Happy Feet

This tale of singing and dancing emperor penguins is incredibly silly, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Background to impose gravity on Penguin Society, with its sundry rituals, prayers and superstitions, creates the feeling of a second rate Watership Down. In common with Moulin Rouge, it shares a love of recycling pop songs from the past thirty years or so. This film however, presents the songs cleverly arranged and interlocking with each other in a penguin mating ritual dance, as opposed to the pub-medley approach of Moulin Rouge. Truth be told, this is one of the most mind-bendingly bizarre films I’ve ever seen, it’s main quirk the fact that it isn’t sure what to be. In all probability, an experiment in near photo-realistic animation resulted in one or two sequences of dancing penguins, and some bright spark considered that a story should grow out of it, and indeed a story does, but it flowers in an unexpected way.

Thank You For Smoking

A comedy of flexible morals, the real meat here is the script, a display of the power of solid arguement, and the characterisation, inverting the politically correct roles of hero and villain. Seemingly, these two pretty strong elements weren't enough to warrant an entire film, so there's plenty of padding about building relationships with estranged family members, but these sprinklings are easily digested since everything else is so well executed.

Lost Highway

After seeing this film several times in the ten years it's been released, the fact that I'm still able to bounce ideas off it and disagree with those of others is testament to its mileage. The cast do a fine job of being significant fish in Lynch's pond and the direction and themes are as you'd expect.

INLAND EMPIRE

Good Lord. I rate David Lynch because his films beg re-viewing. In the midst of the disturbing imagery, too-cool-for-this-world soundtracks, menacing corridors, nightmarish cinematography, a thin thread of logic prevails, pieces of a jigsaw fade in and out, and you get the impression of having a handle on something, no matter how tenuous. His first work filmed on a digital camera, the picture has a very raw quality, a marked change from some of the pristine near-static shots of Mullholland Drive. The cast of Lynch regulars are fantastically warped, and Laura Dern acts her socks off - even if you don't like Lynch, it's almost worth watching this for her, although the running time might put you off. Three hours of David Lynch doing his thing is hard work, even for an ardent admirer.

A better review can be found here.

Tarzan

The chap who writes at Bad Movies has a nice little format including a "what I learned from this movie" section. Disney's Tarzan has taught me that

i) A leopard can match an adult gorilla in a wrestling match.
ii) Elephants can see through their noses.
iii) An English woman of the upper classes is almost capable of outrunning a pack of angry baboons in the jungle.

The animation looks absolutely brilliant, but that seems to have replaced writing as the budget priority...that and a soundtrack of "ethnic" percussion by Phil Collins. Brian Blessed provides the voice for one of the characters, and you'd think that would have saved the film. Sadly, the man really only plays himself, and hearing his voice coming out of a different face was akin to watching a talking dog - there is simply no way that voice really belongs in that face.