Film Shapes

Here's an innocuous, simple tale of absent fathers and alienation from the Shaky Isles. Nell Fisher plays Mildred, a young clever clogs who is suddenly motherless for a time. From the other side of the world comes the father she's never met, Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood). Things are frosty for a while until he agrees to go camping with her to find the mysterious, and probably bollocks, Canterbury Panther. Video evidence of the big cat is worth $50,000 NZD, which Mildred and her mum could dearly use, because of handy plot contrivances. The main draw of this film (for adults, at least) is the wonderful NZ scenery. The mountains and lakes, shot by cinematographer Daniel Katz, look fantastic. But is this enough to sustain a feelgood family comedy/drama? Well, it depends who you speak to, but for me, the answer is no. Wood is charming as the comically unsure dad, though it's still very hard to see past his Frodo face, especially as, once you mentally exchange the panther for a certa...

The old Cygnet cinema in Como reopened, initially for the Strange Festival in July, but is now running films from a very wide range of genres and eras (as well as quality levels).  An exhaustive scan through the calendar turned up the seminal kids'  fantasy-comedy,  Gremlins  from 1984. Seeing an opportunity to show the kids some 80s style, we ventured south of the river for the fi r st time in ages. Now I hadn't seen this since about, hmmm, maybe 1986 (I'm pretty sure I was too young to see it at the cinema on release, so it must have been a TV screening). It's an oddity, in that it borders on horror, flirts with comedy and yet is, at its centre, a soppy heart-warmer from Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, written by Chris Columbus. Apparently though, this film (as well as  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ) forced the MPAA to bring in the PG-13 rating, due to complaints about violent scenes. It starts with a slightly misplaced voice-over from an inventor/sa...

Readers of Terry Pratchett will probably be all over this animated adaptation of his Discworld children's novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents . For fellow neophytes, let me fill you in. Maurice is a talking cat and he runs a scam akin to the Pied Piper's gig of ridding towns of rats. The rats are also intelligent, but aren't fully aware of Maurice's intentions - basically greed, it seems. They're under the impression that he's trying to help them find their Shangri-La, a magical island where animals and humans coexist in harmony. This chimeric wonderland is in a book that we're introduced to at the start of the film, narrated to us by Malicia, voiced by Emilia Clarke. The rats presumably found this book somewhere and revere it as their holy tome, but they're later sympathetically disabused of this notion of 'rat heaven' (perhaps a nod to Pratchett's own form of benign atheism?). Could it be that what they've been searching...