to take their wives on holiday. For the Jetsons it’s Mr. Spacely’s secrets being leaked to a business rival. It takes a good while before Elroy invents a time machine which is the means in which the two shows are able to crossover. The moment when the Flintstones meet the Jetsons is the moment everyone who saw this was waiting for, and it’s no coincidence the film improves a lot as a viewing experience from then.

Thinking about it, it’s weird how The Flintstones and Rubbles are referred to as one family in this film. This is probably because in the series itself even though it was about two couples, only one of the families was in the title. The poor un-credited Rubbles, eh? Also neither of the couples’ children, Pebbles Flintstone and Bam-Bam Rubble, appear in this film, so collectively the Flintstones and the Rubbles are the “past family” by default.

When the Flintstones (and Rubbles) and the Jetsons first encounter each other, the Jetsons think they are in the future while the Flintstones think the Jetsons are a more primitive tribe than them. The irony of it is funny, but it also is amusing if you know the popular, but rather bleak, fan theory that The Flintstones actually takes place in a post-apocalyptic society in the far future which has been all but destroyed by nuclear war, with the dinosaurs as mutated animals and the surviving people trying to use what they can to get back to something resembling normality.

Eventually the two sides bond by Wilma complimenting Jane on her dress and Jane complimenting Wilma on her hairstyle. The family pets Dino and Astro also seem to get on fairly well, spending most of the film play-chasing. Judy once again  develops a crush on a rock star, obvious rock related puns littered there, not least the song ‘The Bedrock Rock’ which reminded me a bit of ‘The Monster Mash’ by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers.

Bedrock is a culture shock at first to the Jetsons with things like a couch made of stone, and grass being something they only knew of from ancient history classes, though they try to be polite about it.  Meanwhile back in the future Rosie the robot maid, Henry Orbit the maintenance man and his assistant droid Mac try and retrieve them but the Flintstones and Rubbles get sent back to the future instead. There they are mistaken for the Jetsons by Rosie and Henry, who remark time travel must have been hard on George and not too good on Judy and Elroy either, and seemingly not noticing any difference between Jane and Wilma. Essentially, it looks a bit like they are making self-aware jokes that Wilma and Jane are extremely similar, and Elroy bears a resemble to a child version of Barney Rubble while Judy looks a lot like a blonde teenaged version of Betty Rubble. Fred and George on the other hand are quite different, both in appearance and personality. Fred is bulky, boorish and his plots in the show and in this film usually involve his arrogance being his downfall. George on the other hand is scrawny, grumpy, a bit anxious and kind of downtrodden – at one point in the film everyone literally walks all over him. I kind of feel a bit sorry for him really.

The Jetsons adapt quite well to prehistoric life while stranded there, but the Bedrock couples aren’t so quick to adapt to new technology, with Wilma accidentally getting a square-shaped green coloured hairstyle.

At this point the two stories going on in different time periods have parallels. In both times, the boss character wants to cash in on the strange visitors. In Mr. Spacely’s case, he wants to make money on having living stone age people, and Fred and Barney’s boss Nate Slate wants to take advantage of George’s futuristic technology. Both bosses also have a rival businessman nemesis each. Mr. Spacely’s is Cogswell and Nate Slate’s is Turk Tarpit. In both times, the visitors become famous. Fred becomes “the most famous man in the universe” and Mr. Spacely comments on him being the perfect advertising mascot. I’m not sure if that is meant to be a meta-reference, but Fred Flintstone is one of the most iconic cartoon characters ever, and he’s certainly the most well known character from this film. The Flintstones also appeared in a lot of advertisements, most infamously these days for once advertising cigarettes. The Jetsons meanwhile end up owing half of Bedrock, but owning so much proves far too much for them to handle. (My favourite problem they encounter is the dinosaurs going on strike).  Both the Bedrock couples and the Jetsons soon want to get back to their own times.

I like that Rosie gets an important role in the film by being the one who goes back in time to rescue the Jetsons. She first ends up in medieval times where she confuses knights in armour for other robots, but manages to find the Jetsons and bring them back along with the Flintstone car, but the time machine ends up broken and unfixable. Mr. Spacely decides to mass produce Fred’s car for the nostalgia market. They get in the original car, and the Bedrock couples are able to return home, because… well something about residual protoplasm and the car wanting to go back to its original home, I don’t know. I’m not really sure the film makers were bothered about giving an explanation that made sense and banked on the audience just going along it.

So the verdict on The Jetsons Meet The Flintsones. It’s… fine. It’s pretty much what it says on the tin. It reminds me somewhat of the Children In Need 2010 sketch special EastStreet which saw members of Coronation Street and EastEnders visting each others’ towns with jokes about their similarities and differences. You get pretty much what you’d expect from the two cartoons crossing over. The plot isn’t always hole-free shall we say, but they at least were attempting to make a coherent story with this. It hasn’t aged too badly, aside from a couple of dated reference jokes, most of which are from the futuristic Jetsons time ironically enough; George is dressed as Rambo briefly. But it’s nowhere near as much as obviously made in the ’80s as Jetsons: The Movie which came later. There are a lot of good jokes and set-pieces in there, particularly from the Flintstones side. If  you’re a fan of either or both cartoons this film is worth checking out.

Jetsons: The Movie

CONTAINS SPOILERS

** out 5

2 stars out of 5

Jetsons: The Movie (as it was titled. Perhaps they thought ‘The Jetsons: The Movie’ would sound odd) isn’t well remembered these days. Of course The Jetsons themselves aren’t massively remembered these days. It was a cartoon set in the far future about George Jetson and his family, wife Jane, daughter Judy, son Elroy, dog Astro and, my favourite, the robot maid Rosie. As a kid I always loved robots, and Rosie was always good fun as a long-suffering servant being snarky about her dozy employers. Finally there is George’s short in height and short in temper boss Mr. Spacely.

It’s rare the series is referenced now, the most recent example I can think of is the Family Guy parody of the opening sequence where Jane infamously takes George’s whole wallet so she can go shopping. Interestingly, in the opening sequence for this film instead of Jane taking his wallet she gives George a kiss.

The Jetsons were never quite as popular as their stone age predecessors and counterparts, The Flintstones. That series was arguably the most well known of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, with the possible exception of Scooby-Doo.  Many people think the Jetsons family dog Astro is a rehash of Scooby-Doo, as he has a similar design and the same voice actor Don Messick, who even uses the same speech style for both characters. But in fact, Astro is more of a prototype. He predates Scooby Doo, as The Jetsons debuted in 1962 while (if we’re being pedantic about the titles) Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! debuted in 1969.

So why aren’t The Jetsons as well known? Well, it’s probably because they were, to be honest, quite bland. But it may also be what TV Tropes calls Zeerust, that is works set in the far future can have dated elements from the decade they were created in. Just like the Flintstones were “the modern (i.e 1960s) Stone Age family”, the Jetsons were “the modern (i.e 1960s) Space Age family”, to be exact 100 years in the future as the original series is set in 2062. The Jetsons predicted some of the future technology that we would use today, such as the “video phone”, but they didn’t foresee how society would change. Jane Jetson is still a housewive, and far from the working week being shorter because machines do everything, generally people work longer hours than the 1960s. What turned out to be appropriate for a series set in the future was that most of The Jetsons episodes weren’t produced in the 1960s, but the 1980s, when it was revived by Hanna-Barbera.

It was during the 1980s that there were plans for a live action Jetsons film, which has never happened to date, although there have been various attempts. Only this year none other than Kanye West has expressed interest in making one. But for now we have got a feature-length animated film, released in 1990. The film is notable in a poignant way. It was the last film which Mel Blanc worked on, playing Mr. Spacely as well as other characters. He died while the film was being made. George O’Hanlon, the voice of George Jetson, died while in the recording studio for this film, and although she died in 2003 it also turned out to be the last film Penny Singleton (voice of Jane) ever made.

With that in mind it’s a shame it wasn’t a success, but the truth is it didn’t do well. It had bad reviews (it was included in Siskel and Eberts Worst of 1990 list), and it flopped at the box office.  It doesn’t look like Universal Studios had much faith in the finished product. Though released in 1990, it was supposed to be have been released in 1989, but was continually pushed back as they felt it couldn’t compete with other films released at that time, notably a certain other animated feature film, Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

All the surviving voice actors for the TV series returned for the film, but there was a late decision by Universal studio executives  to replace Janet Waldo, the voice actress for Judy Jetson, with ’80s pop star Tiffany, hoping she’d attract younger audiences. Understandably Janet Waldo was upset about this, not least because she had already finished recording all her dialogue for the film. The voice director Andrea Romano wasn’t pleased with this change either, and to prevent people from thinking she approved of it she asked for her name to be removed from the credits. The casting change turned out to be a bit of a waste of time anyway, as by the time the film was released Tiffany’s star was fading.

Janet Waldo wasn’t impressed by her replacement’s voice acting in the film, and neither were film critics. I can see why. The voice Janet Waldo used for Judy was high pitched and clear, while Tiffany’s voice was croaky and unenthusiastic. Judy’s character was mostly a teenage girl who falls in obsessive love from one guy to the next, and this film shows that  voice acting does make a difference. The TV and film version both behave the same way, but Janet Waldo’s Judy comes across as ditzy and fairly sweet, whereas Tiffany’s Judy seems like a bit of a petulant brat.

Tiffany has three songs in the film, and we get what amount to pop videos for them with Judy’s love life. These are pretty much filler material, as is the whole “Judy romance” subplot. They are also the best things about the film! As poor as Tiffany’s voice acting was, her singing voice is strong, pleasant, and the huskiness adds to the quality. Her songs in this film are pretty decent pieces of ’80s pop. One of the songs ‘I Always Thought I’d See You Again’ sees Judy in a Nature Zone with rainbow coloured fountains, electric flowers and feeling weepy after seeing happy couples together and looking up at the stars seeing constellations of herself and a rock star she missed out on a date with. If you thought that had trippy visuals it’s nothing compared to her next love song called ‘You And Me’ which is with an alien guy with a guitar that shoots multicoloured lasers and takes place near holographic stimulators showing a giant orange mushroom, a plant turning into a bird and flying away and when the song proper stars it’s an explosion of colours and geometric shapes.  The final Tiffany song was a generic closing theme type called ‘Home’. All in all, it would have been much better if they’d have just left Tiffany to sing the songs and kept Janet Waldo as the voice actress.

The plot of the film is that Mr. Spacely was expanding his factory hoping to produce more sprockets for less money on an asteroid away from Earth. However, the factory keeps breaking down and the vice-presidents running it always quit. So he sends George Jetson, who he considers expendable. It turns out the reason for it is that he built the factory on the home of small furry creatures called Grungees, and they keep sabotaging it to avoid it destroying their home. The film has some morals and ethics it wants to say regarding environmentalism, recycling, pollution and corporate greed. George is also called out on focusing more on his career than his family. In the end the Jetsons suggest that the Grungees run the factory, which they do more productively and efficiently, and they choose to recycle old sprockets instead of just making endless new ones. The Jetsons tell Mr. Spacely that he should pay them fairly, which raises issues about outsourcing. It’s admirable that they were trying to bring forward these issues, but they get kind of buried among all the rest of the stuff in the film. To be honest, even the plot itself gets buried among the other stuff in the film.

They probably wanted to include jokes and set-pieces that made the TV series popular. In this film the many, many slapstick moments involving George fall flat, but some of it does raise a chuckle. We get some robot dogs in a pet shop and an antique shop which shows an ordinary living room “vintage 1990”. A scene from a fictional robot soap opera All My Androids, which is similar to Futurama’s All My Circuits, and the scene itself is a bit like the one in Androids, the fictional robot soap in Red Dwarf. But that’s just it, the film is only really funny in the way that comedy set in the future usually is.

Then there’s all the other characters they introduce.  When the Jetsons move to the Space Station and meet new neighbours, the Furbellows which are covered in blue fur, and they have a toddler daughter named Fergie. The only other employee at the factory is a robot named Rudi 2 who makes friends with George, he has a wife Lucy 2 who makes friends with Jane and a son Teddy 2 who makes friends with Elroy. Judy’s love interests are a rock star called Cosmic Cosmo and later an alien called Apollo Blue (and as mentioned we get two pop videos dedicated to each), and we even learn one of the Grungees by name, Squeep. There’s nothing wrong with any of these characters per se, Rudi 2 in particular is likeable enough, and Fergie is adorable, but there’s just too many of them thrown at us in a short time and it leaves the Jetsons themselves looking underused.

As I’ve noted previously, I like animation and films with many layers of history, and this certainly has that. A 1960s family in the far future as represented by the 1980s and released in 1990. George and his conflicts with Mr. Spacely wouldn’t be out of place in Mitchell & Webb‘s ‘Get Me Henimore!’ parodies of old ’60s/’70s sitcoms. The film itself is definitely a product of the ’80s, with the soundtrack unmistakably so. The Grungees themselves look like the sort cuddly, teddy bear-esque species which seemed to be popular in the 1980s, looking like they were inspired by The Care Bears, the Ewoks from Return Of The Jedi and Gizmo from Gremlins. I think the Grungees were meant to be cute, but I found them weird with their massive eyeballs and the way they kept jabbering on. The film also made use of 3D graphics, which haven’t aged well.

Jetsons: The Movie is by no means a great film. It’s dated, it’s poorly plotted, and it’s not all that interesting. However, it’s not unpleasant to watch and it has some good moments. It’s best enjoyed if you watch for those moments and try to ignore it not making much sense as a whole. While no classic, it’s worth seeing if you get a chance.

The Breakfast Club

*** out of 5

3 out of 5 stars.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Breakfast Club has long been seen as the definitive ‘Brat Pack’ film and one of the best works of its writer and director John Hughes. As time has gone on it has increasingly been seen as both an essential teen movie and an essential ’80s movie.

I have a love-hate relationship with this film. Reasons for the ‘love’ I have for it include that it came out in 1985, the year I was born and it’s always the film I kind of date myself with. Other reasons I love it are that John Bender was the inspiration for Bender the robot in Futurama, and it has ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ by Simple Minds as its main theme song. There’s also the fact that a lot of people can pick their favourite of the 5 teenagers and say which one they were most like in high school. But there’s one particular character that I always related to and the closest I’ve felt any work of fiction show what I was like as a teenager.

That is Allison. Wearing a big heavy coat, scribbling and doodling away on a pad, feeling isolated from the other kids. There are also little things she did which when I first saw this film I was saying “I did that!”, like when she was tying a thread around her finger for instance.  I never had sandwiches as interesting as her Cap’n Crunch and Pixie Stix one though. I’m not alone in identifying with Allison either, indeed looking  at forum posts on this film with a “Which one were you?” title, I’m surprised at just how many people said they were Allison in high school. Now if you’ve seen this film, you can probably guess where the some of the ‘hate’ I have for this film comes in, but we’ll get to that later.

The film hasn’t much plot. Indeed the entire plot is five teenagers in detention. It is more to do with the personalities of the characters. They all fit classic high school stereotypes. We have Claire Standish “the princess” played by Molly Ringwald, John Bender, “the criminal” played by Judd Nelson, Brian Johnson “the brain” played by Anthony Michael Hall, Andy Clark “the athlete” played by Emilio Estevez, and Allison Reynolds “the basket case” played by Ally Sheedy. The main focus of the film is the clashing, contrasting personalities and them all learning about each other. What works so well is that they come across as closer to real people than one dimensional stereotypes. That is kind of the whole point of the film, showing that there are real people behind the stereotypes we automatically file them into. But it is shown well as the costume department haven’t gone over-the-top with any of the characters, the geeky lad doesn’t have glasses for example, and the acting is good from all of them.

The only casting choice I think is a bit strange is Emilio Estevez. He looks a bit slight to be a wrestler, and he’s shortest of the boys. Reading up on the film I found out he was only cast as Andy because they had difficulty finding someone to play him. I’m not surprised at that, Andy is the least interesting character to be honest. I am surprised though that Emilio Estevez was originally going to play Bender! Similarly Molly Ringwald was originally cast to play Allison. I do wonder how she would have played her. With Claire she gives her a lot of charm and likeability which balances out the character’s shallow and spoilt traits. Claire also makes the point that after the detention they won’t be friends afterwards as they all fit in different cliques. This is a good point, as while for this very film and in TV shows you get groups of people with very different personalities, simply because it makes it more interesting and broadens the potential audience appeal, in real life birds of a feather flock together.

Bender is many people’s favourite character, with his air punch at the end being one of the most iconic things about the film. He is definitely the funniest, the film is peppered with his snarky comments and one-liners. Having said that, Brian has his comical moments, mainly due to how perfectly Anthony Michael Hall played ‘adorkable’.

I can see the flaws in this film despite the fact I enjoy it. The film is very silly in parts, and it just gets sillier watching it as I get older. I don’t think it’s because it has aged, rather because I’ve aged. Reviews of this film from people who were adults when it came out tend to dismiss it as pretentious and self-pitying. To its credit, the film addresses the fact that adults and teenagers tend to view the world differently. Allison has a line saying “When you grow up, your heart dies”. I have noticed that I’ve mellowed and my view of many things has changed as time has gone on. The Principal and the janitor have a conversation, the upshot of it is that they weren’t much different when they were their age, it’s that they’ve changed because they are now older.

There has been criticism that the characters don’t have any real problems. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, as parental pressure to succeed and parents fighting all the time are a big deal to kids who are going through such things, and I’d say it’s very harsh to dismiss Bender’s violent, abusive parents and Allison’s lack of friends and possible mental health issues as “not a real problem”. But I can see where those people are coming from to an extent.  Andy is basically feeling sorry for himself for bullying another kid, Brian was going to commit suicide because he got an F, and Claire is very privileged in many ways compared to the rest of them. While it’s more complicated than that for all of them, I can see how it may come across as a bit wangsty for some viewers.

Now here comes what I really dislike about this film. After they spend the film trying to debunk stereotypes, the geek boy has to write the essay while all the others hook up, the popular girl with the bad boy, and the weird girl gets a make-over to look just like the popular girl so she can date the jock. It isn’t so much what happens, it’s that it’s clearly framed as something we’re all meant to be happy about. In some ways I think it illustrates just how conservative a decade the ’80s was.

Brian being left alone I think annoys people because it’s difficult to shake off the idea he’s left out just because he’s “the geek”, which obviously will get peoples backs up. Interestingly, there is a rumour that Molly Ringwald would have liked Brian and Claire to pair up, which would have been different. In real life Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall dated for a while after the film.

While I wouldn’t say I like it, I don’t so much mind Brian being left unattached, mainly because the character himself didn’t seem that cut up about it. Apparently Brian’s personality was based on John Hughes himself, so I doubt he disliked the character and had contempt for him. From what I’ve seen it doesn’t seem to have effected Brian’s popularity as a character with fans of the film. He gets to write the essay which is shown as a big speech at the beginning and end of the film, and it leaves him open to fans giving their own interpretations. He has been called “the heart of the film” by quite a few. There is a popular theory that Brian was gay. I don’t think that was the intention of the filmmakers at all, but I quite like it as an alternative character interpretation.

When I first saw this film, I was shocked about Claire and Bender hooking up. Since then I’ve become more familiar with the “girls love bad boys” cliche. But even then, Claire and Bender seemed to hate each other. Bender was basically bullying her throughout the film, and there is an implication she wants to go out with him partly because it will piss off her parents. This isn’t helped by finding out that Judd Nelson stayed in character throughout filming and picked on Molly Ringwald to the point where John Hughes almost fired him. It’s presented as the great romance of the film, but for me I’ve always thought that relationship could only lead to disaster.

And then there’s Allison’s makeover. It’s a variation on the old “Plain Jane was Beautiful All Along”/”Ugly Ducking becomes a Beautiful Swan” thing, but it misses the mark. Basically, most people seem to think Allison looked better before. Her new look doesn’t suit her (for her part, Ally Sheedy apparently hated the bow she had to wear)  and she looks too much like a doll. What the filmmakers couldn’t have predicted is that Allison’s original look would date much, much, much better than her makeover.  Her going from an outfit not dissimilar to goth/grungy/alternative/emo or whatever to something that a girl might be made to wear by her mother at a stuffy formal event is puzzling for those of us who first saw the film in the ’90s, 2000s or 2010s.  The intention of the film may well have been to bring Allison out of her shell and for her to stop hiding herself away, but it comes off as her being told that she will never be happy if she looks the way she wants to look (she says during the makeover she likes the black eye make-up she wears), and instead has to conform to a very specific type of beauty, and ultimately that her own personality is worth throwing away if it means getting to be a piece of arm candy for a jock. For me personally, and for those of us who identified with Allison, it’s bad because it’s this idea that anyone who isn’t in the most popular clique is just kidding themselves if they say they don’t want to be in it, a view which Claire is called out on earlier in the film by Brian. Not everyone wants to be in the most popular crowd just because it’s the most popular one, and I think the filmmakers may not have realised about real life “Allisons” out there is that, they don’t want to look like every other girl, they don’t want to be the girlfriend of the jock, they want to be appreciated for who they are and they want to find like-minded people. The other problem I have with the makeover is that Allison’s social difficulties aren’t going to dissolve just because she’s wearing different clothes now, and ultimately her eccentricities are probably not going to sit well with Andy’s friends.

If there’s another thing that makes me not feel so bad for Brian, it’s that I can’t see either of the two couples ending well, but then very few high school romances last long.

I’ll always have a lot of affection for this film, and it will probably always irritate me a little too, but it’s a testament to how good it is that it has endured for nearing 30 years, and even if it had been forgotten I’d say it’s an fun film despite its flaws.

One thing I discovered recently is Molly Ringwalds’s nice cover of  ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’, which is what I’ll end this review on.

Ten Significant Songs from Forgotten Films

Songs associated with films often become big chart hits. But occasionally we get a song becoming a hit and standing the test of time even though the film itself didn’t. Here’s my entirely arbitrary top ten list.

 10)  Smash Mouth – ‘All Star’ from Mystery Men (1999)

If  ‘All Star’ is associated with any film nowadays it is Shrek, as it is used in the opening credits of the first film. But the film it was originally taken from was Mystery Men, a spoof of superhero films, and the cast even appear in the video.  In the end though the film failed to take off, while the song became one of Smash Mouth’s biggest hits, second only to ‘Walkin’ On The Sun’.

9) Giorgio Moroder & Philip Oakey – ‘Together In Electric Dreams’ from Electric Dreams (1984).

This collaboration between The Human League’s frontman Philip Oakey and producer Giorgio Moroder, who produced such tracks as ‘Call Me’ by Blondie, ‘I Feel Love’ by Donna Summer and ‘Take My Breath Away’ by Berlin, is regarded as an ’80s classic. It ended up being a big hit, but the film it was written especially for, Electric Dreams didn’t fare so well. It was a sci-fi rom com involving a love triangle between a man, a woman and a computer. Yes, really. Clips from the film feature in the video, making it all even more ’80s with the yachts,  legwarmers and most of all the old fashioned computers and graphics used.

8) Aaliyah – ‘Try Again’ from Romeo Must Die (2000)

Aaliyah had quite a long music career for someone who died so young, but her film career was just beginning before her tragic death in 2002. Many remember her final film role was as Queen Akasha in Queen of the Damned,  and she was due to star in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as Zee, as well as in Honey, and was rumoured to have been offered a part in Scary Movie at some point. But her first film role was in Romeo Must Die, which was retelling of the Romeo & Juliet story with gangs and families of different races. Aaliyah played the ‘Juliet’ to Jet Li’s ‘Romeo’. The film itself had a mixed response, but Aaliyah’s song from the film ‘Try Again’ went on to be her biggest hit, making number 1 in the US.

7) En Vogue – ‘Don’t Let Go (Love)’ from Set It Off (1996)

Classy soulful ’90s R&B girl group En Vogue scored their biggest international hit with ‘Don’t Let Go (Love)’, which made number 5 in the UK and number 2 in the US. The song is still played on radio stations nowadays, but the film it was written for Set It Off isn’t very well known. It’s about four women who take part in a bank robbery if you’re wondering.

6)  Lisa Loeb – ‘Stay (I Missed You)’ from Reality Bites (1994)

Lisa Loeb hit number 1 in the US charts with this acoustic ballad before she had even signed a record contract, becoming the first person to have that distinction. The song is very 1990s, but it is has dated much, much better than the film it was taken from. Reality Bites (even the title is slang which has long since fallen out of fashion) was a film focusing on being a middle class 20-something Generation Xer in the early ’90s, so it… isn’t exactly timeless, put it that way.

5) Madonna – ‘Crazy For You’ from Vision Quest (1985)

This lovely pop ballad is well known as one of Madonna’s early hits, but nowadays few even know it was originally a film theme. The film in question was Vision Quest, which is about an 18-year-old wrestler who falls in love with an older woman.  The song completely overshadowed the film to the extent that in the UK and Australia film was re-titled Crazy For You when it was released there.

4) Wheatus – ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ from Loser (2000)

This track shows that you can make a song about teen angst and unrequited love and have fun with it at the same time, which is probably why it became so popular. What’s unusual about it though is that most people know it’s from a film, they just think it’s from the wrong film. Because of Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari appearing in the video and the comedy “guy wanting to get laid” storyline a lot of people think it’s from American Pie, or one of the sequels. It was actually from Loser, which became an apt name as it was a box office flop.

3)  All Saints – ‘Pure Shores’ from The Beach (2000)

‘Pure Shores’, produced by William Orbit, was one of All Saints biggest hits, regarded as one of the best songs from 2000 and still sounds good today. In stark contrast the film it was taken from The Beach was critically panned and seen as one of director Danny Boyle’s disappointing follow-ups to Trainspotting.

2) Coolio feat. LV – Gangsta’s Paradise from Dangerous Minds (1995)

This song has sold over 5 million copies and counting, was a chart topper in both the UK and the US, and even the “Weird Al” Yancovic parody ‘Amish Paradise’ is quite well known. Clips of the film appear in the music video, and the film’s star Michelle Pfeiffer filmed some scenes with Coolio especially for the video. Although the film has largely faded from the public memory, Dangerous Minds was actually a box office hit when released, and even inspired a TV series. It was based on the autobiography of ex-U.S Marine LouAnne Johnson who became a teacher in a school located in an area full of drug abuse and gang wars.

1) Goo Goo Dolls – ‘Iris’ from City of Angels (1998)

The film City Of Angels starring Nicholas Cage as a Guardian Angel falling in love with Meg Ryan playing… that part she always plays, is rarely bought up these days. But the song ‘Iris’, a big windswept guitar ballad was a massive radio favourite in the US when it was released,  and it has charted in the UK no less than 5 times, (in 1998, 1999, 2006, 2011 and 2013), peaking at number 3.

Corpse Bride

**** 4 out of 5 stars

CONTAINS SPOILERS

As it is Halloween it seems a good time to review a Tim Burton film, and one of my personal favourites. Corpse Bride is seldom regarded as been up there with his best, but I love it.

It is often compared with The Nightmare Before Christmas, which certainly does have a massive fanbase. I will admit that film was more distinctive than Corpse Bride, taking place in mostly in fantastical lands Halloween Town and Christmas Town. But personally, I enjoyed Corpse Bride a lot more. It could be that it is a more traditional story.

It has a period drama style set in Victorian England, and stock characters, particularly the servants. The initial story is one of an arranged marriage between two families who are opposites but have similar goals. The Van Dorts, skinny William and chubby Nell, are fishmongers who have become wealthy through their business. As they are nouveau rich they think that marrying into the aristocratic family will raise their social status and put them into high society. That family are the Everglots, short toad-like Lord Innis and tall Cinderella‘s Stepmother look-a-like Lady Maudeline. They are landed gentry that now have no money left, and to save them from the poorhouse they want to marry into a family with money, even though they snootily look down their noses at them. However the arranged marriage seems like it will work as timid clumsy Victor Van Dort and quiet downtrodden Victoria Everglot  both see that they have a lot in common and like each other straight away. The main conflict of this film comes when Victor cannot recite his wedding vows correctly in the rehearsal, so practices out in the woods at night…. which leads to him accidently marrying a Corpse Bride. From here, Victor has a problem of how to get out of this surreal situation, not least because the sinister Lord Barkis Bittern seems keen to move into the vacant spot as Victoria’s husband.

The Corpse Bride, once a beautiful woman named Emily, was murdered in the woods when she was due to get married, and has since been waiting in the hope that a potential husband will to marry her. She resembles more a ghost bride,  especially with her tattered, white wedding dress blowing in the wind, and she has an eerie otherworldly beauty dancing in a dreamlike state in the snow on a moonlight night.

One main thing about this film is the contrast between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The land of the living is grey, grim and dreary, while the land of the dead is bright, colourful and, ironically, lively. This is best shown with the strongest song in the film ‘Remains Of The Day’, a song performed by a jazzy Sammy Davis Junior-ish skeleton named Bonejangles (voiced by Danny Elfman, who as this is a Tim Burton film also wrote all the music) in a bar which has skeletons who play pool, use their own bones as instruments and include one who looks like Napoleon Boneapart.

As well as Danny Elfman, the film stars actors that are regulars of Tim Burton films. The lead roles of Victor and the Corpse Bride are played by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter respectively, and Christopher Lee voices the intimidating priest Pastor Galswells. But these actors are well cast in their roles, indeed you could easily imagine them playing those parts if this film was live action. The choice to make the film a stop-motion animation allows them to create cartoonish caricatures and exaggerated features such as the big pointy nose of the butler, and all the large pointed chins. It is even better used in the land of the dead, possibly allowing it to be more convincing than what it may have looked like in a live action film. The style of stop motion animation suits the fantastical nature of the underworld, and generally it gives a feel of illustrations in an old children’s book bought to life.

As usual with animated films, we get some funny animal sidekicks. Victor is reunited with his dog, Scraps, who is now a skeleton, (and very similar to Zero, Jack Skellington’s ghost dog in The Nightmare Before Christmas) Emily has a maggot who sounds like Peter Lorre, and there’s also a black widow spider.

What stands out most for me in this film is the humour. There are a lot of puns, so depending on your tolerance for that it may grate a little, but what I like about this film is the black comedy. Lady Maudeline Everglot (who Joanna Lumley voices with relish) gets the best line, when her daughter worries that she and Victor might not like each other she dismissively replies. “As if that has anything to do with marriage. Do you suppose your father and I like each other?” Wise old skeleton Elder Gutknecht makes an elaborate potion which is implied to be the one that will take them back to the land of the living… it turns out he’s just making himself a drink and the spell turns out to be more straightforward. In the final battle between Victor and the villain, undead cook Miss Plum tosses Victor a weapon which she thought was knife, and it turned out to be a fork.

They also manage to get a humourous look on what it might be like to be the living dead. Emily’s maggot tells her “If I had not just been sitting in it, I’d say you’d lost your mind”. Emily herself gets a catty comment about her love rival. “Little Miss Living . Maybe he belongs with her with her rosy cheeks and beating heart”. However it is refreshing that Emily doesn’t go down the road of hating and resenting Victoria. In fact she sympathises with her when Emily is about to marry Victor for real, and seeing Victoria upset makes Emily tearfully back down from marrying Victor. She had her own dreams taken from her so cruelly, and she can’t bring herself to do the same to someone else.

The ending is often described as bittersweet. In many ways it’s a conventionally happy ending. The villain, slimy, cowardly Lord Barkis tricked Emily into falling in love with him, murdered her and stole her parent’s money, and was planning to do the same to Victoria. But he very much gets comeuppance, after making a smug speech he ends up poisoning himself before being tortured, as if going to Hell, by the undead. It can also be assumed that Victor and Victoria go on to live happily ever after. The reason the ending is bittersweet is all to do with the fate of Emily. She’s certainly a very tragic figure, murdered by a man she fell in love with, spending her afterlife waiting for someone else, and when he does arrive it turns out he loves another so she gets her heart broken all over again. She chooses to give up her last chance of ever having what she always wanted, and walks out of the church looking like a bride going down the aisle. But in a way it is presented as at least partly a positive thing, as she now says she has been “set free”. There are echoes of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations in Emily, however unlike Miss Havisham the fact that Emily is able move on is what helps her be at peace in the end.  Interestingly enough, Helena Bonham Carter is due to play Miss Havisham in an upcoming film adaptation of Great Expectations.

The last scene of the film is … Emily turning into lots of butterflies which fly up towards the moon. The implication is that Emily has gone to Heaven, and perhaps the filmmakers thought her turning into an angel would be too corny, but it’s still a bit weird. The scene does however, look very pretty, and strange but beautiful is very much what Tim Burton likes to put across in his films.

I think this film is underrated. It is very much a Tim Burton film through and through, so it depends on whether you like his style or not, but as a film on its own terms it has a great cast, gorgeous visuals and a very nicely told story.

The Dark Knight Rises

*** ½

3 ½ out of 5

CONTAINS SPOILERS

After the success of The Dark Knight, this film has a lot to live up to. I’ll come straight out and say this isn’t as good, but really the question is does it stand as a film in it’s own right? Yes it does. In fact, if you view it as the concluding part of a trilogy, then it’s excellent.

As the third part in the saga it offers the question of what happens when you have succeeded, when most of what you were fighting for has been solved.  Bruce Wayne is crippled at the beginning of this film, his crime fighting having taken a toll, and he has gone into retirement. Gotham’s crime has been drastically reduced, and it hasn’t been good news for those that tried so hard to make that happen. As one character says of Comissioner Gordon, “He was a war hero, this is peace time.” This being a film, the peaceful time doesn’t last long. If anything, things get worse than ever before.

It is rare in these films that you genuinely belief that the hero is in serious trouble, but that happens several times here. The stakes here are much higher. By the time this film gets going, the whole of Gotham city is threatened, and it only escalates from there, in the last third or so of the film the city has been completely taken over by angry escaped criminals, and the fight for the citizens is one of survival. On top of that, there is a nuclear bomb that is set to go off.  As you might have guessed, the tone of this film is more closer to a blockbuster high octane disaster movie than previously.  There are A LOT of explosions. It can’t really be said that it has a light tone, but the visual look and cinematography is lighter than before.

This film heavily publicised that Catwoman, arguably the most well known of Batman villains other than the Joker, would have a large role in this film, which she does.  In this incarnation she is depicted fairly traditionally, as a classy cat burglar and jewel thief. It doesn’t really bring anything new to the part, but perhaps that was the intention, going back to basics. Of all the depictions of Catwoman, I like Michelle Pfieffer in the Tim Burton directed Batman Returns one best, as in that film and with that performance she was a truly fascinating, so this more by-the-numbers version isn’t quite as good. However, considering what the last big screen version of Catwoman was the disastrous Catwoman film starring Halle Berry (seriously, if you haven’t seen that, don’t waste your time. It’s not even fun to watch as a bad movie), then this one is a definite improvement. Anne Hathaway seems to be enjoying herself. But it’s largely how you’d expect. Anyone familiar with the character will expect her to be a bit of a grey area, morally ambiguous and a bit fickle as to which side of the good/evil fence she is on. This time, while she clearly has fun stealing, ultimately her motive is she turned to a life of crime out of desperation, and now she wants to get out it and start afresh.

Bane proves a formiddable foe. Physically he is more than a match for Batman, and he seems a real threat. Although I have clearly labelled that this review contains spoilers, I’m going to choose not to reveal some of them because there are some MASSIVE twists in this film. What I will say is that Bane, while he is no dumb hired muscle, turns out to be more of a weapon than a mastermind, and the biggest twist is the indentity of the mastermind. I was kicking myself because when it is revealed, I should have seen it coming.

There are some problems with the film. As with many Batman films it is a little on the long side, the scenes in the hellish underground prison could possibly have been trimmed a little, and the scene with the choir boy singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in a stadium before Bane unleashes hell is a little cringey. But the film manages to wrap everything up well for the whole of the Christopher Nolan version of the Batman saga, and the ending is a very definite end, with a message that a hero should leave on a high with leave a lasting legacy.

The Dark Knight

*****

5 out of 5

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Memento is a contender for my favourite film of all time. I keep changing my mind on which film is THE favourite, but Memento is always up there. Growing up in the ‘90s meant that Batman has been a part of my entertainment from very early on, from watching repeats of the ‘60s TV series starring Adam West, to the brilliant Batman: The Animated Series and of course the film franchise. So I was very interested in seeing what Christopher Nolan would do with it when it was rebooted.

Having such a vast and interesting rogues gallery than most and having a darker image than the glossier shiner superheroes, Batman is arguably the one that can be taken most seriously. But the great thing about Batman is that it works no matter what you do with it. It can be campy and brightly coloured like the ‘60s TV series and the Joel Schumacher films (even though Batman & Robin effectively killed off the last film franchise).  It can also work as a gothic fantasy like the Tim Burton films. The Christopher Nolan incarnation is also going for a dark take, but trying to make it gritty and realistic, focusing on the grimy underbelly of a big city, organised crime and the struggles of law enforcement. Yet again, it somehow works.

The Dark Knight has been called the best Batman film and the best superhero movie ever among other accolades. Now what it the best is always a highly contentious issue, but is this film really worthy of all the praise heaped upon it? Well… yes! It’s a great film for many reasons.

One thing about it is that it is highly entertaining. We get plenty of action and high speed car chases. The film also has a sense of humour about itself, something which the first film in this new series, Batman Begins was a little lacking in. They are aware of how James Bondish some of Batman’s gadgets can get and there is plenty of black comedy, not least from The Joker. Heath Ledger’s performance is compelling as the insane twisted Joker, and he actually doesn’t appear all that much in the film, but he is one of the most memorable bits of the film, which shows just how strong a prescence he is. He’s violent and sadistic in some truly horrible ways and enjoys the pain of others, and even seems to enjoy pain that is inflicted on him. Like many incarnations what he wants to do is to drive others insane, forcing them to make horrible choices and manipulating others to do evil for him. They make clear that is motive is he is one of those who just wants to “watch the world burn”, he does it for the sake of it. He has conflicting stories as to how he got his scars, which just adds to the mystery, as we are no closer to knowing much about him, and as such he’s more threatening.

It is a bit of a shame that he overshadows Two Face so much, both from audience reaction and in the film itself, as while Harvey Dent is a constant prescence in the film Two Face doesn’t appear until near the end. The reason this is a shame is that the film does Two Face so brilliantly. In Batman Forever,  while there was nothing offensively awful about Tommy Lee Jones’ version, it was more like he was playing The Joker. They never really tackled that Two Face has a split personality and is constantly battling between his good and evil side. In this film they establish that Harvey Dent is a good man who wants to do whatever it takes to destroy the criminal hold on the city, and we see him get utterley destroyed mentally and physically. The make-up and effects used when his face has burned is much better than any other adaptation I have seen. It is the most realistically like half a face has been burned off, which is what makes it all the more horrific.

The film isn’t perfect, as good as it is it’s a little long to sit through, and while Maggie Gyllenhaal is much better than Katie Holmes was in the same part, Rachel is very underdeveloped as a character. As such, her death isn’t as affective as it really should have been. But I highly recommend this film, not just as a film for a particular genre, but by any standards it is a great film. From a directing point of view, it’s action packed, showing the big picture, that is the scale of all the car chases and the city, and showing how it effects the characters on a personal level. The latter is also a credit to the very, very strong performances, particularly from Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger and Aaron Heckhart. All this and the film even has room for some laughs along the way.

Snow White and the Huntsman

CONTAINS SPOILERS

**

2 stars out of 5

Appropriately enough for a story about beauty, visually the film is gorgeous. If you like eye-catching gothic imagery, which I certainly do, then this film delivers. We get blood drops on snow, red roses, gnarled black forests, ravens. The dark forest where nothing is as it seems as it appears to make people there hallucinate their worst fears. When Snow White gets lost in the spooky forest in question she sees branches as snakes. But that was fairly similar to the animated Disney version. There is also an opposite forest, the forest of the fairies, which is brightly lit and full of cute woodland critters, which also is similar to the Disney animated version and frankly look just as cartoonish. The CGI and special effects are generally to a high standard to be fair, but this section stands out quite badly.

The Seven Dwarves do show up despite their appearance being somewhat underplayed in most of the promo I’ve seen. They are characterised as gold miners being forced into becoming a sort of gang of thieves because of the queen’s reign, and they provide some comic relief. I could be wrong, but it seems almost as if they are reluctant addition, almost like they are only there because people would expect them to be part of a Snow White adaptation. There is a feeling that they are a little unnecessary.  They don’t appear until quite late in the film.The title suggests the story they wanted to tell was a love story between Snow White and the huntsman hired to kill her. The problem is though, that that story isn’t presented in an engaging way here. There isn’t much there that shows that they are attracted to each other, it almost comes off as they are by default. “You’re the heroine, I’m the hero, we should get together”. Also by the end of the film, this isn’t resolved. They try and set up a love triangle with a childhood friend of Snow White, who is also a duke’s son and standing in for the Prince Charming role. The implication is that the huntsman is Snow White’s ‘true love’ as at different points in the film after she has been poisoned by the apple, they both kiss her and she only wakes from her deep sleep after the huntsman has kissed her. But by the end, it’s not explicitly said whether they get together, but they probably do… to be honest I didn’t really care.

As far as plot is concerned, the main narrative is that Snow White is leading a rebellion against the wicked queen. Making a fairytale princess into an Action Girl isn’t a new thing, Ever After  starring Drew Barrymore did that for Cinderella, but Snow White actually makes a bit more sense to try that. As Ellie Beaven’s character put it in an episode of ’90s CBBC show The Wild House, “according to the story everyone loves Snow White and everyone hates the old bag”, so why not lead a revolution and claim the throne which as the daughter of the deceased king she has a legitimate claim that it is rightfully hers anyway? The ‘Snow White: Warrior Princess’ part of this film is actually one of the things about it that works well. But the film runs out of steam long before the end, and it follows standard “going into the final battle to defeat an evil overlord” clichés. Snow White making a BIG INSPIRING SPEECH TO RALLY THE TROOPS backed by stirring music is a very cringeworthy moment it has to be said.

By far the most interesting thing about the film is Charlize Theron’s performance as the Wicked Queen, here named Ravenna. In the first half of the film it looks like she’s trying to play the character as an insane hammy villainess, which would be fine, in fact if handled correctly it can make a villain iconic, but it still needs to come off as natural and convincing. Unfortunately it comes off as her trying a little too hard. However, when we get to see the more tragic sides of Ravenna, she’s much better. They give a blink and you’ll miss it flashback to a traumatic childhood, but it’s they way Ravenna tearfully remembers it that makes it work. As in the original story the wicked queen is obsessed with her beauty, and in this version she maintains it by stealing it from other young women, causing women in the kingdom to deliberately scar themselves so she won’t take them. But what makes her as a villain more disturbing isn’t her powers, but that her fatal flaw, a desperation to stay young and beautiful, is a very human one, and Theron plays this side of the character very well.  The scene where Ravenna poisons Snow White with the apple and in the final battle is good for this. She’s angry, bitter, twisted and desperate.

The poison apple scene also follows some adaptations that make Snow White seem a little less, well, thick. In the Grimms version of the fairytale, the queen comes back as a peddlar woman 3 times and tries varations of the same trick and Snow White falls for it every single time.  In this film as with some other modern adaptations, the queen disguise herself as someone Snow White knows rather than as a random peddlar woman after she’s well aware of the queen’s magical power and the fact she wants to kill her.

This film isn’t a terrible one, it looks good, and Florence + The Machine’s ‘Breath Of Life’ is an ace film theme,most of the characters are presented well enough, and it does a better job of making them more relatable and fully rounded to modern audiences than some adaptations of fairy tales can be, but overall it’s a little uninspiring really. If you want a film with a dark take on the Snow White story I’d recommend Snow White: A Tale Of Terror starring Sigourney Weaver as the wicked queen.