The Borrowers

Somewhere along the line I'd seen the end of this version of The Borrowers before, so it was kind of good to catch up with the remaining eighty or so minutes.

This is a peculiar Borrowers. It owes almost nothing to the original novel except the title and the idea of four-inch people living under the floor of a house (or in the walls) who borrow all manner of things to survive.

It exists in some strange land where the houses and cars are English but the light-switches switch on American style; where the policeman seems to have popped out of a French comedy (with the same kind of gear as a French policeman would wear on point - and he even appears on point a couple of times); where the family who occupy the house are American (though played by British actors) but the Borrowers are English (as are all the other Borrowers they meet later); where the villainous lawyer, Ocious Potter (played with a cartoon kind of manicness by John Goodman) intends to build a set of apartments that would take up a couple of acres in the space of one modest British house. And where every other car you see is painted green; in fact they might all have been painted green. It's a very attractive green, and it predominates throughout, along with ginger wigs (all in need of a quick trim) for most of the Borrowers, and a muted red. That's almost the entire colour palette.

And in one or two scenes the skyscape of the town the story takes place in is so obviously painted it's hard to know quite what the designer's intention was.

Okay, so what are the good points? John Goodman puts up with a heck of a lot of electricution, extermination, being tied up by duct tape and wire, and still manages to give his part plenty of verve. Ron Weasley's father (Mark Williams) appears as the exterminator who seemingly can't make up his mind whether he wants to dispose of the little borrowers or protect them. (This is an ambiguity in the script which leaves Williams high and dry more than once.)

Jim Broadbent plays the father of the borrower family with great energy, Celia Imrie (Mrs Quickly from the first Nanny McPhee movie) his wife, Flora Newbigin his teenage daughter, and Tom Felton his ten-year-old son. Tom Felton - yes, I thought that name rang a bell: it's our old friend Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series. This was his first movie, and he has a ball.

The special effects are superb: there's never a sense that the borrowers exist in anything but their own tiny world (crammed with heaps of visual jokes, most of which pass too quickly to be taken in on one viewing), or that they really are only four inches tall. And the overall design, odd though it may be, has a quirky charm.

Bradley Pierce also appears in the movie, as the boy who holds the story and the two worlds together. Though it may not be obvious when you see him here, he was the little boy in Jumanji - his big sister was later to become Spiderman's girlfriend: Kirsten Dunst. And even though they played a big sister and little brother in Jumanji, they were actually the same age...
Just one of those bits of trivia!

(The photo is of Tom Felton - when he's not being Draco.)

Double Hitchcock

Amongst all our house renovations, I’ve managed to watch two elderly Hitchcocks, after finding them on DVD in The Warehouse. The first was definitely the better of the two, though it had its hammy moments; the second (which even Hitchcock didn’t regard highly) is so hammy and badly acted that you wonder why he let them get away with it.
Sabotage, the first of the two, is full of wonderful detail and energy, marvellous London characters, and an effective performance from Oskar Homolka. Sylvia Sydney is good in the early part, when she’s lively and bright, but she doesn’t seem to do well in the latter half of the movie, when she’s required to be much more emotional. John Loder was second choice for the male lead, and is adequate, but doesn’t exhibit much charm. Desmond Tester plays the young boy as a person full of beans and liveliness. He was actually 17 at the time the movie was made, but you’re never aware of his being much older than his character. (I don’t know what happened to him as an actor. He made a bunch of movies up until 1940, one more in 1947 and then nothing more until 1874. Seems he might have moved to Australia - he died in Sydney in 2002 at the ripe old age of 83 – because he appears in more than one Aussie movie after that time.)
[Should have checked Wikipedia first: there's a reasonably full bio of Tester there.]
The other movie, Number 17, is low on the list of Hitchcock favourites, perhaps with good reason. It’s either a complete spoof or a ham-fisted piece of rubbish, and since Hitchcock wasn’t much into ham-fisted work, even when he wasn’t enjoying making a particular film, we can only conclude that he plays his producers for suckers and produces a piece of nonsense.
It’s full of shadows playing around on walls, and strange empty rooms and enigmatic characters. Though based on a hugely popular play, Hitchcock has done such a re-treatment of it that little of the original survives. The main actor, Leon Lion, who was completely associated with the role of Ben on stage, reappears here, and it’s well known that Hitchcock detested his constant mugging and overacting. Between him and John Stuart, in the opening scenes, the acting is taken at a snail’s pace, with every gesture and reaction overdone. You have to wonder what Hitchcock thought he was doing.
Things heat up a bit with the addition of more characters, and there is some humour in it, but it’s hard to believe Mr and Mrs Hitchcock and Rodney Ackland really spent several months on the script. It makes no sense, and is full of stuff that couldn’t have been got away with on stage. By the time we get to the end, with its crazy train ride, a bus trailing it all the way, and the enormous crash onto the waiting ferry, things have reached the theatre of the absurd. Admittedly, Hitchcock intercuts models and real action and other special effects in a marvellous way; it’s just a pity it’s all for so little dramatic effect.

POTC3

My wife and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean Mark 3 the other night. I hadn’t been looking forward to the prospect of a three-hour stint in the theatre, but in fact, the three hours went by pretty quickly, certainly more quickly than the third in the Lord of the Rings series, which was at least twenty minutes too long.
That’s not to say that POTC3 couldn’t have been cut. There are some sequences – particularly the pitched battles – that go on to such a degree you’d have be a numbskull to think there was anyone left alive. But there always is. And several versions of Jack Sparrow on screen at once is almost several too many. It’s only the fact that Johnny Depp’s character is so perfectly realised, and so intrinsically hilarious, that saves these scenes. In fact, Depp saves quite a few scenes.
All the characters are back in full force, plus a few additional ones, such as Chow Yun-Fat as an Asian pirate lord. And the special effects are extraordinary, as befits a blockbuster of this ilk in this day and age. Once upon a time you could spot many special effects; these days it’s well nigh impossible.
Apparently there’s a scene after the credits – which we missed. No doubt we’ll catch up with it when the DVD comes out.
The story line is utterly complicated – almost as bad as the later Star Wars movies. It resolves itself in the end, to a degree, but you have to keep your wits about you to follow it first time round. And it has a nasty twist at the end which really took the edge off the romantic part of the story – for me. I won’t say what it is, as it would spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.