Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (2014)

Pirate Fairy.

Those are the two words that first made me pay attention to the Tinker Bell series of films, and if they don't make you say "Tell me more", then you might want to check yourself for a pulse, because you're dead inside.

Zarina is "the Tinker Bell of dust keeper fairies": inquisitive and adventurous, determined to follow her dreams whatever anyone else says.  But when you work with pixie dust, the magical force that drives the entire fairy kingdom, well ... the potential for mishaps is pretty frightening.

I'm sure you know what happens next.  Zarina causes quite the mishap indeed.  She's banned from working with pixie dust as a consequence, and leaves Pixie Hollow, taking her own secret supply with her as she does so.

A year later Zarina returns, as Captain of a pirate vessel, to steal the blue pixie dust that keeps the kingdom running.  When Tinker Bell and friends try to stop her, she blasts them with a veritable rainbow of pixie dust, causing all their powers to switch over.  Can Tink and Co adjust to their new abilities fast enough to retrieve the blue pixie dust?  What will happen to Zarina if they do?

With four previous films under their belt at this point, the Tinker Bell crew have really honed their formula: this is a fast, fun, family adventure film with a generous mix of humour, action and adorbs.

All the adorbs.

Clearly the target audience for this is young girls, but if you don't laugh out loud at least once while watching this, then you might want to check yourself for a pulse, because -- oh wait, I already did that gag earlier in this review.

Good stuff.

Primeval Season 4 (2011)

Season 3 of Primeval did pretty well in the ratings stakes, but it was an expensive show to film at a time when the broadcasting network had got itself into financial difficulties.  They elected not to renew the series and the producers began to look for new partners.

It took about a year, but ultimately a deal was struck to film two additional series - 13 episodes in all - thanks to the co-operation of several channels (including the original broadcaster).

I'm pleased to say that I enjoyed season 4 a lot more than season 3.  First and foremost because it has precious little Danny Quinn - just a guest spot in one episode - but also because the creatures in this series feel like much more credible dangers than they did in the last one.

Just as in the real world, a year has passed in the show.  There's a new team responsible for the anomalies, headed up by newcomer Matt Anderson.  Matt's a man with secrets, as is made clear from his first appearance, though it won't be until the season conclusion that he clearly states what it is.  This is a thread that runs though both this series and the next one, which is why to me they feel a bit more like one season in two parts than two genuinely separate series.

Jess Anderson (in the red dress above) is also new to the show.  She oversees things from back at base, using advanced computer systems to coordinate the team's actions and to keep the public out of harm's way.

The other important new face in the show is Philip Burton, a technological genius whose company has been brought on board to help fund investigation of the anomalies.  Exactly what he gets out of the arrangement is left ominously unsaid (dun dun dun!).

The other main cast members are all returnees, including three veterans (four if you want to count a CGI lizard) who've been on board since season 1.

Despite all the changes, this series feels more like the show going back to its roots than anything else, with its renewed emphasis on menacing creatures and will-they-won't-they romance angles, both of which were staples of the first two seasons.

It's nice to be having fun while watching this show again.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Two girls and their father move house.  Later, the girls wait for a bus.  The next day they plant some acorns.  At the climax of the movie, they go on a bus ride.

I'm deliberately exaggerating the mundanity of the events in this film, of course.  I mean, from the DVD picture above you can probably guess that it's not quite as prosaic as those events would make it sound.

And yet those are signature sequences of the film.  "Waiting for the bus" occupies a good 5-10 minutes of screen time and most of it really is just standing by the side of the road.  That those 5-10 minutes are still engaging and entertaining speaks highly of the film's craftsmanship and of the writing's ability to capture the wide-eyed wonderment of childhood.  Not to mention its ability to make you wish, even if it is just a little bit, that you could see the magical creatures that live at the end of the garden.

This is one of the films that built the reputation of Studio Ghibli in its native Japan, and one of the films that made director Hayao Miyazaki a strong influence on John Lasseter of Pixar.  It is no accident that Pixar's success in the industry has been followed by a the rising visibility of Miyazaki's films to western audiences, in the shape of newer releases such as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle.

If you want to see the work that inspired the minds behind Toy Story and WALL-E, this is a fine place to start.

The Big Country (1958)

This is another of those movies I own on DVD because it came in a pack with the movies I actually wanted.  I've had pretty good luck with such films in the past, but it did not really continue here.

It's not that The Big Country is a bad film, per se.  The music and cinematography are good and the performances are all sound.  But it is in my opinion a deeply and fundamentally flawed film in a couple of important ways.

The first of these ways is the length.  At 160 minutes, the movie is far too long for the relatively slight story it has to tell.  I appreciate that it's a film that deliberately sets out to be an 'epic', but I haven't seen a narrative this padded since ... well, okay, since the Hobbit films, which wasn't that long ago.  But Peter Jackson's efforts to redefine self-indulgence aside, this is one of the most "oh get on with it" movies I've seen in a while.

The second issue is the main character.  Jim McKay (Gregory Peck) is Right About Everything, All The Time.  Now sure protagonists often do tend to be The Best, but in McKay's case it becomes problematic because his actions do not match the motivations the script ascribes to him.  If you tell me that one of the prime traits of your protagonist is modesty, it's best if I can't point to at least three scenes in your film where his actions appear motivated by pride.

The plot: man from back east (McKay/Peck) arrives in the west to marry his fiancee.  He makes a poor first impression on most of the locals: but as the movie will make abundantly clear to us, over and over again, this is because the locals are all venal, spiteful western yokels and he is ethically, morally and intellectually their superior.  No doubt this played very well to urban, middle class 1950s cinema-goers.  Anyway, his fiancee's family is locked in a bitter feud with one of the other ranchers in the county, and things all come to a head soon after he arrives.  What a good thing the city slicker is there now to fix all the problems these brutish cowboys have brought upon themselves.

The Big Country is one of those late-50s-to-early-60s westerns (like The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) that critiques and/or deconstructs the genre that birthed it.  Alas, it does so without any verve or consistency, and it takes way too long to do it.

Revenge of Doctor X (1970)

Ed Wood apparently wrote the screenplay on which this film is based.  I say apparently because, although he claimed he did, and all the usual Woodisms are there - thuddingly awful dialogue, incomprehensible "logic", and characters whose motivations change from scene to scene (or even within a scene) - he didn't receive a credit.  But then, in the best known cut of the film no-one receives a credit: the original US video release mistakenly had the credits for an entirely different movie.

On the plus side, if you're going to go uncredited, this is a good film to not be credited for.

During an important space mission launch, the lead scientist shows alarming signs of cracking under the strain.  His colleagues suggest he take a holiday - there's nothing they can do now until the rocket reaches it destination in any case - and he agrees.

Since he was a botanist before he became a rocket scientist (lots of overlap in those fields, right?), our protagonist decides to spend his holiday studying plants in Japan.  Before he leaves the US though, he has a chance encounter with a snake-handling garage owner who owns a Venus Flytrap.  The scientist (let's call him Dr X, since I don't recall his real name, and since there is no actual Dr X in the film) is so impressed by the plant that he treks into the local swamp and digs out one for himself.  Such are the things that happen in Ed Wood films.

Dr X takes the flytrap to Japan with him where he is met by the designated love interest, though to say that the romance is unconvincing is a bit like suggesting that Andre the Giant was of larger than average build.

Once established in his isolated laboratory near an active volcano (here's a helpful tip: if at any point in your life you find yourself voluntarily moving to live in an isolated location near an active volcano, please consider that you may be a mad scientist or supervillain), Dr X conducts experiments on his flytrap.  Somehow convincing himself that it has the capacity to reason, he resolves to cross-breed it with an aquatic plant only found in Japanese waters, and create a human-like hybrid plant.  Why?  To prove that humans evolved from plants, of course!  As we must have done, if we came from the sea!

No, I don't follow the Woodster's logic either.

Anyway, what we've got here is a dumb as rocks Dr Frankenstein remix with the monster replaced by a humanoid plant-thing with what looks like boxing gloves for hands.  Though that's a summary that actually makes the film sound a lot more entertaining than it really is, because it focuses on the events of the film's mad last half hour, rather than on the interminably dull first 60 minutes.

Also, before I go, I do want to give a shout out to the soundtrack, which is delightfully inappropriate throughout pretty much the entire film.

Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings (2012)

I'm not crying.  You're crying.

Okay, to be honest I didn't actually cry while watching this, but I did mist up a little at one point.  You can ascribe this to the fact that this is the first film I ever sat down and watched with my eldest niece.  Or you can ascribe it to me being a sentimental old fart.  Both probably have some validity.

Neither of them changes the fact that this is a grand little film.  It celebrates sisterhood and friendship in a matter of fact and unashamed way.  It shows characters disagreeing without any of them being 'bad people', and - without ever calling attention to it - shows that you can have different opinions and beliefs to someone else without being hurtful toward them or treating them badly.  It has (mostly female) characters who are consistently proactive, compassionate, altruistic and brave.  It has librarian jokes (it's possible I am the only one for whom this last fact matters, but it's my review).

The plot?  Tinker Bell dreams of visiting the land of the Winter Fairies, but it's forbidden for the very sensible reason that it is too cold there to be safe for Warm (Autumn, Summer and Spring) Fairies.  Prolonged exposure to the icy temperatures can irreparably damage a Warm Fairy's wings (and vice versa for Winter Fairies, of course).  But when Tink finds a mystery to which only a Winter Fairy can give her the answer, she's not going to let a little cold and snow stop her.

What Tinker Bell finds in the land of Winter will change not just her life, but the entire Fairy Kingdom ... assuming it doesn't destroy it first.

This is, all in all, a charming piece of film-making.  Recommended for anyone whose heart has even a little childlike optimism still in it.

Witchville (2010)

If you're as old as I am, you may remember British boy band Bros, who enjoyed a brief period of success in the late 1980s.  Band member Luke Goss has since moved on to acting.  For my money, he's better at this gig than he ever was at music, but his on-screen career has tended toward ... well, it's tended toward movies like this one.

Actually, that may not be entirely fair.  This is by far the worst movie I've seen Goss in; and I've seen Tekken.  But he's definitely tended toward the shallow end of the cinematic gene pool, with his highest profile parts being as the antagonists in Blade II and Hellboy II.

This film, though ... wow.  It doesn't just waste Goss's talents (and he is a pretty charismatic actor, really), but the talents of pretty much everyone who gets in front of the camera.  There's a fair number of capable-if-far-from-A-list actors in this flick, but none of them can make the dialogue work, and I don't blame them for that, because its straight out of a 14-year-old's first attempt at a fantasy novel.  Leaden and pompous only begins to describe its problems.

The narrative is as clumsy and malformed as the dialogue, with characters lurching in and out of the story like badly-operated marionettes.  Perhaps the worst example of this issue are a group of Chinese bandits who attack Goss's character, then join up with him, and later get pretty unceremoniously killed off because the script doesn't need their martial arts mojo any more.

The story?  Oh yeah, Goss is the heir to the throne of a kingdom beset by witches.  When his father dies, he has to fight to defend his people against the supernatural menace that threatens them.  This feels like it takes a lot longer than the film's 82 minute run time.  The end.

Seriously, you'd be better off watching Tekken.