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Emubird
Reviews
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
A perfect rendition of a book I've loved since childhood
I approached the film with trepidation, afraid it simply might not live up to the pictures I'd had in my mind since childhood.I needn't have worried. My jaw hit the floor during the opening battle sequence, and stayed there until the final frame.
Impossible to mention everything, but top honours must go to Viggo Mortensen as the Aragorn I'd always imagined - wild, ferocious, slightly unearthly and yet unimpeacahably noble - and Elijah Wood as Frodo, who sidestepped any pitfalls attached to playing a stunted, hairy peasant and made Frodo's quest have all the high seriousness and quiet sacrifice it needs to have. Sometimes he looked a thousand years old.
There was barely a false note in the entire piece. The next two? I can't wait.
Nature Boy (2000)
Stick with it - it's grim, but moving
Stick with this one - the opening episode is one of the grimmest things you'll see on TV but the four-hour drama is well worth your time. It's complex and ultimately deeply moving, following sensitive runaway David on a kind of modern oddyssey to find his father, who disappeared when he was a child. Heavy, thoughtful, but rewarding.
Up on the Roof (1997)
British film-making at its amateurish worst
Dealing with the lives and loves of five British university students in the fifteen years after graduation, Up on the Roof attempts to be a bittersweet comedy about the disillusionment of maturity in the style of Peter's Friends. However, this lame and derivative saga falls down on almost every front. The characters fail to engage the emotions, the styling is badly researched (headbands and love beads in 1979 ???), the script is unfunny and the direction unfocused and meandering. This is British film-making at its amateurish worst.
Bean (1997)
Second-rate retread of "Being There"
Why do they do it? The original Mr Bean sketches on British TV were charming, slight and yes, very funny. He was a triumph of visual humour - real old-fashioned slapstick done with imagination, a genuine clown, silent and sometimes even touching. Then they go and raise this huge unwieldy edifice of a movie on top of this sweet, fragile creation - and hardly surprisingly, it's flattened. There's nothing funny about this movie; the bits that work are second-hand borrowings from "Being There" and frankly, there aren't many of those. One set-piece in an operating theatre is tasteless in the extreme and don't let your pre-schoolers see Rowan Atkinson drinking hot water from the kettle if you want to stay out of the hospital yourself...
The Avengers (1998)
Wasted opportunity
It tried, it really did. It had the surreal touches I remember from the original, the script actually wasn't bad and in Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman - not to mention Sean Connery - a suitably stellar cast. So what exactly went wrong? Everything. It just did not gel. Fiennes was hopelessly miscast; fine actor though he is, the character of John Steed needed someone with a bit of sleazy sparkle, a bit of a barfly, maybe. Except for one notable scene involving Miss Thurman and a pair of long leather boots, Fiennes' own powerful brand of steely sexuality remained firmly under wraps. It simply wasn't relevant to the character. Uma Thurman was trying so hard to hold onto her British accent that she forgot to act; Diana Rigg she ain't, after all. Connery hammed it up with a vengeance but couldn't save the day. Mysteriously, everyone's timing seemed to be off. Jokes fell flat. Sexy moments went limp. Fight scenes were risible. Er... maybe it was the editing. A wasted opportunity to reinterpret one of TV's great cult classics. Don't waste your money.