torsdag 13 december 2018

More films I'm glad I saw in-flight

It's December, and Christmas will be here soon: surely a good enough excuse to follow the road of least resistance blogging-wise? Anyway, here are my thoughts on two further films I saw in-flight on my trip Down Under (and back), which were both suited for this kind of watching for different reasons: one because it was complicated, one because it was simple.

Inception All right, not one to watch at the end of a long-haul flight when your brain is fried. At the beginning of a trip lasting hours on end it's a good choice though, because it's pretty long. If you were watching it at home sitting on the sofa, you'd probably be tempted to fidget, wander off to make a cup of tea etc. On a plane, there are few distractions, and as the hours go by you can concentrate on getting your head around the plot.

Briefly, its troubled anti-hero Cobb, played by a glum Leonardo di Caprio, and his small team of helpers make their living by gate-crashing people's dreams and extracting secret information from them. One hard-headed businessman is on to them, though, and makes them an interesting offer: if they manage to plant an idea in the head of a business rival, a young sprig who has just taken over his father's huge empire, they will be amply rewarded. They accept the challenge, but planting an idea (the inception of the title) is a tricky business, and Cobb and co. end up struggling to get free from the young sprig's dream world.

Clearly, you have to be geek to enjoy this film. Happily, I am. I have a great fondness for "dream or reality?" plots; I'm fascinated by things like how you can tell if what you're experiencing is real, all the details that are off in dreams compared to real life and which mechanisms are at play when we're still convinced that what we're experiencing in dreams is really happening. I vaguely remember a reviewer commenting that Inception isn't half as clever as it thinks it is, but for my part I thought it had some nifty concepts. One trick to check if you're dreaming, Cobb claims, is to try to remember how you came to be in a certain situation, because dreams always start in the middle of an event (though the exception appears to be the dream-within-a-dream which does have a clear beginning: when you think you wake up). Dream time moves differently than real time, which would explain those epic dreams you have where you seem to live a whole parallel life before waking up after only a few hours. I also liked the idea of the people in the dream, the dreamer's "projections", attacking intruders like antibodies once they realise there's something amiss. If, like me, you were truly interested in the "Am I mad, in a coma or back in time?" set-up of the TV series Life on Mars and didn't view it as simply a faux-profound excuse to team a policeman with modern-day sensibilities with a tough Seventies-style copper, then this could be the film for you. The ending really isn't very clever, though.

Sing Your opinion of Illumination Studios, and the likely quality of their animated films, tends to depend on what you think of the minions, the comic sidekicks first introduced in Despicable Me. I am not a fan. It bugs me that the word "minions", such a lovely appellation for a villain's devoted followers, is now connected with small, yellow, annoyingly babbling creatures that look like the useless rubber tips of pencils. However, a lot of people find them funny, and they even got their own film, which must have done pretty well considering that Illuminations had the funds to buy up Disney's angriest rival DreamWorks. As a Disney fan I have mixed feelings about DreamWorks, but they have produced some high-quality stuff. Whereas Illumination, if Sing is any indication, isn't really in the same league, and certainly not in the same league as Disney.

To be fair, I've only watched two of Illumination's animated films, and Sing is a lot more slick and effective than the uneven Despicable Me. The plot is fairly straightforward. Buster Moon, the koala owner of a failing theatre, tries to save it by arranging a singing competition. Because of a printing error, though, the prize announced for the winner is huge and way beyond his budget. Meanwhile, hopeful contenders queue up to take part, and Buster has to find a way to come up with the prize money and make sure his nervy contestants - who all face different problems which could come between them and stardom - perform on the day.

Cue a number of contestants who are sweet and likeable, one who is a bastard (but a first-class crooner) and the hustler Buster himself who is scheduled to be taken down a peg or two while his love of the theatre is validated. It's a predictable film when it comes to the main thrust of the story, though the plot takes one or two surprising detours along the way. The contestants are stereotypes, if enjoyable ones, and there are too many of them to give them much personality beyond about one characteristic each. The animation is pretty good, as is the singing, but this feels much more like a kids' film than, say, Disney's Moana/Vaiana (which isn't even one of my favourite Disney flicks). In other words, it works well for the fried-brain part of a long flight.

With Illumination in charge of DreamWorks, it's unlikely to produce a new Prince of Egypt any time soon. On the other hand, it's a long time since DreamWorks itself produced something in the Prince of Egypt vein. Maybe Illumination is the logical owner of the company who released The Boss Baby and Captain Underpants, films whose very titles repel grown-up animation lovers. And now the creators of the minions are getting their mitts on the Shrek franchise. Not to gloat or anything, but... that's what you get for blowing up people's pet geese, ogre scum.