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Holiday Movie Madness
This year’s holiday movie season features an unusually large number of excellent films worthy of viewing and the usual southern hemisphere weather conditions conducive to sitting in an air-conditioned room.

Favourite film of the season is Fantastic Mr. Fox, a wonderful stop-motion animation take by Wes Anderson of a short children's book by Roald Dahl. It’s a tale of the charming, if slightly over exuberant Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney, who gives up his thieving ways (he is a fox after all) to become a card-carrying member of suburbia. This complacency doesn’t last long and soon he is back to his chicken rustling ways and this time he draws in the entire neighbourhood. The film is utterly charming and has that rare ability to keep the children completely engaged while giving the adults in the audience more than enough brain food to keep them interested as well.

Speaking of adults, It’s Complicated is also one of those very rare films, it’s a romantic comedy written for and about middle-aged adults that is actually funny. Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep play a divorced couple that have been separated for a number of years. The time apart and even Baldwin’s new wife doesn’t prevent them from having a saucy affaire. Director Nancy Meyers (The Holiday) gets the nuances just right and there are a number of very funny scenes, including one of the funniest pot smoking scenes ever put on film.

Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of Sherlock Holmes is also an interesting one. It’s the most modern looking film of the season and one based on the oldest story (the character of Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887). It’s fast paced and full of modern film effects. Computer generated mayhem, slow motion fights scenes and an impressive digital reproduction of London way back when are just a few of its highlights. It also features one of the most bromantic pairings in film history as Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson do just about everything together but get a room.

The Lovely Bones splits the audience’s preference down the middle with most females in the crowd showing the love for this tale from beyond the grave, while most males seemed more than indifferent about the whole thing. The people that have read the book also seem more than enamoured. Peter Jackson has lost none of his visual sense and the film looks fantastic while it jumps between the world of the living and the dead. Its pacing is slow and thoughtful and it does raise some fascinating questions but this viewer found the answers less than riveting.

Finally we have Nowhere Boy, a tale of the early years of John Lennon leading up to the beginning of The Beatles. This period piece sees England at the start of the swinging sixties and shows Lennon to be a very talented lad and more than just a bit of a prat. We get to see the majority of the complications in Lennon’s early life that lead to him becoming such an enigma of an adult. His mistreatment of almost all the women in his adult live is given motivations here. The music is of course wonderful and the acting by the less than famous ensemble cast is very effective. For those Beatle fans please note that the music presented here predates the fab four’s output.

All in all, it’s been a great end (movie-wise) to a year that featured a number of films that will live long in memory and a few that will help show the way towards the future.
Rob Hudson


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