Peter Jackson's Extended Editions of the Entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-03)

Yes, it's a long title for a blog post, but not half as bloody long as I spent watching these films.

A couple of weeks ago, my two-doors-down-and-across-the-corridor neighbour James cracked out the dusty boxset of the Lord of the Rings movies that had been sitting on his desk since the start of university in September, and brought them through to my room. James, amongst other things (rugby and novelty pyjama bottom enthusiast included), is a big fan of Tolkien's seminal fantasy trilogy, having been weaned on the films since they arrived in cinemas in the early noughties. He's been metaphorically gnawing away at the books since arriving in Stirling but has barely made it out of Hobbiton, so to speak. In a compromise my end-of-the-corridor neighbour Chris and I were only too happy to oblige with, he suggested we watch all the movies within a short space of time and appreciate the story while bonding like the exemplary corridor mates we are.

And so it was to be that, on that day in late October, I sat my laptop on top of my printer and stuck the disc in. This was, I should point out, only the first disc. Yes, the extended editions, despite this, are so long that one cannot simply contain them on a single DVD. Halfway through, the film cuts off and a message flashes up on the screen telling you to switch the DVDs. This is the first time I've ever experienced such a thing. Oddest thing is, it didn't completely take me out of the moment like I expected it to. We all had a nice little break, stretched our legs, and then sat down and continued the movie feeling a wee bit more refreshed. Smashing.

Anyhoo, after a bit of a kerfuffle sparked when Chris really insisted I open the Pringles I'd been saving, we started with The Fellowship of the Ring. This was the first film of the three to be released, and the first to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. It lost to a film about Russell Crowe writing equations on a big blackboard, but it set an incredibly lucrative and blockbusting ball rolling. We began, to the sound of Howard Shore's unparalleled score (punctuated by Pringles crunching and me sulking), with Bilbo Baggins getting ready to celebrate his eleventy-first birthday. Admittedly, if I was to read that famous opening line for the first time in a library, I'd think it sounded like a load of pish and stick it back on the shelf. What it does do, however, is introduce the reader, and, in this case, the viewer, to an immensely complicated world with quite a relatable and pleasant idea: a birthday party. Tolkien's stories demonstrate to us the true extent of the human imagination. Look at it all! He's created entire political systems, families whose stories stretch back centuries, multiple cultural histories that overlap and conflict with each other! The scale and detail of it is bewildering, but, at the same time, pretty easy to follow. That's the wonder of The Lord of the Rings.

As much as Tolkien is to credit for creating this world, it was no mean feat for Peter Jackson to put it on the big screen. The total manuscripts for the original books ran to 9,250 pages, and even the slimmer editions run to about 500 pages per volume. A lot of scenes from the book were filmed, but had to be cut out so the cinema audiences didn't contract rickets during their time spent in the auditorium. No such problems with the folk sat at home, though, so Jackson edited his own cut of the movies, which are monstrous in length but much better in terms of detail and depth. Every so often, while we watched the trilogy, James would chime in with a, 'this scene was deleted', or a 'I can't believe they didn't leave this scene in the original version'. Admittedly, some very charming and dramatic sequences were cut for the sake of brevity, and it does seem a shame.

Even without the deleted scenes, the scale of the production is remarkable. There are points in The Two Towers and The Return of the King where you realise there are about five plots going on at once, but you and everyone around you understands what is going on so unfalteringly it's as if it is as complicated as The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It helps that the characters and stories are so iconic. It's difficult not to smirk when Boromir mutters, 'One does not simply walk into Mordor.' Or when Gandalf roars 'You shall not pass!' Or when Legolas sings, 'They're taking the hobbits to Isengard-gard-gard-gard-gard.' It was not unusual to look around and find most of the people in the room mouthing the words to a particular scene, or singing along to one of the songs.

By the time we got to The Return of the King, Lewis and Rori had joined us, and we were watching it on Rori's lovely big 'snooker telly' rather than my crappy wee laptop (out of interest, both Rori and Lewis have great blogs you should have a look at; Rori's is a charming wee thing largely about university life, while Lewis' has just one post at the moment but has the potential to be - and I'm not going to mince my words here - the greatest piece of literature ever written in the English language). One particularly lovely moment came when the three LotR fans in the room - James, Rori and Lewis - sang along to Pippin's song before the Battle of Minas Tirith, and all three were bringing up random bits of trivia as they became relevant. There's something about Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth in general, and it's the same with things like Star Wars and Doctor Who, that just cries out for people to know as much as possible about them. It must be the level of detail and the amount of mythology surrounding these stories. They present themselves as a challenge to viewers and readers, who delight in being able to name the particular battle in which a particular minor character died or the planet where a particular item was collected.

There's definitely an aspect of admiration in it, and although I'm not a Lord of the Rings obsessive, I completely understand it. By the time The Return of the King absolutely swept the board at the Oscars, the films had cemented a place in popular culture to rival the original book trilogy. Fans flocked to the cinemas and made it only the second film in history to make over $1 billion at the box office. It remains a phenomenon - the success of the not-really-as-good Hobbit films demonstrates that - and has lasting popularity that most other franchises wouldn't consider in their most ridiculous LSD-fuelled dreams over a decade on. To many people, it was one of those movie 'events' we hear over-enthusiastic trailer producers talking about, and one that, remarkably, still feels fresh every time the experience is revisited.

Hamlet (1948) vs. Green Street (2005)

That's me settling down into university now. I've learnt how to cook a decent omelette, I've made a perfectly neat room look like shit, and I have the number for the local pizza place in my contacts. The past couple of months have been a swiveling mash of pub quizzes, pubs, public embarrassments and quietly scribbling notes down on a pad. I've not had that much time for films, and when I have, I haven't had that much time for writing anything on this blog; or, there's never been anything worth writing about. I've been told by my friends that the biggest problem with this blog is that I find so many films insufferably good. The writing is, naturally, far more entertaining when I find the film unbearably fecal, and I can go on a massive rant about how painful it is to live in a world where such a film can secure funding from grown men. That's why I never wrote about Interstellar or Nightcrawler, both of which I saw last week, and both of which were very very good. You ought to go to the cinema and pay to see them both. Last night, I watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. It was excellent, as I imagined it would be, but it would be tricky to write a whole post on it because I'd run out of superlatives after a couple of paragraphs.

A couple of nights ago, however, an interesting cinematic situation struck which finally gave me something worth writing about.

I'll give you some context, because I like the sound the keys make when I type on them. I had been struggling to get through Hamlet, one of the set texts for my English course, since I started reading it on a train in Sweden a couple of weeks ago. By Monday of this week, I had only got to The Mousetrap scene, and so I resolved to watch a film version and read along with it. Stupid me went for Laurence Olivier's 1948 best picture-winning version, for which he hacked away at the text like Cambodians hacking away at a sacrificial ox, cutting a four hour play down to a two-and-a-half hour movie. Out when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the main comic relief of the play, as well as the entire Fortinbras sub-plot, a sub-plot I only realised existed when it was mentioned at a lecture earlier this week. I was flicking between pages with such intensity, it must have looked like I was reading a Stephen King choose-your-own-adventure book.

It's a difficult watch, even with the Bowlder-like cuts. Olivier directs himself, prancing about in his tightest pair of medieval tights, with a haircut that looks like an albino Paul Simon. Of course he was one of the best actors of the twentieth century, Of course he knew Shakespeare better than almost any other director of his era. That doesn't make it look any less ridiculous. Unbelievably, costume design was one of the five Oscars this film picked up, despite everyone being dressed like they just stepped out of a Shrek film. The acting is terrific, as you should expect from a Shakespearean production as large-scale as this, but this is not the film to win over any Shakespeare skeptics. It is precisely the wrong kind of Shakespeare film - there is nothing new, no curveballs to get the audience sitting up in their seats. It's one of the Bard's biggest fans playing Hamlet for the rest of the Bard's fan club.

I suppose this was what was expected of a Hamlet adaptation back in the 1940s. I suppose back then critics were looking for something that was more revered than it was entertaining. Maybe the Academy's judges felt like they owed Shakespeare something, for some reason. But imagine if someone in Shakespeare's day gave their highest creative award to a particularly good version of something written by Sophocles. That year, Hamlet beat The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Best Picture. Go figure. They should've just given Willy Shakes the award for Best Original Screenplay and made do with that.

Anyway, when I was twenty minutes from the end of Hamlet, I was called down the corridor to watch a movie called Green Street (released outside the UK as Green Street Hooligans). I'd never heard of it before, but it seems like the other folk in my corridor can quote any scene at the drop of a hat. It concerns an American student who ends up in a violent football firm when he visits England, and it has more in common with Hamlet than you might think. It's about a young man who has recently dropped out of university, and is pressured into violence by a relative who is dead by the end (admittedly, Hamlet's father is dead before the start of the play, but I'm clutching at straws here). Both end with a climactic fight in which a main character dies (all the main characters die at the end of Hamlet, but once again, cut me some slack, I'm trying to compare the two most dissimilar things on the planet). Both stories largely take place indoors, but not exclusively. See?

I get the feeling Green Street was written for quite a particular audience, one that I really don't put myself in. It's for folk who love football, for one, and folk who are entertained by a massive group fistfight for another. While it does attempt to slip in an interesting anti-violence message ("Steve didn't kill your son! You did!"), it's difficult to shake the feeling that this is a film about football hooligans to be enjoyed by football hooligans*. That message is just stuck in so it can claim the moral high ground. Matt (the American student, played distractingly by Frodo Baggins) is undoubtedly shown to have come out of the experience a better man. Nevertheless, it is good fun, because who wouldn't enjoy watching a load of Cockneys knocking each other out?

So who wins in the battle of Hamlet vs Green Street? Well, I'm going to plump for Green Street in this round, simply because I like imagining how the critics and snooty cinemagoers who championed Hamlet back in the 40s would react to it. Hamlet fails because it would bore the tits off anyone who enjoyed Green Street. Green Street, on the other had, would shock the tits off the 1948 Hamlet fans. In this battle of moronic populism versus patronising elitism, the former floors the latter. Probably with a headbutt to the chest.

*DISCLAIMER: The people in my corridor are as far from football hooligans as you could care to get. They are friendly, smart people who cook fantastic meals. I imagine they enjoy the film for the reason outlined at the end of that paragraph.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Finsterworld. Ah, Finsterworld.

When the Edinburgh International Film Festival closed for another year a couple of months ago, I thought my experiences there would make a fairly decent new post for this blog (god knows I needed something). I volunteered for the festival in the role of Young Programmer, one of a bunch of young people who chose a bunch of films to be shown as part of the youth-oriented 'Teen Spirit' strand of the festival. It was a fantastic few weeks, choosing great films that deserve a wider audience, and then watching them being shown on the big screen at Cineworld or the Filmhouse. I got access to the opening and closing premieres and parties, as well as a small place round the back of the Filmhouse called the 'videotheque', where the press and people associated with the festival could watch any film that was screening as part of the festival on a personal computer. It was great.

My problem was, I didn't actually go and see many films. All this opportunity, and I was at home doing other things most of the time. In retrospect, it was a bit of a waste. I went to see one dreadful Finnish arthouse film, which I couldn't walk out of because I had just done the introduction for it; a bunch of short films, including a terrific German one called Moritz and the Woodwose; and a German comedy-tragedy called Finsterworld. When I was thinking about writing this post about the EIFF, I soon realised that all I really wanted to write about was Finsterworld. So, I have abandoned the rest of the post in order for it to take centre stage.

Part of the job of the Young Programmers was getting together on a Monday afternoon to watch some films, then deciding whether they deserved a place in the festival. It was towards the end of this cycle, when we were beginning to run out of places, that we sat down in a tiny cinema to watch Finsterworld. Once the credits were over and I was standing up again, I couldn't stop talking about it to everyone else. I volunteered to write a short paragraph about it for the festival brochure because that meant I could take home a DVD. I did, and I watched it again. Once again, I was blown away. I started talking about it with friends at school who didn't know what it was. Eventually, when the festival came round, I gathered up a group of friends to come with me to the cinema and see it. I've never been in such an excited flurry over a film.

Its style is the first thing that noticeably sets it apart. Finsterworld seems to take place, as the title perhaps suggests, in a universe slightly removed from our own. It is inhabited by quirky characters, all as fascinating and allegorical as each other, and the colour palette is bright, with blue skies and pastel tints even as the film corkscrews into darker and darker territory. The film itself follows five loosely connected storylines, each with its own message about the modern world and the general state of humanity. It tackles such awkward subjects as German guilt over the Holocaust with intelligence and humour, which makes it surprisingly easy to follow and enjoy.

I really don't want to say too much about it, because I believe one of the reasons I was so excited by it was because I didn't expect it to be that great. We'd watched pretty good films together before, but none I would count among my favourite films. If you ever get the chance to watch it, I don't want to be the one who spoiled any of the surprises for you. Hopefully you will soon be more likely to get a chance to see Finsterworld, as it was recently announced on the official Facebook page that the film is on the shortlist for Germany's Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination. I had the pleasure of conducting a Skype interview with the director, Frauke Finsterwalder, after the screening. She came across as very smart, patient and eloquent, answering the audience's questions, as well as my own, with much enthusiasm. The movie deserves all the attention and awards it's getting. Find Finsterworld and watch it, any which way you can.

NOAH (2014)

With biopics, there is a tendency to use a title with a single, evocative word, usually the name of the protagonist.* If you're famous, it'll be your surname. If you're really famous, it'll be your first name. If you're really, really famous, you'll only have had one name to choose from in the first place. Such is the case with Darren Aronofsky's new movie Noah, about a man whose story is one of the most famous in the best-selling book of all time. So yes, really really famous. But it would be a mistake to call this a biopic. Even if you're one of the folks who believe in the biblical tale of Noah and the Ark, the liberties Aronofsky has taken with what it says in the Bible is similar to if Richard Attenborough had made Gandhi fight off a wormhole invasion of intergalactic velociraptors with a rusty machete.

I'd like to establish that I was never planning to go and see Noah. I didn't really see myself as the target audience, seeing as I don't particularly believe most of the stories in the Old or the New Testaments, and I wouldn't be particularly shocked if one day it turned out God isn't real. That doesn't mean I don't find the whole idea fascinating, and I was interested in how Aronofsky would put his trademark dark twist on a story that ends with the invention of the rainbow, but it never quite intrigued me enough to make me get off the seat in my living room to sit down in one with a popcorn holder to the side. What happened was I got the opportunity to attend the Scottish premiere of the film at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh. Russell Crowe was going to be there, as was Douglas Booth, and they would both be strutting about outside in front of the peanut-crunching crowd, all straining to have a look at their well-known facial layouts and have them scribble on a sheet of paper. I'd never experienced a premiere before, and I was curious enough to let that persuade me.

So I met up in town with my filmy friend Bronwyn who had got a hold of the tickets, and we waited outside in a queue for the arrival of the Kiwi Beard. After a while, he turned up with an entourage of kilted Scots with facial hair to rival his, and we all sighed gratefully and went inside to the cinema, where it was warmer. Russell stepped up on stage and delivered a short introduction to the film before running out to catch a plane to Cardiff for the Welsh premiere, happening the same day. The place went dark and we got comfortable.

We start with a quick recounting of the story of creation from Genesis, and how mankind came to be such a bunch of total arseholes through their ancestry, leading all the way back through the centuries to the very first arsehole, Adam's. I spent a lot of the film imagining how mind-blowing all this would be if Aronofsky had come up with the original idea himself. However, in retrospect, it probably seems as though he relied heavily on the fact that most people know the story of Noah. If most of the folk watching didn't already have the preconception that Noah was altogether a decent guy, they would have gone off him pretty quick. Aronofsky's Noah just doesn't quite work as a protagonist people can like, especially at the point where he is lurching around the ark with a knife, searching for his newborn twin granddaughters so he can kill them both, like an Iron Age Jack Torrance. This is amplified for folk who don't believe in a God, who will see his homocidal rampage as the result of his own choice rather than a challenge of faith from the creator. This isn't a guy we want kids to draw and stick on the walls in Sunday School.

So Noah isn't that great a guy, and the rest of the characters are either the intended villains of the movie (the folk who don't interpret the word of God correctly) or the folk who are constantly yelling at Noah to stop ruining everyone's lives over his (apparently correct) interpretation of the word of God. I don't know where I should be. And using Anthony Hopkins' Methuselah as the comic relief of the film is just bad. I suppose I've learnt my lesson now: biblical epics are not my sort of film. And don't go for biopics of folk without a bio.

*See: Alexander, Ali, Amadeus, Bugsy, Capote, Casanova, Chaplin, Cleopatra, Diana, Elizabeth, Evita, Frida, Gandhi, Hamlet, Hitchcock, Iris, Jobs, Lincoln, Macbeth, Milk, Nixon, Patton, Pocahontas, Ray, Spartacus, Sylvia and Wilde

Post script - Need someone to build an ark? I Noah guy. Haha.

Follow me on Twitter - @crunro

Crap Film Night

The other night, me and my friends Chris and Lewis, who joined me for Inside Llewyn Davis on Monday, came together at Chris' house for a wee film night. Our intentions were to watch the very worst films we could find, for the laugh factor more than anything. Terrible films reach a section of the funny bone intentional comedy films often miss, and I often watch them for the sheer joy of picking apart every individual calamity of continuity, plot, accuracy and production (see Plan 9 From Outer Space).

The movies we had chosen concerned two of the most dangerous organisations in recent history: al-Qaeda and the Nazis. When a studio or director doesn't want precious running time to be taken up by crafting a back story for their villain rather than action, they'll often resort to using an established baddie who people already hate for reasons that don't need to be explained in the film, so they can get around to shooting their limbs off as quickly as possible. These two films actually do this doubly, the first by having a zombie al-Qaeda and the second by having Nazi alien invaders from the dark side of the moon. Scary stuff. Our night started with Chris' DVD of John Lyde's 2012 horror Osombie.

Osombie (2012)

This gritty documentary recounts the events following the US Navy Seals' killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The world knows all too well the story of bin Laden's zombie insurgent army who rose to avenge him in the years following his death, and the story of the crack team of NATO special forces (here played by lookalikes of Colin Farrell, Amanda Seyfried, Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters and Keanu Reeves in 47 Ronin) who were sent to Afghanistan-on-Sea to fight back. The director and funders clearly, correctly, thought that there was no better way to honour the memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in 9/11 and the subsequent, ongoing War on Terror than to tell this tale. Good on them, that's what I say.

Osombie follows what happened when this crack team, given as much ammo as they could ever need, the most ridiculously unsuitable weapons they could think of, and orders to show off as much as they possibly can when killing their targets, stumbled across Hilary Swank in the desert (here played by a lookalike, of course) and joined her on her search for her conspiracy theorist brother Derek (here played by Crocodile Dundee with a beard), who holds the apparently outlandish belief that bin Laden has returned from the dead, and who wishes to kill him himself. I found myself close to tears when, completely unexpectedly, Derek turns out to be the one to kill Osama at the end, finally realising his dream (I decided it wasn't even worth putting a spoiler warning in there).

And if you, like myself, are a massive fan of cliches, Osombie is your dream movie. Colin Farrell rips his shirt off if he ever gets the opportunity; Amanda Seyfried is a supposed tomboy nicknamed 'Tomboy' who actually has a crush on, over the course of the film, just about every other member of the group; and 47 Ronin is a joker nicknamed 'Joker', who poignantly tells a final shite joke in his dying moments. Who would have thought that a film with such a ridiculous premise could be so outstandingly predictable?

So well done, Osombie, for actually managing to insult the memory of one of the most hated human beings who has ever lived.

Iron Sky (2012)

Lewis had been mentioning this movie all evening, as he had a DVD of it at home. After searching Netflix and finding no genuinely bad movies (as in fun bad, not just bad bad; see Queer Duck below), we decided it was worth walking round the corner to his house in order to grab it and have a watch. The premise is simple enough. In 1945, the defeated Nazis fled to the moon and have spent their time educating Aryan children in all their nasty Nazi ways. Their careful hiding place is discovered by a pair of American astronauts, and *havoc ensues* when they decide to revisit Earth to spread their Nazi message.

What sets Iron Sky apart from a film like Osombie is its implicit self-awareness. It knows exactly how preposterous it is, and actually employs that preposterousness to its own advantage, using it to emphasise a surprisingly potent political subtext. Obviously, there are some parts to it that are plain stupid, such as the black astronaut who the Nazis turn Aryan using an 'albinism serum' in order to make him palatable. But then you've got the US president (a clear parody of Sarah Palin) listening intently to a Nazi ambassador's description of their one-world ideology, before reeling it off to her cheering, adoring nation... ouch. By the end, it's clear that the film is even more anti-USA than it is anti-Nazi Germany, which is interesting. Does raise a few valid points, and there's a fantastic shot-by-shot throwback to 'that' scene in Downfall.

Nevertheless, nobody has ever bought Iron Sky on DVD for its political message. On the cover, it's a Nazi bashing science fiction movie riddled with explosions, ironic humour and careless offensiveness. On those points, it could be argued that it's not the film most people set out to watch. What it is is one of the more surreal viewing experiences in my life.

(As a sidenote, it turns out that the original idea of Nazis from the moon isn't as original as you'd hope, too. Read this.)

Queer Duck: The Movie (2006)

This was one we came across during our search through Netflix to find the worst films we could. Chris typed in the letter Q into 'Search', and this is what popped up. We all glanced at each other and immediately put it on. The title sequence was hysterical. It was the hardest any of us had laughed for ages, out of sheer disbelief and wonder. Then, when that ended, we lasted for about a minute before turning it off. The basic premise is, there's this gay duck, and he has gay friends. Jokes are squeezed out of this premise like a puppy going through a mangle, and the results are just as funny. It's the epitome of a one-joke idea, and yet they run with it for the full feature-length. Nae gid.

Crimson Tide (1995)

Well, okay. By midnight we had got tired of bad movies, and decided to try out one of the many incredibly brilliant films on Netflix. When we scrolled past Crimson Tide, I piped up, since I saw wee clips of it a couple of years ago and I'd been wanting to see the full thing ever since. It has Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in it, and it's a Cold War thriller about the battle for leadership aboard (within?) a nuclear submarine.

We found ourselves sitting on the edges of our seats for half the film. It's sweaty, cramped and fantastically intense, with the responsibility for a nuclear war between the USA and Russia as the stake. When a broken message comes through to the sub that could either be ordering the immediate launch of nuclear missiles or the retraction of them. The sharply logical and cautionary Hunter (Denzel) presumes the latter, and refuses to allow his impulsive superior Captain Ramsey's orders to fire. As the crew decide who to trust, things get more claustrophobic, more intense and even sweatier. It's concerning, suggesting that the fate of millions of people could rest on whether one person blindly makes the right decision, or blindly makes the wrong one. And it's hardly far from possible. As the opening title card chillingly reminds us:

"The three most powerful men in the world:
The President of the United States of America
The President of the Russian Republic
And the captain of a United States ballistic missile submarine."

Luckily, all the uncertainty and fear of the Cold War is over now. Well, is it? As Tony Scott shows us here, as long as there are short-sighted warmongers, the possibility for disaster is always on the doorstep, and god knows we don't have a shortage of them in the world. Just thank your lucky stars that bin Laden's finally been taken out for good.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

A Week of Coen

As those who know me well know well, I have quite a large soft spot for the Minnesotan film makers the Coen brothers. The dark, idiosyncratic humour the brothers share just appeals to me, and in their more serious turns their sharp focus on deeply complex characters is compelling. Anyway, a week or so I decided to watch my DVD of Raising Arizona, their second feature, for no other reason than I'd never watched it before and I suddenly had time. As it turned out, this was the first of three Coen films I'd end up watching that week, with The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis, their newest, following not long after.

Raising Arizona (1987)

As the brothers' second feature, the fast-paced comedy Raising Arizona is a fun opportunity to try and catch the beginnings of the many hallmarks that appear in their films. The Coens are more devoted to a certain number of hallmarks than your average directors, as if they have a few lucky charms they can rely on to make the film a success. These include the actors John Goodman, John Turturro and Frances MacDormand (Joel Coen's wife), as well as their use of quirky characters, southern accents, recorded music and long speeches (such as the one that opens The Big Lebowski, or the ones that end No Country For Old Men and Fargo). Raising Arizona ticks five of these boxes.

Nicolas Cage, the man who does mental like nobody else, stars as Hi McDunnough, a small-time criminal who, after being caught and released many times, falls in love with Ed, the police photographer who takes his mugshot after every arrest. They end up getting married and, after discovering Ed is unable to have kids and being turned down at every adoption agency in town, Hi manages to steal a baby from a local unpainted furniture magnate. It's never going to end well, and it doesn't. As wacko after wacko enters their lives, Hi and Ed struggle to keep the child in their undeserved possession. It's a yarn with such ridiculous imagination it's difficult to not get swept away with it. When it comes round to one of the strangest chases in cinema history, it's clear that the Coens must have had a whale of a time creating it.

And it is the Coens' film. In a well-known anecdote, Cage said he would constantly suggest new ideas for the character of Hi or for the movie, only for them to be smashed down by Joel or Ethan. They have a very clear idea of what the movie's going to look like, and you can't blame them for not wanting interference when the story's this complicated and winding. It's the sort of thing I wish I could write, the cinematic equivalent of taking a line for a walk. You just come up with the original premise, then run with any ideas that come into your head, no matter how ridiculous they get, until you reach a satisfying conclusion. It's something they do incredibly well, and it's just as much fun to watch as it would be to write.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

I know, I have written a full post about this one before, but the fact remains that every time I come back to it, which is not as often as I'd like, I'll stumble across something new or notice something I hadn't before which reveals a little more about the supremely unique plot of The Big Lebowski. I came back to it this week for the saddest of reasons: the shocking and untimely death of the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays The Big Jeffrey Lebowski's assistant Brandt in the movie. The best tribute to the man's huge talent I could think of was to watch and enjoy his performance in this, one of my very favourite movies.

Like Raising Arizona but better, The Big Lebowski takes an even more trivial thing, namely an intruder relieving himself over the rug of a man called The Dude, and uses it as a catalyst to set in motion a Rube Goldberg machine of unconventional madness. There is a spark that lights in the opening scenes and continues until the closing credits roll. The imagination of it is startling, and I'd be hard pressed to think of a film I've ever enjoyed more. Anyway, if you want to read more about what I think of The Big Lebowski, check out the post I wrote a few months back. There, that's saved some time.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

This was the third time I tried to see this film. The first Saturday, my friend Michael couldn't find the time to come with me. A week later, my friend Chris came along as well. We first checked the Vue, but the times were too late. We then checked the Filmhouse, but the ideal times I found turned out to be for two week's time. We visited the Cameo, but they had sold out, and the Odeon weren't showing it at all. So, we ran across Edinburgh to the Dominion cinema at Morningside, where they told us that the film reel of Llewyn Davis hadn't arrived on time, so they had to push back the showing of it another week. At this point, we had run out of cinemas, so we retired to a pizza place and tried again on Monday, when two more friends, Lewis and Connor, came along to see the film at the Cameo again, where they let us in because we'd ordered the tickets. I was glad I did, because the Cameo has incredibly comfortable seating.

And, of course, Inside Llewyn Davis did not disappoint. The film opens with Oscar Isaac's pitch-perfect Davis performing to a packed bar in Greenwich Village, New York. As with every other song in the movie, the Coens just let it run for the entire length, allowing the cinema audience to become the crowd listening. The soundtrack is the movie, the movie is the soundtrack. Every tune is given the directors', and the audience's, full attention, and there is no other music that isn't performed in front of the camera. It may just prove to be one of my favourite soundtracks of all, in fact. Michael went home and bought the album immediately.

As vital as the music is to the story of folk musicians and the fickle world of the music industry, the tale of Llewyn Davis remains compelling independently. It's a melancholy picture, emphasised by the dark-green, brown and wet cinematography of Bruno Delbonnin, following the singer's journey around the Eastern United States over the course of a week. As the people around him win recording contracts and fame, Davis refuses to comply to the advice of others when they suggest he finds someone to perform with. He sleeps on the couches of people he is barely friends with, he is temperamental and blunt, and yet your heart breaks when a record producer responds to his soulful and pained performance with, 'I don't see any money here'.

Success is a reward which is seldom earned without compromise. As Davis walks around the wintry city, guitar case in one hand and symbolic cat in the other, he sees compromise as an insult to his former singing partner, who jumped off the George Washington Bridge. He doesn't enjoy the folk singing life, he sees it as the only career choice he can make that stops him from the horror of merely 'existing'. His problem is, the music world doesn't like him either, and so he is destined to keep moving between friends' apartments forever. Like a rolling stone. He will only ever achieve if he lets go of his old life, but perhaps he's missing all these opportunities on purpose, punishing himself and constantly reminding himself of how useless he is alone now his only partner is gone forever.

It really is an incredible and beautiful film. Make a point of going to see it if you haven't yet. It serves as another reminder of the genius and skill of the Coen brothers, and I can't wait to see what comes next from the two filmmakers who never seem to come down from the top of their game.

Please, Mr Kennedy, follow me on Twitter: @crunro

American Hustle (2013)

Hello again, tiny but loyal readership. It's been a good few months since I last put anything on Rewatchableness, and this is my written apology to all four of you. When I started this little blog o'mine back in December 2012, I said I'd make an effort to write about every single film I saw from then on. Bollocks. I'm surprised I kept that promise for the ten months I did, to be honest, but eventually I just found myself in the pitiable state of just not being arsed. It could have been permanent, had a couple of people not brought up the blog and made me feel guilty about abandoning the poor thing.

Anyway, a bunch of things have happened since I did abandon it. The night before I published my last post before the hiatus (which was about The Raid), my friend Connor, who has been mentioned a few times on here, put a link to this website on Reddit. In the 24 hours that followed, I went from roughly 6 or 7 views a day to over 2000. The people working the blogger server must done a double take. Inevitably, though, not many people looked at anything other than the first post they were confronted with, and the next day the viewer count plummeted back down to 20. It might have been that gentle nudge to the face reminding me of how mediocre the blog was that discouraged me from writing on it for a while, but I'm not sure. I'm happy with the casualness of it.

It certainly wasn't that I just didn't see any films. Quite the opposite. For example, I've seen both Filth and Sunshine On Leith, and I probably could have enjoyed writing something comparing their very different views of my home town of Edinburgh (the closeness of the setting meant that in one sweeping shot at the start of Sunshine On Leith, I could clearly see the cinema that I was sitting in at the time, quite an odd sensation). I saw Hitchcock's seminal 1960s horror The Birds for the first time on Halloween night. I saw Gravity twice, with one of those times being in IMAX, and massively enjoyed it both times. I saw the Danish drama The Hunt, which is outstanding and everyone should see, and the touching, shocking and desperately needed Palestinian documentary Five Broken Cameras, both over Netflix. And while I was over in Sweden seeing Swedish Charlotta for New Year, I went to see Steve McQueen's jaw-dropping slavery film 12 Years A Slave and Peter Jackson's passable Middle Earth 3D romp The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

I can't say I didn't appreciate the freedom of watching these films without having to make the effort to write about them afterwards, but I've come to realise that I actually enjoy writing just as much as I love watching movies, and I wasn't such an idiot 14 months ago when I decided to merge these two passions to produce a hideous, mutated and confused baby blog. So that's why I've grabbed the iPad with both hands and thrown myself back into it.

But the top of the post says American Hustle. That's the last film I saw, last Saturday, and that's the film I'm going to use to defibrillate this thing. My good friend Paul had texted me earlier on in the week, asking if I wanted to go and see Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street that weekend with him and Michael, another friend. However, this plan went to mush after we realised it was an 18, and while I could possibly have got in using Paul's passport (as I did with Filth), baby-faced Michael wasn't going to find a way in in a hurry. So we plumped for American Hustle which, it was announced last week, has tied with Gravity for the most 2014 Oscar nominations. Sounded like a fair swap, I thought, and I went in the cinema knowing next to nothing about the story or anything else.

The first thing that slaps you in the face about American Hustle is Christian Bale. Director David O'Russell has clearly heard the old Hollywood adage that if you want to hook your audience from the very start, get your main star to put on 43 pounds in weight, shave his head for a hideous combover, slouch until he gets a herniated disc in his back, then open with him topless. It works. With an image more than reminiscent of Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, Bale's repugnant Irving Rosenfeld walks into a scene right from the middle of the storyline, that shows us exactly what we're dealing with: we have three people: Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper. Wee bit of a love triangle going on between them. They're attempting to capture a politician (Jeremy Renner with a quiff) taking a bribe on film, but the politician takes it badly and walks out.

Naturally, once Irving takes us back to the start and shows us how he got to that point, things prove to be a bit more complicated. The whole story of conmen conning and conning some more, then being conned themselves and being offered retribution through helping to stage another massive con is entertaining, and the great script makes it power along. It's enjoyable to see such a terrific cast loving every line they're reciting.

It's just a shame that as the cons get more and more numerous and intricate, it's incredibly easy to slip away for a second and end up not having a clue what's going on. Both Michael and the aforementioned Connor said that they thought the acting was brilliant, but they didn't like the movie because everything had just become gibberish by the end. And when I tried to explain it to Michael during the credits, I realised I hardly had a grip on what was happening either.

American Hustle is a film that begs for a second viewing for all the wrong reasons: you're so confused at the end that you feel you have to go back and find out where you lost it. That isn't to say I didn't just like the feeling of it. Even if I was lost, the performances, the soundtrack and the intentionally tacky, kitsch style of it made it good fun to watch, and I wouldn't be sad if I ended up revisiting it. It's certainly never boring to watch.

There, I'm done.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

The Raid (2011)

For weeks we'd been planning this event: during the October holidays, myself, the two Michaels, Connor, Nick and Chris would romp along to Chris' house in order to eat pizza and marathon the Star Wars original trilogy (do three films count as a marathon? No, almost certainly not, but hopefully no one will notice). However, as it usually goes, these great nights rarely go as planned. Michael H ended up in St Andrews, unable to make it down in time. What with their recently found jobs, Connor and Nick could only make it along after nine, and Haile Gebrselassie himself wouldn't have the endurance to watch nothing but Star Wars until after three in the morning. My parents had made it clear that I was walking home, too, so the 'cannae be arsed' factor also came into play.

And so it came to be that we were sitting on Chris' sofa at half past nine, scrolling through Netflix to find a possibly accompaniment for the pizza we'd just ordered. We scrolled past a low-budget British movie named Tower Block, with Sheridan Smith and Russell Tovey in it, amongst others. I stopped Chris there, saying I had heard it was 'like a British version of The Raid'. Everyone liked the sound of this, so we watched it for a good ten minutes before we realised that The actual Raid was also on Netflix. We stopped wasting our time and switched on the genuine product.

The Raid is an Indonesian film, set in Jakarta and directed by Welsh-born-but-currently-Indonesian Gareth Evans. Both Connor and Chris had come across it on Netflix before, and both said it was one of the best action films they had ever seen, a sentiment agreed with by Empire magazine. This is the basic premise: a SWAT team have to muscle their way to the top of a Jakarta tower block in order to find and arrest the notorious drug baron who lives on the final floor. If you're hoping for much more than that, you'll probably be disappointed. Aside from a couple of neat twists towards the end, your main draw is the violence: violence that I have never seen more beautifully and graphically co-ordinated in a film.

Honestly, if you're not too squeamish, these fights are awe-inspiring. There are moments where I couldn't understand how the shots were filmed without actually killing actors. Axes are slammed into people's shoulders as they run; bullets are fired through their heads as their eyes are still darting back and forth. It's CGI, sure, but it's CGI so convincing you can't help wincing when a man is decapitated by a door frame. One sequence in particular, set in the corridors of the seventh floor, is directed by Evans as if he was conducting a symphony. As each new assailant attacks Iko Uwais' Rama, the tempo shifts and the camera spins to showcase the incredibly impressive martial arts skills the man actually possesses. As unlikely as it is that his moves would actually stop and disarm a madman with a machete, you let it pass because it's so bloody cool. The Raid has style.

What with this and Kil, the Malaysian film I watched and loved at the start of the summer, I really believe that South-East Asia is a gold mine for stylish, modern independent movies. The Raid both pays homage to and is a part of the martial arts film culture that originally put the area on the cinema map, the sort that never really pushes its premise story-wise, but captivates you with action until you come round during the credits and have to pick your jaw up from the floor. This is the type of movie that reminds people why world cinema is worth having a look at.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Amadeus (1984)

It was the September Weekend holiday last week, in which Scottish state school kids get both their Friday and their Monday off for a four-day weekend in the middle of September. Late on the Thursday evening, I noticed that Amadeus, the 1985 Best Picture winner, was on BBC Two at quarter to midnight. I took the split-second decision to give it a watch, regardless of how early I was supposed to get up the following morning and how tired I would be by the end. I would commit myself to this film. It was only as the title card appeared:

AMADEUS

DIRECTOR'S CUT

...that I sank back in my seat and put my head in my hands. It would be a long night.

But what a director. Miloš Forman is my second-favourite Czech, and his 'other film', One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is undoubtably one of the best films I've ever seen. Forman won the best director Academy Award for both One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus (two out of his three nominations), and both won best picture. His movies craft extraordinary characters and tells their story with exceptional skill. If there's anyone I'd trust to re-edit a film up to three hours long to take me late into the night, it's Forman.

The extraordinary character at the centre of Amadeus is Antonio Salieri. He's an Italian composer with a gig writing music for the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. We join him as an elderly man in a mental institution, where he retells the story of his glory years to a young priest; glory years which were largely eclipsed by the meteoric of a ridiculously talented former child prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Where Salieri can write the occasional march for a royal event, Mozart is in another league. As Salieri recounts, he wrote his first entire symphony at the age of eight. When he composes, he writes out the exact complexities he is hearing in his head in one go, making no mistakes in any of the multitude of parts.

Salieri's problem is that Mozart is a conceited, arrogant, moronic arsehole. He doesn't nearly deserve the divine talent that has been bestowed upon him. This drives Salieri's jealousy beyond reasonable bounds, and he fantasises about murdering the young man so he can play his own compositions at his funeral. It only intensifies as Mozart has success after success, writing great symphonies and operas, the beauty of which Salieri can only awe at (Amadeus' soundtrack is immense). His narcissism and immaturity is toe-curling to watch. It's a situation that the best of us can relate to: the mind-melting irritation that comes as a result of being bettered by a seemingly undeserving contemporary, one who achieves so much more with far less effort.

With this story, Amadeus speaks to a vast majority of us. Those of us who have ever been made to doubt that hard work will get you anywhere. Those of us who have ever been driven to rage by the taunting of our superiors. However, the message behind Amadeus, so vividly demonstrated by Forman, is that these attitudes have deep consequences. They will destroy you as well as the target of your spite, and no one comes out clean. It's a truth that everyone will learn over the course of their lives. Save yourself the time and the bother, and bathe in the magnificence of the incredible Amadeus.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Elysium (2013)

I was in Edinburgh last week for one of the all-too-infrequent day visits with Connor and Chris, two of my friends. Whilst we had decided that the trip would involve going to the cinema, we hadn't a clue what we were actually going to see until about half an hour before the film started. Having surfed through most of the options on my phone, and dismissed a vast majority of them, I suggested we try a movie I was vaguely curious to have a look at: Neill Blomkamp's dystopian sci-fi Elysium.

Blomkamp had only one feature film to his name before he made Elysium - the well-received District 9 from 2009 - but he already had an enviable reputation in allegorical science fiction. Amazingly, District 9 was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 2010 (losing it to The Hurt Locker), one of the few from that genre to achieve that honour. Famously, not even Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was nominated. It was for that reason that I decided to give him a go.

For Elysium, it appears that Blomkamp has decided to be a bit more subtle with his metaphors and a bit more focussed on the action side of things. Elysium is an enormous, beautiful satellite where the privileged of Earth have set up home in order to escape from the mess of a planet beneath them (a concept not previously unheard of: I kept getting flashbacks to Wall-E). A hairless Matt Damon is part of the unloved back on Earth, and part of a plan to infiltrate Elysium and put every human back onto the same level. This is easier described than done, though, as any illegal ships found entering Elysium's sacred airspace are immediately destroyed by a big gun shot by a very angry South African man down on the surface.

Naturally, in a film in which a handheld missile launcher is used to take out spaceships as they fire off into orbit, there is an abundance of violence in Elysium. Some of the images will stick with you for a while. There's the bloody surgery scene, where Matt gets holes carved into him and metal strips screwed into his skull, and the moment where a man gets his face blown off in slow motion... which, incidentally, he lives through. While there is something oddly beautiful about someone being blown into fragments on board a satellite, it's not a film to take the grandkids to see. Suffice to say, Elysium's gore is the most realistically realised gore I've ever seen in a film.

But while the focus is certainly on the action, there's more than an undercurrent of moral warning. Elysium, at its base, is a film about class and privilege. It shows the consequences of a future where the out-of-touch wealthy have finally achieved what they've always desired: a remote paradise where they can socialise with others like themselves, bask in the myriad benefits that their vast wealth can afford them, and relax far away from the working classes who caused their every problem whilst they suffered down on Earth. They take advantage of miraculous health-beds that remove any disability or disease in a person's body by using them as a means of staying forever young; the poor, meanwhile, have to make do with incredibly overcrowded hospitals with the minimum number of doctors and nurses who cannot afford to spend any time on them.

The proletariats and their employers have grown so far apart that they are literally living on different worlds. The poor get poorer and sicker, the rich live on in wilfully ignorant bliss, justifying their unjustifiable privilege with the disillusioned belief that they have earned the right to not help anyone except themselves. Ta-daa! That's capitalism. Kudos to Blomkamp for creating such a satisfying metaphor. He makes his views on the ruling classes known, too, by cheerfully smashing spacecraft into their perfectly tended lawns. Quite satisfying.

Besides big names Damon and Jodie Foster, some of the best performances in the movie come from relatively unknown actors. Brazilian Wagner Moura is outstanding as the twitchy, unstable Spider, and his emphatic way of delivering lines is quite fun to watch. Diego Luna is wonderful in the short time he's got as the tragic Julio. Previous Blomkamp collaborator Sharlto Copley would be worth casting just for his fantastic South African accent, but he makes a really terrifying villain in Agent C.M. Kruger. It's all enjoyable, fast-paced action but also, notably, it's a film with a point. Personally, I can't wait to see what Neill Blomkamp's still got up his sleeve.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Finding Nemo (2003)

I've now written about just over 50 films for this blog, and I'm already on my fourth Pixar film. I don't think I've ever found such a large amount of any other studio's output so appealing and so watchable. Looking in front of me now, I notice that the Munro family has every Pixar movie bar four (Ratatouille, the two Cars films and the recently released Monsters University) on DVD. The one I chose to watch is perceived by many to be their greatest feature to date, which naturally means it is also considered among the best animated films of all time.

It's not difficult to see why. What appears to be a relatively simple story on the surface (fish is kidnapped in front of his dad, who has many adventures trying to find him again) turns out to be a deep parable of what it means to be a parent. Finding Nemo follows Marlin, an overprotective clownfish voiced by the great Albert Brooks, as he frantically searches for the son who was snatched out of their home off the coast of Australia and plopped in a dentist's aquarium. Mortifying, perhaps, but director Andrew Stanton ensures that the darker parts of the story are dealt with promptly so they bolster the story without alienating the younger folks the film is aimed at.

The cast of speaking characters is immense, and as Marlin meets more and more different fish, each with an important message for him to find, the tale becomes more epic. It's an odyssey on the scale of Jason and the Argonauts, but with the intimacy of a character study piece. The impressive calibre of actor lending their voices to the movie reflects the quality of the writing. As well as Brooks, there's Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Geoffrey Rush, Barry Humphries and Eric Bana, along with the obligatory John Ratzenberger and a role for the director as Crush, the easy-living turtle who rides the East Australian Current with his son Squirt. None put a foot wrong.

But more important than the voice cast and the moral message is the question of whether Finding Nemo actually appeals to its target audience of kids. Well, I can answer this. I was in that demographic when it came out. I bought a 3D Finding Nemo poster when a Pixar exhibition came to the National Museum in Edinburgh, and it's still in my room. I believe no kid could ever be disappointed by it. There's no time to get bored, as the action moves along very quickly with multiple new characters being introduced every five minutes. It's difficult not to be entranced by Pixar's portrait of the spectacular, vibrant colours of the fish and the Great Barrier Reef, sharp bubbles rising amongst floating rings of azure refracted light. There's comic relief aplenty. It's an instant favourite film.

There's nothing not to like about Finding Nemo. It has charm by the barrowful, and depth to match its setting. Show it to a child and they'll be captivated for the running length. It even manages not to suffer from the Cuddle Syndrome many animated films fall victim to, which involves a blatant overconcern for upsetting children with scary or sad scenes, wrapping them in a thick layer of cotton wool. Finding Nemo takes its viewers, whatever age, along with Marlin on his odyssey, with all the necessary highs and lows. It is a masterwork in movie production, supported by an outstanding script, and it fully deserves its lofty respect in the animation, and wider film-making, world.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

The Shining (1980)

It's quite a sharp shift, going straight from Ed Wood to Stanley Kubrick. Regarded as one of the few true geniuses who found themselves putting their ideas across through the medium of cinema rather than in some great philosophical thesis, Kubrick had a knack for adapting his source material into a film with depth usually well surpassing that of the book. He would take the basic story of the novel and reform it around the messages he intended to pervade.

Perhaps the best example of Kubrick's reanalysis of a work is his 1980 film The Shining, which I watched for the second time a week ago today. Stephen King was far from happy with Kubrick's adaptation of his homonymous seminal 1977 horror masterwork. He disagreed with the casting of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, saying Nicholson's previous role in Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest would suggest to the audience that Torrance would go mad before the film had even begun. He disagreed with many of the new aspects of the story that Kubrick had introduced. He mistook a drastic new take on his story for a badly beefed-up interpretation. King's Shining and Kubrick's Shining are two explicitly different works. Many adaptations struggle as they simply put the words from the page onto the screen, without exploiting the opportunity for making a unique film from a framework that has already been created.

The trouble with (or greatest thing about?) The Shining is the fact that Kubrick buried the true message behind the film so deep within the plot, script and photography that no one knows for certain what it is.  While most fans agree that there is some metaphorical depth beneath the surface tale of a man being driven to kill his own family by the ghosts in a hotel he is looking after over the winter, they can't agree about what it is. The recent documentary Room 237 (which I am desperate to watch) explores the many theories behind The Shining, with a group of hardcore fans tossing their suggestions into the ring. These range from the film being about the persecution of native Americans (the hotel is built on an ancient Native American burial ground; a can featuring a Red Indian profile is strategically placed in one shot), the Holocaust (a subject that fascinated Kubrick for much of his life) and, most strangely, the authenticity of the Apollo 11 moon landing footage. One man believes the film is Kubrick's admission that he actually directed the fake moon landing film. His sole proof for this seems to be, Danny wears an Apollo 11 jumper in one scene.

It's fair to say that Kubrick hardly hands it to you on a plate, though. At times, The Shining can feel like a drug-induced nightmare, a surreal, Dantean hallucination that confuses you more than scares you. Nearly every shot contains some odd incongruity that could be read into as representative of a certain idea. Some may not be intentional. It wouldn't be difficult to choose a random message before the start and find a fair amount of evidence for it. Even more interesting is trying to find the answers to the film's many mysteries that remain unaddressed at the end. If the ghosts are all in Jack's mind, how does he escape from the larder? And what is that photo at the end supposed to mean?

And when it's not being wonderfully perplexing, a good chunk of The Shining is simply terrifying. The first act is deeply ominous and full of foreshadowing, stretching the tension to breaking point, before Jack snaps in the second half, trapping his wife and son in the hotel during a snowdrift, and letting the spirits of the hotel take over his fragile mind. Jack's famous axe-wielding assault on his family's room as they frantically try to escape through the slightly-too-narrow bathroom window is the most frightening few minutes of cinema I've ever watched, above all the crappy modern exorcism movies I've been subjected to. The suspense as Jack chases his son through the hotel's maze is palpable. 

With one of the most spectacular manipulations of tension of any horror film, and one of the most startling final shots ever filmed, The Shining is a fantastic film to get your teeth into. Far from being ruined by repeat viewings, they are almost necessary. It's near impossible to only watch The Shining once. Every time you watch it again, it gets even better, as you notice more details and begin to form your own opinion on what it is actually about. I myself have no idea. The Shining is a cerebral masterpiece, a film beyond most others, so it shouldn't be much of a task to keep watching. Forever and ever and ever.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

Just over a week ago, I decided it was about time I used the two twenty pound Amazon vouchers I had got for my birthday in May. I had, at long last, come to a conclusion about what I would spend this forty quid on. After some negotiation with my sister, I bought three Pixar films: Wall-E, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. Remarkably, I still had much left over, and I decided to use it on another film poster for my bedroom. Texting around my friends, I decided I wanted a poster from the classic era of Hollywood film-making, pre-1969 or so, when the posters were at their most over-the-top and striking. For the same reason, I scouted around classic horror posters, through Hitchcock, before settling on what is one of my favourite watching experiences: Ed Wood's classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, famous for being one of the worst films ever made.

In the mood after buying the poster, I had a look on Youtube, where the entire movie is available for free. Despite it taking me into the early hours of the morning, I watched the full thing. It is an object of beauty. Hardly a scene goes by without some blatant mistake, be it the boom mike wobbling around the top of the screen, clumpy dialogue moving along like high heels on a whole street of chewing gum, characters disappearing from the story without mention, or the classic cardboard flying saucers dangling from string that no one has bothered to try hiding. There is nothing to not like about a film in which almost everything is disastrously wrong.

It is introduced by a feverishly dramatic man, who launches into a passionate yet nonsensical speech about the invaders from space, which contradicts confuses so many things before the actual film begins. From there, it's a tantalising story about very camp, very humanoid aliens descending on a small rural town in the USA and initiating 'Plan 9', which involves resurrecting the Earth dead. Handily, the precise science of this technique is explained in the script - 'long distance electrodes' are shot into the pineal and pituitary gland of the recently dead. Don't be getting any ideas, now, it might just work...

It is exactly this tacky awfulness that makes Plan 9 From Outer Space so much fun to watch. Search for it in the Internet Movie Database, and have a read of some of the quotes. It is far funnier than most of the comedies I've been subjected to over the years, and the laughs come in every form, in every other line. The narrator is superb, attacking the English language with a demonstration of faux-deep philosophy and embarrassingly corny metaphor that it must actually take some impressive dexterity to accomplish. The poor actors try so hard to disguise the mediocrity of the writing, but their serious manner only succeeds in making it even more hilarious. The special effects are non-existent, with flashes of the studio lights substituting any budget-swelling explosions. In fact, no expense is wasted  anywhere...

Ed Wood has gone down in history as one of the worst directors of all time. Perhaps that's unfair. I enjoy his films far  more than most of those I see in the cinema these days, with multi-million-dollar budgets. There's an innocent appeal to these films that it's difficult not to enjoy. Unlike other qualifiers for worst film ever made, which are bad sheerly for being offensively misjudged in terms of tone (see; The Day The Clown Cried), Wood's movies are simply too entertaining to complain about. For this reason, Plan 9 From Outer Space is far from being the most dreadful picture to be shown on a cinema screen. It is glorious good fun to watch. The legendary Ed should be proud of this achievement, simply because it ended up so astronomically far from what he intended it to be.

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Memento (2000)

As the holidays came round, I thought I would take the opportunity to lighten the load on my Sky+ box, which contains dozens of memory-filling films recorded from TV over the past few months. It turns out that I've only managed to fit in one so far, Christopher Nolan's psychological thriller Memento. This was recommended to me over Twitter by a friend called Lewis a couple of months ago, and I told myself it would be the first I watched when I got the chance. The sound of a brain-bending and confusing film to get my head around appealed to me.

A recurring feature in Nolan's films is the intelligent analysis of what goes on inside the human mind. The way he puts this across is outstandingly creative, and there's no better example of this than Memento. To put the audience on the same level as the main character, who is unable to form new memories after being attacked in his house, the story is told backwards. The film is made up of a number of short scenes played out in reverse chronological order, gradually revealing the truth about each of the characters we've already met; the truth that Leonard, the damaged protagonist, has already forgotten. It's a genuinely interesting way of doing things, and, like the dream world in Inception, it takes us inside the brain. At the start of the film, the audience is just as confused as Leonard, and only finds everything out at he same pace as him.

Because the smallest detail in one scene could have caused one of the major event seen earlier on in the film, Memento punishes those whose concentration wanders for a minute or two. Characters who you always assumed were on Leonard's side turn out to be taking advantage of his condition, and vice versa. The words that Leonard has written underneath his Polaroid pictures change meaning. Nolan has crammed as many twists as physically possible into 113 minutes, and so it is necessary to keep your wits about you for the entire thing. If you do manage it, though, you'll get a hell of a reward by the end credits.

Before not too long, you'll have worked out that Leonard is after a mysterious man named John G, who supposedly raped and murdered his wife in front of his eyes during the same attack where he lost his ability to form new memories. We follow him as he moves around town, meeting new contacts and taking their photos so he is able to remember them when he sees them again. To confuse things further, each reverse-chronological main scene is separated from the next by a series of scenes shot in monochrome and shown in chronological order, with Leonard in his hotel room. These two timelines eventually meet by the end. If you can understand those last two sentences, you'll have no trouble with Memento.

Guy Pearce's Leonard strikes exactly the right notes, being just as determined and constantly perplexed as he should be. The acting, for the most part, does take a back seat to the story and script, though. What starts like a simple murder mystery (albeit a why-did-he-do-it rather than a whodunnit) ends as something much more fascinating and shocking. A deceptively simple way of telling the story is worked to its full potential by Nolan, making Memento one of the most enjoyably unique and cerebral movies of the 21st century.

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The World's End (2013)

The World's End is a film I've wanted to see for a scarily long time. It started about five years ago when, after seeing Hot Fuzz for the first time, I looked at its Wikipedia page (as I was wont to do back then). This led me to discover the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, an otherwise unrelated series of comedy films with Edgar Wright as their director and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as their stars. At this point, The World's End was only a rumour, with only its Cornetto flavour confirmed (if you're unfamiliar, each of the three films are associated with a particular colour, also a flavour of Cornetto ice cream: Shaun of the Dead was strawberry, a gory zombie red, and Hot Fuzz was classic, a blue for the police force). The World's End would be mint choc chip, for the traditional Martian green. Where Shaun had its zombies and Hot Fuzz had its suspiciously friendly village folk, World's End would deal with some sort of alien invader.

Pegg and Frost released Paul in 2011, another sci-fi comedy which could almost have been a taster for this one. This, however, had nothing of the influence of Edgar Wright, of whom I am a stonking big fan. The first two in the trilogy were very unique, although they both retained the same style - a blend of brilliantly puerile and wonderfully intelligent humour, full of sharp and quotable lines and coy references to the sort of cult show or film enjoyed by the writing team of Pegg and Wright. Their television show Spaced was similar, and The World's End belongs to the very same vein.

It's true that it doesn't have the gore of the other two, which some fans might have been looking forward to. There's relatively little blood in The World's End, with organs and bloodstreams replaced with the blue gunge contained within the extraterrestrials' fragile white shell. The over-the-top arterial spurting in Hot Fuzz is hilarious, but it's not such an integral part of the humour in the movies. I think the violence is Wright and Pegg's method of getting some of their trademark surreality into a story about policemen; it's automatically there in Shaun and World's End thanks to the supernatural nature of their plots.

But that's enough of looking at the film as part of a trilogy. To all intents and purposes, it's not. It's an individual film with a story and characters that bear no relation to those in either Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. The World's End has a particular fondness for its characters that makes it unique. We first meet Gary King (played by Simon Pegg) and his four friends (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) as teenagers, when they first attempt the 'Golden Mile', a pub crawl in the quiet rural town of Newton Haven. It appears to have been a disaster for everyone other than Gary, who remembers it as the best night of his life. So, spurred by irritation at never completing the crawl and a painful inability to let go of his past, he sets about finding his old mates and organising another shot.

As the five move with varying enthusiasm between the pubs, their true selves, beaten down by years of having to perform as a sensible adult, are released, and each has a glorious drunk personality. In addition to this, it slowly becomes obvious that Newton Haven is not in the same state as when they left it. The townsfolk are acting suspiciously, with no one recognising the team who painted the town red not so long ago. They appear to be being controlled by a third party. When they get angry, King and co. have to get their hands dirty.

Simon Pegg clearly relishes being given a character with such depth, someone clinging on his youth with such moronic desperation that you can't help pitying him. He reels off Gary's many great speeches with delight. Nick Frost demonstrates he can play a (relatively) straight part as well as anything else, Paddy Considine makes you feel as if he could be your best mate and Eddie Marsan is as brilliantly charming as always. It's nice to see Martin Freeman returning to the sort of British comedy he made his name with now he has become a major Hollywood player. The World's End is a cameo-spotter's dream, with a great number of recognisable faces from UK film and TV making an appearance, including Michael Smiley, David Bradley and Reece Shearsmith, as well as a couple of more internationally-known names.

The music is exceptional, the astonishing fight scenes are very well choreographed and shot and the script is written with love. Edgar Wright has confirmed his place as one of the top British directors and writers out there. There is no good reason why you shouldn't go out to the cinema and see it.

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Now You See Me (2013)

This is a film my friend Michael has intended to see for a good long while, as he nurtures a keen interest in magic and is quite an impressive magician himself (he does events!). Organised the minute I got back from my Borneo trip, we went back to Ocean Terminal for another film-watching day out: Now You See Me, followed by Frankie and Benny's for dinner, and then The World's End to round off the evening. I admit to having been quite excited myself. I'm fascinated by magic tricks (who isn't?), and Now You See Me's USP is that all the tricks featured in the film were performed for real.

This is an impressive claim, considering the huge scale of everything featured in the film. One trick in particular, where Isla Fisher tosses two ribbons in the air and they dance about before revealing the huge machine that has appeared from thin air behind the material, seems suspiciously computer animated. This isn't the problem, though. The tricks are spectacular, and the knowledge that at least some of them were performed for real (David Copperfield is credited as a 'magic advisor' on the film) adds a further layer to the magic. No, the problem is the whole business of linking together all the tricks with a tangible storyline.

I loved the idea of a group of magicians carrying out the crime of the century. From the scenes in the trailer - 'We are going to rob a bank!', Jesse Eisenberg switching the handcuffs in the interrogation room - that looked like what it was going to be. I was looking forward to a reverse Jonathan Creek, where the magicians use their skills to carry out the crime rather than solve it. They would vanish in a puff of smoke from their jail cell, and then go on to explain how they did it. That was the film I wanted to see, and that's what the first section of the film is like. I enjoyed it, even if the explanations were a bit tenuous.

Then it all gets a bit... Dan Brown. A hooded figure leaves the four magicians (Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco) a calling card, instructing them to meet at a deserted apartment. It is there that they are instructed on how to carry out these huge crimes. From there it's downhill into Da Vinci Code territory, with Interpol getting involved, police chases through major cities and eventually, director Louis Leterrier just going the whole nine yards and introducing a mysterious ancient society.

The magnificent all-star cast, clearly drawn in by the attractive synopsis, are tragically wasted. Morgan Freeman's character, an ex-magician who now reveals to the public how other illusionists do their tricks, is far less interesting than he should be. He spends a majority of his time teasing everyone else by not telling them how the tricks were done. Out of the main four magicians (known in the movie as the Four Horsemen), Leterrier clearly favours Eisenberg and Harrelson. Isla Fisher plays a generic female part, bitter with Eisenberg after some previous relationship, and Dave Franco's character is terribly dull. He's an amateur who's better at pickpocketing than magic, an interesting premise but that's all we really find out. Mark Ruffalo's grumbling cop character has well over the regulatory amount of clichés ('I refuse to do any research that might help with the investigation, I just want to find these guys and shoot 'em!').

Now You See Me is a film with so much going for it. Woody Harrelson and Michael Caine are wonderful as always, and the idea of an extraordinary Ocean's Eleven is undeniably good. Unfortunately, the story's lost me by the ridiculous twist ending, which must have come in too late to fit in any sort of explanation afterwards. I left with more questions than answers, and not in a good way. Leterrier tries his best to weave a fast-paced and intelligent thriller, but there's just not enough room for any of his characters. Hopefully someone will grab this premise and squeeze out the full potential.

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Monsters University (2013)

A new Pixar film in the cinema is always an event. It's the thought of an addition to the enviable filmography the animation studio basks in that makes it so special. Can they pull it off again? What can they possibly do in this which will better the one before? They've already made some of the greatest Hollywood films of the 21st century and some of the best animated films of all time. It can't, and won't, go on like this forever.

Some might argue that the quality has been declining ever since they reached a peak with Toy Story 3 in 2010. Brave was relatively and uncharacteristically generic, not making much of an impact, whereas Cars 2 was, by some margin, the least successful film Pixar has done. So, determined to shake off this notion of a downhill slope in Pixar's film quality, my sister and I headed out to Ocean Terminal for a small day out and a look at their latest, Monster's University. It's their first prequel, explaining how the main characters of 2001's classic Monsters, Inc. got on in their higher education and how they got into the business of scaring. It's been years since I saw Monsters, Inc. I can hardly remember the plot. I was concerned this might ruin the plot a little, there would be references I don't understand, characters I can't remember.

As it turns out, I could have stepped onto the planet for the first time four minutes before going into the cinema and everything would still make sense. In fact, if it wasn't for the improvement in animation graphics, Monsters University could well have been the first film of the two, with Monsters, Inc. released twelve years later. As a prequel, however, this does allow for a clever bit of character study. Sulley, as it turns out, used to be a bit of a dick, using his much-admired family name to hide the fact that he is not a very talented scarer. And before he reached the amiable personality that made him so loveable in the first film, Mike was quite self-absorbed and unwilling to hand over power to others. The story arc that lands them at their Monsters, Inc. characters is great fun to watch and brilliantly written.

Mike is an ambitious teenage monster who applies for the scaring course at Monsters University after being enthralled by the factory on a school trip when he was young. On the first day, he becomes rivals with Sulley, who appears to have got into university solely based on the fact he is descended from a line of distinguished scarers and is arrogant without having the skills to back it up. Whilst Mike is incredibly hard-working and knowledgeable about the history and techniques of scaring, he is, naturally, far too cute to make a small child scream. Sulley, on the other hand, knows only one scaring technique. It's very effective, but he needs a full set to make an impression at uni. When they are both kicked off the course for inadequacy, they must team together, along with the rest of their fraternity house, to show the university's best why they ought to stay.

In such a deceptively simple plot line, there are many spaces for unexpected twists. It's a great script, with the same Pixar humour that everyone can get as well as insights into the characters. The voice cast is superb, with the fantastic John Goodman and Steve Buscemi returning from the first film with Billy Crystal, and Helen Mirren and Nathan Fillion amongst those joining the new film as staff and students. This is a worthy addition to Pixar's bunch of wonderful movies, and comfortably their best since Toy Story 3. Expect to see OK t-shirts everywhere within the next year or so.

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A Month Away. Four Movies

It's been well over a month now since I wrote about Toy Story 3, my last post. It's the longest gap I've taken since this started up seven months ago, but I do have a relatively decent excuse. Yesterday, I got back from an expedition to Borneo with my school, flying over to the Malaysian section for an experience lasting for just under four weeks. During that time, and despite the social culture focus of the trip, I found myself in various situations where I managed to catch a movie. The first of the four films I watched while away, Moonrise Kingdom, I saw exactly a month ago, so I decided I wouldn't get very far writing a separate post on each one. This chunk is what I ended up with.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

On our first long-haul flight (13 hours from Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur), Malaysian Airlines provided a small TV set in the back of each economy seat. This small screen contained well over 100 films. I had already had a look on the website, which contains a list of every film available, and decided on all the films I would do my best to watch during the half-a-day I was in the air. There was The Mask, which I would watch first, then The Way (one of my friend Michael's favourite films), then I might have caught Die Hard, and I couldn't miss A Bug's Life...

In the end, I slept for about eight hours. I could only fit in one movie, and that turned out to be Wes Anderson's teenage romance comedy Moonrise Kingdom, a film that has been in the back of my mind as one that I might really enjoy since it was released last year. It turned out to be just as charmingly eccentric as I had imagined, with very pleasing camerawork and outstanding acting from a group of the best used to tell what is essentially the simplest of love stories. A young Scout runs away from camp to escape from the bullies in the troop and find the girl he has been smitten with since they briefly met the year before. This provokes an island-wide search for the couple, led by Edward Norton's scoutmaster. Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Bruce Willis also feature in great roles, taking advantage of the wonderful script.

The plot may be simple enough to predict, but that hardly matters when the story is handled so well by Anderson, with an ideal cast and wonderful cinematography to carry it along.

Man of Steel (2013)

On a relatively quiet night in Kota Kinabalu (capital of Sabah, the region of Malaysia we were visiting), we found out that there was a great big cinema on the top floor of Suria Sabah, the city's largest shopping centre. Abandoning the Bornean culture for an evening, me and a small group from our team went to see Man of Steel (with Malay subtitles), a film I had been curious to see since hearing there was a new Superman film in production. Curious, not keen.

I wondered how Superman could possibly be portrayed as sympathetic to cinema audiences. Unlike Batman (and the Dark Knight films are very closely linked to Man of Steel; they share a writer in David S Goyer and Christopher Nolan produces), Superman is not human. He cannot be injured by any natural means, or by Earth weapons. Had he gone against the Joker, he could have flown, faster than a speeding bullet, to save both Rachel and Harvey with time to spare. Had he gone against Bane, he could have broken his back and flown the bomb to the centre of the Pacific or something. He is not weak, physically or mentally. He has no moments of wavering morality. He can come out of any situation with a sparkling grin, immaculate hair and his square jaw intact.

It isn't enough for audiences to just watch evil villains and their henchmen be beaten up for a couple of hours. They need something to associate with. For the first movie - and it is the first, as a sequel was recently confirmed at San Diego Comic Con - Zack Snyder drafted in a true match in General Zod, a fellow Kryptonian with a vengeance against Kal-El and epic plans for the destruction of Planet Earth. The closing battle between the two is enjoyably destructive, with things smashing and exploding all over the place and another building collapsing every other frame. What I liked the most, though, were the scenes in the middle of the movie, showing Clark Kent having to constantly move between jobs as he always ends up blatantly using his superpowers for benevolent means, with the Superman legend being created in his wake. Is Superman a religious metaphor? The Jesus analogy is, at one point, openly discussed. And in one scene, if I'm not reading too much into it, he battles against 'evolution' and wins...

Having now seen it, I'm no less skeptical about whether Superman can really appeal. I can't imagine these films ever really touching on emotional themes on the same scale as Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. The good story, great cast and grand scale are all slightly let down by such a sadly thin main character. There is a part of me, though, that is aching to see the next few films, even if it is just to see where they go from here.

Kil (2013)

On the bus to Sepilok Orang-Utan Sanctuary, the eight hours on dull roads through endless palm plantations were made more bearable with the screening of two Malaysian films on small television screens hanging down from the roof. The first of these, about a man who exacts revenge on the group of gangsters who murdered his humble fisherman father, lost my interest about fifteen minutes in and was so bad I can't remember what it was called. This was followed, however, by a drama named Kil, set in Kuala Lumpur, which immediately caught my eye.

I couldn't take my eyes off it for the length. Starring a man who I can only describe as the Malaysian equivalent of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kil concerns a man named Akil (his nickname gives the film its title), who wants to commit suicide but can't bring himself to jump from the tower block where he lives. He finds a flyer for a mysterious company (Life Solutions, Inc) which assists suicidal people, and signs a contract that hires one of their people to murder him at a random point within the coming weeks. However, he finds himself regretting this when he meets a girl and falls in love within days of taking out the contract. This is paralleled with the story of a film director who, left by his family and scorned by the media over his latest film, takes out the same contract.

Suicide is an undeniably tough issue to confront, but Kil faces it starkly with sympathy and insight. The two main actors (called Redza Minhat and Cristina Suzzane, now I've done some research) are incredibly talented, delivering performances suited to the powerful story. It has a stylish and modern look, drawing on the bright lights of Kuala Lumpur. The smart ending embellishes rather than confuses the film.

Doing a bit more research, I found out Kil was filmed in just eleven days on a tiny budget. This is a testament to Nik Amir Mustapha as director, and it is mad to learn that this was his debut film. A very impressive achievement. Find it and watch it.

Trance (2013)

We had taken off in June, to return in July. Malaysian Airlines had brought in a whole new crop of recent movies for the new month. Among these was the great Danny Boyle's new movie, Trance with James McAvoy. Suitable for Boyle's famously eclectic filmography, Trance slots into another genre he has never tried out before: the psychological heist thriller. To be fair, it's a bit of a specific subgenre that not many people have made a film in before (Inception?), but it's hardly Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours or Trainspotting.

Trance is another film for which style and image is important. The editing and camerawork is sleek, the colours distinct. This is a cool film. From the opening few scenes, with McAvoy's Simon addressing the viewers directly for his description of an art auction's security measures to the epic, almost over-the-top climactic scenes, close attention has been paid to the look. Simon is an aid at an art auction when a painting just sold for several million pounds is apparently stolen in a violent heist. He quickly cuts it out the frame and hides it from the gangsters, who knock him unconscious. In doing so, they wipe out the memory of where the real painting is hidden. Simon is sent to a hypnotist to worm out the final location of the picture, but more than intended is uncovered.

It's as confusing as you'd want and expect from such a film, and only gets more puzzling as the audience are taken deeper and deeper into Simon's mind, before the crushing truth is dramatically revealed. It takes a very clever mind to pull off such an intricate plot, but Danny Boyle's is that mind. He is aided by the suave but on-edge McAvoy, the main player in a film where the majority of the script belongs to just three characters. It's an enjoyable film of memorable images and ideas, and it will certainly provoke many conversations over the credits, about what was actually happening there.

We had a hll of a good time over in Borneo, and we returned during the school's summer holidays. This means it's back to the classic routine. I've already racked up three more films to write about before I can relax. Probably by watching a movie, I suppose.

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Toy Story 3 (2010)

On a free evening in the middle of June, me and my sister decided it was high time we put right a little anomaly in our film viewing lives. We went to see Toy Story 3 when it came out in 2010, and since then we've enjoyed the now-classic first two films on television, meaning that the most recent addition to the trilogy was also the one I had gone the longest without seeing. It is also the case that, much like Unforgiven was the third Western to win the Best Picture Oscar, Toy Story 3 was the third animated film to be nominated for the highest award in the movie industry (and the second best, after 2009's Up).

It's a movie that I have always chastised myself for only seeing once. I remember being slightly skeptical before going to see it. Like a great number of people, I'd grown up watching Toy Stories one and two, and couldn't see a way to justifiably add another film without ruining the first two. It would be like trying to add another testament to the Bible. Little did anyone expect that the third film would not only be worthy of such company, but it would actually embellish its predecessors to the point of making Toy Story one of the best movie trilogies of modern times. It would reduce the snootiest of film critics to tears and send a quiver through the peripheral nervous system of anyone who planted themselves in front of the cinema screen.

The iconic status of the first two certainly added a vital dimension to Toy Story 3. The whole to-infinity-and-beyond recognizability of the characters and story was already deep-rooted as a true modern Hollywood success story by 2010, ensuring that Toy Story was notable not only for its historical value as the first full-length fully computer generated film, but also as one of the greatest animated films ever made. Toy Story 2 came along four years after the original, and served, surprisingly, to better it. They were left to marinate for over a decade whilst Pixar built up an enviable reputation as the most reliably wonderful studio in Hollywood, churning out some of the best movies of the noughties - Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and WALL-E all within the space of four years. Just when everyone thought this astonishing run would be coming to an end, Toy Story 3 came along to show that, if anything, they were only getting better.

It begins as almost a personal message to the kids who were just old enough to see the original in the cinema. Andy, the heartwarmingly innocent and imaginative owner of the titular gang of toys, has, like them, reached the age where he has left school and is preparing to leave behind the symbols of his childhood that have become irrelevant. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was aimed at those in their late teens, as if Pixar have tempted them back with the promise of a nostalgic return to the franchise and hit them with this emotional power station of a film to secure them as fans for life - so they don't follow Andy's lead and embrace the symbols of their childhood.

There's far more to the story than that, though. When the toys are donated to Sunnyside Daycare Centre, Woody is torn away from his friends by his desire to return to Andy. In this aspect, the film is just as much about the importance of moving on from your early obsessions for the benefit of those around you. Buzz, Slinky, Rex, Mr and Mrs Potato Head and everyone else find themselves at the mercy of the tyrannical Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear, dictator of the toys of Sunnyside. Woody is forced to leave his fruitless goal and his past behind and take responsibility for the safety of his friends. They end up being put into more danger than ever before and having to stick together and rely on each other more than ever. The result is a tremendously entertaining adventure resulting in a startlingly moving climax and ending.

It is rare to find a film which handles humour (on every different level of maturity) and emotion with such skill, and pretty much impossible to find another trilogy which has had such a profound impact on a generation. It's an impact that will resonate for many decades to come as today's children raise their own children on the invaluable messages contained deep within the Toy Story films. At no point do you question the fact that the main characters are a bunch of inanimate toys. The creativity of that idea is lost on the children who really used to imagine their toys came alive when they weren't watching. To these children, these films are magical. The Toy Story films were conceived with a childlike fertile imagination, giving them a near-unique appeal to the shared desire in every person; to return to their childhood.

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