The yearly crop of Netflix Christmas films

'Tis the season for not too demanding blog posts. Last year, I admitted to the guilty pleasure of watching Christmas romcoms on Netflix; this year, I've indulged even more heavily, and might as well give a few tips to those who share my taste for this particular kind of brain rot. Always remembering that we're not talking The Seventh Seal here (fortunately).

The ones to watch while you're wrapping presents (or not at all): The award for the most plotless Christmas rom-coms available on Netflix this year (at least as watched by me) goes to Haul out the Holly and Haul out the Holly: Lit Up. Their main attraction is Lacey Chabert, of Mean Girls and Hot Frosty fame. Emily, a stressed-out woman with Christmas-mad parents, returns home to her small town (of course) after a bad breakup. Only, her parents are disappearing to Florida and the duty of keeping up the over-the-top decorating and Christmas jollities now falls, at least partly, to her. She only wants to have a nice, quiet Christmas but is somehow won over by the collective hysteria. 

In the follow-up, Emily and the other townsfolk feel threatened by a family of influencers (gasp!) who want to take over the festivities completely. I actually somewhat preferred Haul out the Holly: Lit Up to the first film – the dialogue is a bit sharper, and the quirky neighbours have their moments – but there's no denying both films are very thin indeed; Chabert, pro though she is, has her work cut out. Also, the message is confusing. At some point, I'd have liked someone to remind the small-town busybodies that Christmas isn't about the tallness of your nutcracker (that's not a euphemism: this is a thing). Nevertheless, you won't miss much while struggling to wrap up that cosy sweater, which is a plus.      

The stilted ones: Sometimes you just want a Christmas romance that actually is a bit stiff and unconvincing, simply to get into the right frivolous spirit. Paris Christmas Waltz and A Cinderella Christmas Ball are good alternatives for watching while present-wrapping, if you can't face the Haul out the Holly films. The romantic leads struggle to produce any chemistry, the romantic entanglements feel cut and pasted from other Christmas romances, and there's a certain air of cutting corners when it comes to costs. But the surroundings are nice, and there are some surprisingly good performances from side characters. In Paris Christmas Waltz, Paul Freeman nails the wise mentor role (even the Frenchness), and A Cinderella Christmas Ball has a solid supporting cast all round. I especially appreciated the surly guard, the crusty butler and the disgraced Duke who spouted none-too-brilliant words of wisdom with full-on sincerity.

The actually quite good ones: If I'm not mistaken, all the films I've mentioned so far are imported fare, shown but not produced by Netflix. The homegrown crop this year is a cut above: it feels like Netflix is getting the hang of this. True, the best Netflix romcom I've watched this year was not a Christmas one (The Wrong Paris – yep, I'm as surprised as you are). But Champagne Problems isn't half bad either. 

If you opt for only one Christmas romcom set in Paris, please let it be this one and not Paris Christmas Waltz. In Champagne Problems, glamorous business woman Sydney goes to Paris to win a bidding war for a French winery on behalf of her company. She accidentally falls for the owner's estranged son, and complications ensue as she ends up spending the weekend at the vineyard with an assortment of national stereotypes while trying to show her mettle.

Call me easily pleased, but having the French characters talk to each other in actual, correct French, and the German pronounce each obscure German Christmas phenomenon impeccably (because the actors actually are French/German, duh) already gives the project a certain classiness for me. To add to this, the dialogue is pretty fizzy, and the hero, instead of only hanging around gazing longingly at the heroine, actually has his own drama to resolve. Pas mal du tout.

A Merry Little X-Mas was also good fun. Personally, I found the environmentalist female lead character (a yummy mummy played by Alicia Silverstone – man, I'm old) hard to take, but the rival love interests (a toy-boy himbo and an English model really trying not to lose it) of the couple supposedly breaking up kind of stole the show, and there were some solid chuckles along the way. If you need small-town American cosiness, this is better than Haul out the Holly.

The absolutely bonkers one: I had to find one with a premise almost as out there as Hot Frosty, and My Secret Santa fits the bill. Get this: a single mother, who's lost her uninspiring job because of cut-backs, is desperate to find money to send her daughter to... snow-boarding school. A nearby resort offers a 50% discount on the school fees, but their only opening is for an inhouse Santa. So our intrepid heroine disguises herself as a jovial old man and lands the job, while falling for the resort owner's son.

Really, one suspects that someone came up with the idea while drunk. But you have to give Netflix credit: once committed to it, they do their best to make it work, and I had a good time. Not the worst Christmas film Netflix has to offer, but (among the newcomers) undoubtedly the craziest.                         

They don't do entertaining tripe like First Knight anymore

Yesterday would have been the perfect day for blogging. I was stuck at home anyway, waiting for delayed luggage (which still hasn't arrived, by the way). In spite of a number of possible blog subjects, however, I just thought "nah". Why is summer blogging so difficult? Is it the weather? Post-travel inability to settle? Sheer laziness?

Anyway, a less complex subject for a blog post than First Knight, which for some reason (I'm not complaining) has made it to Netflix, would be hard to find. This schmaltzy Arthurian romance was filmed in the 90s, and it shows. I was surprised at how much it triggered my nostalgia. Back in the day, the younger me wasn't much taken with First Knight. I did not see the appeal of Richard Gere as the apparently irresistible Lancelot, and the depiction of Camelot wasn't close enough to how I imagined it (based on reliable sources such as Howard Pyle and the Prince Valiant comic). But now, a number of "gritty" reimaginings of the King Arthur legend later, this film feels endearingly straightforward.

The film centres on the famous love triangle between King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot (I've always felt torn about this part of the lore as Pyle, maybe mindful of his young readers, insisted that Guinevere and Lancelot were "just good friends"). Gere is Lancelot, Julia Ormond Guinevere – more beautiful than envious younger me gave her credit for – and an attractively regal mature Sean Connery is King Arthur. We also have Ben Cross, usually cast as an intensely brooding hero, as the intensely brooding villain Malagant (as far as I know a character made up for the occasion – what's wrong with Mordred, I'd like to know?). Not badly cast, in other words. John Gielgud, never too haughty when it came to his roles, shows up in a bit part.

The challenge anyone who wants to tackle the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle faces is that they're all good guys, but I can see that that's part of the story's appeal. First Knight solves the problem by not making Guinevere and Lancelot too duplicitious. They want to do right by Arthur, and only indulge in one bout of passionate kissing (that's when Arthur walks in). It's all very airbrushed, but I'm fine with that. It's in keeping with the silly bit of entertainment this film is.

For it is silly, I'll not deny it. In a battle sequence, Lancelot idiotically removes his helmet to let his locks fly free. Earlier, Guinevere marvels at his ability to channel rainwater in leaves, as if it were a consummate skill. The secondary characters have no function at all except to admire Lancelot's prowess and Arthur's wisdom or (if it's the villain's sidekick) sneer. The film has "formulaic, vaguely historical Nineties adventure/romance" written all over it, and I enjoyed it very much.

So what do I mean by my title? Surely generic adventure flicks are churned out all the time? Well, maybe, but it's not so easy to find entertaining hogwash of this kind, where some effort has been put into making the formula work, nowadays. Take the romance. I was partly ashamed of my prissy "whoa, there" reaction when Lancelot kisses Guinevere, whom he's just met, out of nowhere and claims "I know when a woman wants me". You wouldn't get a scene like that in a 2020s film, which is perhaps no great loss in itself, but a sign of how restricted the parameters of romance have become. When we say that something has "aged badly", what we often mean is that our own age has become more intolerant. Lads should not try this kind of behaviour at home, but fictional romances can't be wholesome all the time – it kills all the fun.

Then there's the Arthurian legend part. For the last couple of decades, when someone tries their hand at the King Arthur story, it's mostly in order to make it more "realistic" and "historical". But this, I would argue, is not what we want from a King Arthur story. We want the round table, Excalibur, Merlin, a brave Lancelot, a witty Gawain, the Lady of the Lake, at least one wicked sorceress, the whole caboodle. Of course that's not in any way a "true story", but the trueness isn't the appeal here, as little as it is in the Robin Hood myth. I've got my problems even with the sanitised merry folk hero Robin Hood, and would stomach him even less well were he to lean more into actual highwayman/robber behaviour.

First Knight does't tick all the Arthurian boxes – there's no Merlin, for example. But it doesn't try to turn Arthur into some boring Roman centurion or local chieftain, and for that I at least am grateful.

Why is the Moana/Vaiana sequel a box-office hit?

So, I watched Moana 2 (or Vaiana 2, as it's inexplicably called in Europe) at the cinema this week. And it was OK. It didn't irritate me as Ralph Breaks the Internet did and was mercifully free from the Wise Natives vs Civilisation rhetoric of Frozen 2. The story, although there wasn't a lot of it, followed naturally from what happened in the first film, and it didn't detract from it. It didn't, for instance, separate close friends or sisters because "they need to let go" or some such rubbish. According to one YouTube review, the animation for this project was outsourced as it was originally supposed to be a Disney Plus series, but I still thought said animation looked really good.

Having said all that, the film felt underwhelming – "mid" as the kids may or may not say. The origin as a Disney Plus series really shows. Ironically, I think I would have appreciated it much more as a series, as the characters would then have had to be fleshed out. As it is, although Moana (yeah, I'm calling her that, so sue me) and Maui are as charming as ever, the secondary characters don't have a lot to do. Moana brings a crew with her on her new adventure with different skill sets, but these skills don't really come into play that much. Why did she have to bring the reluctant old farmer again? 

Villain pickings are slim. The antagonistic-seeming Matangi who holds Maui captive is a fun addition, but she's painfully underused. Instead, the main villain is a thunder god named Nalo, who only shows up as an angry face in the clouds and as a disgruntled, not very menacing guy in a mid-credit scene. Nalo has cursed the peoples of the ocean by sinking a particular island, which somehow means they can't find one another. Why? Because he thought splitting people up would give him more power. Why would it do that? No idea. As thunder gods go, Nalo is singularly personality-less. In a series, they could have explained things a bit better with a mythological flashback, but as it is...

It's not the only time the storytelling is a let-down, either. Moana and Co. make a deal with her old foe the Kakamora to defeat a giant clam in return for their help. But the clam-defeating is a dismal failure, and were it not for one of the Kakamora's own warriors they would have been worse off than before. This is not how deal-based storylines work! Since the Kakamora have no debt to pay to Moana and her crew, as they failed to deliver on their part of the bargain, this plot thread is simply cut short.

I could go on whining about how Moana 2 feels it has to hit the very same storybeats as the first film, which slows the whole thing up – does Moana really need a new "How Far I'll Go"-style song, or wouldn't it maybe have been better if her big ballad had a new topic this time? – but it's time to come to the question I posed in the title, to which I have no answer. In spite of everything, I had a good time watching Moana 2 (and there were some enthusiastic kids in the cinema audience). But I've no idea why it's such a smash hit.

It seems I'm as lousy at predictions in show business as in any other kind of business. Were I a studio boss, I would have no idea where to invest money in order to get a good return. It could be that cinemagoers aren't that fussed about creativity and originality, which is fair enough – I myself can feel that film snobs go on about these virtues a little too much. But in that case, why does entertaining and lightweight fare like Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves and Red One bomb at the cinema? In both cases, you can argue "yeah, they seem fun but not unmissable: I'll wait until they hit the streaming services". But you can make exactly the same argument about Moana 2.

Maybe Disney's Bob Iger is right, and nostalgia is such a strong factor with filmgoers that they're prepared to show up at the cinema for a mid product as long as it's tied to a franchise they know and love. That would explain why Dreamwork's Kung Fu Panda 4 did well in cinemas, in spite of being an even more tired sequel than Moana 2. Apparently, it's much harder getting people so excited about a new potential franchise they're willing to leave their TV sofa in favour of the cinema. A film that's simply entertaining but little else isn't enough.

In the long run, as I've discussed before, this poses a problem. Disney and other studios can't rest on their laurels and churn out sequels forever. I suppose I should take my responsibility as a consumer and go to the cinema more often, if a film sounds promising enough, instead of lazily waiting for the streaming release. But for now, I'll snuggle down in my TV sofa and just be glad I'm not a studio boss.

The mysterious appeal of Netflix Christmas films

I have a shameful confession. Not only have I watched both the A Christmas Prince trilogy and The Princess Switch trilogy on Netflix; since they came out, I've also had the time and the inclination to rewatch them. The appeal of the soupy Netflix Christmas film is hard to explain. Never mind high-brow stuff: there's plenty of light-hearted TV and film fare which is of way higher quality than this. 

And yet, there's something deeply satisfying with a Christmas romance with just the right amount of hokeyness thrown in. I enjoy picking the tropes apart – sleigh rides, snow fights, handing out Christmas presents to orphans – while admiring the efforts of the leading lady (it's more or less down to her) to carry the whole show on her back. Rose McIver (Tinkerbell in Once Upon A Time – I knew there was a reason I liked her) and Vanessa Hutchens are both seasoned pros, and they have to be. 

I guess this is what people mean by enjoying something "ironically", though I suspect in my case there's some unironic enjoyment thrown in as well. Watching Netflix Christmas films is a little like watching old Barbara Cartland adaptations, except the casting's more wobbly – you don't get Oliver Reed purring "I can see you are going to be very interesting". True, you can find the odd trouper (Alice Krige is the Queen in the A Christmas Prince films), and the kid actors tend to be solid too, but as for some of the supporting cast, you're amazed that there was no better talent on offer. Surely, good character actors can always be had for a decent pay check. Nevertheless, the prince-themed trilogies somehow manage to get the mixture of groan-worthy clichés and slick execution just right.

That's not true of all Netflix Christmas films, though – far from it. I've watched a fair number of misfires over the years: a heroine with a suitably Christmas-film-friendly job (wedding-planner, caterer, candystore owner) and pretty, snowy surroundings aren't enough to compensate for the amateurishness of it all. The unfunny script, the awkward pauses, the non-existent chemistry between the leads: it's just painful to watch, and more than once I've simply given up. But I'm not put off the genre altogether. Being the new A Christmas Prince or The Princess Switch should, after all, not be that high a bar for a film.

I've been comparatively lucky this year. Meet Me Next Christmas, about a girl called Layla who has to get a ticket for a sold-out concert in order to reunite with a potential Mr Right, is actually cute and funny. True, there are some absurdities thrown in. At one time Layla (Christina Milian) selflessly abstains from a designer handbag she would have needed to barter for her ticket, so it can go to a father and son who want to give it to their wife/mother who's been ill. But if they can afford an exclusive designer handbag (which isn't even that pretty), they can find a better present for the convalescent mum. We're not talking about food rations here. However, it wouldn't be a real Netflix Christmas film without a good helping of cheese.

Meet Me Next Christmas may not be Love Actually, but it's several notches above Hot Frosty, one of the most marketed Christmas films this year (at least on streaming). Nevertheless, Hot Frosty is worth a watch if you want to see an absolutely bonkers premise (even for a Christmas film) carried out with some panache. It scores high on the "what did I just watch?" scale. So, get this: young widow Kathy, played by former Mean Girls actress Lacey Chabert, puts a scarf with vague magical properties around a snowman. The snowman comes alive. He looks like a handsome bloke, but is still sensitive to heat. Will he help Kathy find love and joy, perhaps by judicious matchmaking, before melting away as is the custom in bittersweet tales involving live snowmen? No, silly. The snowman is the love interest, so the film has to find a way to do a Pinocchio on him.

Chabert and the rest of the cast do their game best to keep this surreal love story on the road. But the mind does boggle. Also, I wondered if the live snowman (called Jack, not Frosty, which is something) really, truly is the male ideal nowadays. Is this what other women want? A man full of childlike wonder, who has to learn everything from scratch (though he is a fast learner)? Who may have emotional intelligence, but not much of the other kind? A guy who's sweet, ripped and clueless? I never thought I'd say this, but could we have Mr Darcy back, please?

If you want a nice, frothy romcom that does not insult your intelligence all of the time, Meet Me Next Christmas is your best bet. If you want a jaw-dropping festival of hokeyness to enjoy ironically, you could put Hot Frosty on (perhaps while wrapping your Christmas presents, so you feel you've done something sensible with your time). Or why not watch both? It's almost Christmas, after all.

The Rebel Moon films are not all bad (but hardly the new Star Wars)

It's hard to defend films which don't get much love even from their director. Granted, I have only seen snippets from an interview with Zack Snyder, the director of Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (which I'll call Rebel Moon 1 and Rebel Moon 2 for convenience). However, he seemed to be talking up his forthcoming R-rated versions of these films at the expense of the PG-13-rated ones now available on Netflix. I must say, these auteur directors can be enigmatic, even downright annoying. Surely, if you want the public to watch versions of your films with crushed skulls and the like, you try to make a decent fist of the versions without crushed skulls instead of half-arsing it and saying "don't worry, the R-rated ones will be better"? If you nail it the first time, people end up wanting more instead of giving up on Rebel Moon before it's even become a franchise.

Having read an article in a film magazine about the Rebel Moon films before their release, I was pretty excited about them. However, like proper Snyder fans (I'm ashamed to say these are the first films directed by him that I've seen), I was disappointed by what we got. So far, we have nothing that could rival the epicness of the Star Wars franchise even on a bad day. But though I feel no great wish to rewatch Rebel Moon 1 and 2, I will give the next film in the series a go (if there is a next one). There are things here I quite enjoy. And I'll say this for Rebel Moon: although it started as a idea for a Star Wars movie turned down by Lucasfilm, this universe doesn't feel like a Star Wars knock-off.

So, all right, there's an evil space empire, and the odd glowing sword pops up, though they aren't essential to the plot. But when is there not an evil empire? When's the last time we saw a good empire on the silver screen? (Napoleon? Sorry, I had to. Still haven't seen it, by the way.) One thing I really liked about these films was the aesthetics of the Rebel Moon universe. The planets and people visited by the protagonists in Rebel Moon 1 borrow traits from different places and historical eras on Earth: the Wild West, the Roman Empire, Ye Olde Japan etc. It's a bit odd, I suppose, considering this is outer space, but it's an idea that sets the Rebel Moon galaxy apart from the Star Wars one, where the look was more classic sci-fi and the planets often felt like they had one trait each (here's a desert – but it's a planet, here's a forest – but it's a planet, here's a big city – but it's a planet etc.).

The star ships look nothing like the Star Wars ones, but are more like clunky locomotives in space. Modes of teleportation are also different, and the advanced medical treatments one of the main villains undergoes are inventively squishy, a far cry from the a-scan-and-you're-fine treatments we mostly get in sci-fi. The music is properly grand and epic. So, plenty to like in the settings and soundtrack, then. That only leaves the problems with details such as story, script and characters.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a peaceful agricultural village, where people live in harmony from the good of the land, is threatened by a superior force (in this case troops from the evil empire, called simply the Imperium). The superior force demands more from the village than it can give, or it will be destroyed. A deadline is given. The villagers are distraught. What to do? They're farmers, not soldiers. One hero (heroine in this case) manages to assemble a motley band of warriors to defend the village. However, that is not enough: the peaceful farmers, and their womenfolk, have to learn to fight for what is theirs and stand up against the oppressors...

Yeah, I know. I haven't even seen The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven, and I have still seen this story so often I've become sick to death of it. A Bugs Life, episodes in Doctor Who and The Mandalorian... this plot seems to be everywhere. It's a mystery to me why Snyder couldn't find a better story to tell in this visually stunning universe he's imagined. What's more, the characters just aren't interesting, with the possible exception of the kick-ass heroine's mild-mannered boyfriend. Some of the acting is fine – Anthony Hopkins voice-acts an enigmatic robot with aplomb – but at other times it's decidedly wonky, and the actors aren't given much to work with. The tormented heroine Kora fights well but is otherwise not compelling, and not a strong enough character to build a franchise on. Her band of fighters are hardly more fleshed out than Asha's side-kicks in Wish, and though we get to hear their back stories they are more or less variations on the same theme (the Imperium attacking out of nowhere and doing their evil empire stuff).

As for the villains... Ed Skrein clearly has fun as the evil dictator's  man on the ground, with heavy irony named Atticus Noble. But he's too much of a parody to ever feel menacing. I kept wishing for the second in command, Cassius (!), who seems much more competent, to live up to his name, knife Atticus and take control. No such luck. I guess Atticus must be seen as the comic relief rather than a serious threat, but it diminishes the tension when the heroes are up against a buffoon. And that haircut.

This world's Palpatine is called Balisarius, on the other side of the Asterix spectrum to Galbatorix in Eragon. What his motivations are I honestly couldn't tell you: "unlimited power", I guess. The only character he's known to have a personal relationship with is Kora (she's his adopted daughter), and he screws her over. It doesn't make any sense why he's so keen to capture her after that, when surely, for propapaganda purposes, it would be much better to have her remain the empire's most wanted elsewhere, and he has no personal axe to grind. But, well... he's bad, and that's all there is to it. A pity he couldn't be entertainingly bad like Palps.

So no, I'll not be watching the R-rated versions of Rebel Moon 1 and Rebel Moon 2, even though Snyder promises to "deconstruct" the tropes he leans so heavily into in the PG-13 versions. But if there's a film about Kora's search for the lost princess (very Super Mario), I'll watch it: this universe is interesting enough to warrant a better story than what we've seen so far.

Fuzzy feelgood fare for anglophiles

Looking for an unambitious subject for a pre-travel, pre-Christmas blog post, I decided to pick one of those "I really should give that a watch some day" films from one of my streaming services, watch it and then write something about it. There were a few options: underperforming, gritty versions of the Robin Hood and King Arthur legends respectively (theme: is grittiness really a good idea here?); a soupy Netflix Christmas romcom (theme: soupy Netflix Christmas romcoms); or the first Paddington film (theme: ideal for anglophiles?). Somehow, I ended up plumping for Paddington.

The story is simple. The titular cute bear makes his way to London from Darkest Peru after the death of his uncle (his aunt holes up in a retirement home for bears, which mercifully does exist and isn't a fib just to get her nephew to seize his chance). Years earlier, before the young bear was born, his aunt and uncle – who belong to an unusually intelligent type of bear – ran into and bonded with an explorer from England, which is why the aunt fondly imagines that a home can be found there. 

The young bear finds London a lot less welcoming than he thought, but manages to get a room for the night with the Brown family, who give him the name Paddington after the station where he was found. Paddington, though well-spoken, is accident-prone, and Mr Brown is adamant that he can't stay, so Paddington tries to find the explorer who once visited his family and make a home with him. Mrs Brown is Paddington's kind-hearted champion, he eventually bonds with the children, and well, you can guess the rest.

The first half-hour or so, I wondered if I had made the wrong choice. Of course this is a children's film, but the plot is very standard nevertheless. Also, there's a lot of slapstick, something I didn't really care for even as a kid (at least not in live action), and even less now as a fuddy-duddy adult. When Paddington uses two of the family's toothbrushes to clean his ears, before flooding the bathroom, I shuddered and wished I had gone for the Christmas romcom instead.

What's not simply standard, though, is the script. From the start, a quirky humour shines through, like when the explorer names one of the bears after his beloved mother – and the other after a boxer he met in a bar. There are a lot of nice details like that. Another early example is when the competitively minded daughter learns Chinese and one of the stock phrases is: "I'm accused of insider trading. I need a lawyer". 

The visual style is also very attractive: like the film as a whole, it aims for whimsical charm and succeeds. The doll's house in the Browns' attic becomes an overview of their house as Paddington writes about them to his aunt; later, the camera swoops in on the toy train of antiques dealer Mr Gruber and shows a scene from his childhood when, as one of the children of the Kindertransport, he was met in England by a stiff female relative. "My body had travelled fast", sighs Gruber, played by kindly-eccentric-man expert Jim Broadbent, "my heart took a little longer". It was about at this point in the film that I decided I enjoyed it after all.

This scene is an example of two other of the film's virtues: that it's stuffed to the gills with solid acting talent, and that it can be heartfelt when it needs to be. But it's the wit and the inventive takes on classic comic set pieces I enjoyed the most. Two bored security guards while away the time by guessing the content description of their packet of biscuits, taking a genuine interest in the amount of sugar and other ingredients. Mr Brown, disguised as a cleaning lady, catches the fancy of a guard – so far, so familiar. But then the situation gets increasingly surreal as Mr Brown tries to explain the discrepancies between himself and the cleaning lady's photo id (she clearly looks like a real menace).

Hugh Bonneville is a reliable comic foil to Paddington as Mr Brown and Sally Hawkins a charming Mrs Brown, but it's often the side characters who steal the show rather than the Brown family or even cute Ben Whishaw-voiced Paddington himself. I'll certainly check out Paddington 2 at leisure, but with an awareness that I need to get in touch with my inner twelve-year-old in order to truly appreciate it.

Mary Poppins (Disney version) on good form

I'm starting to long for an opportunity to rubbish something. It feels like my recent blog posts have been comparatively benevolent, and it's a long time since I had a chance to tear a film, book or TV series to ribbons. Maybe the TV adaptation of His Dark Materials will oblige me by and by - the first episode was certainly dire, but the second, annoyingly, picked itself up a bit. I'll have to hold my fire for now. Meanwhile, I watched Mary Poppins Returns this weekend and found myself yet again enjoying something a great deal more than I expected.

I didn't think I'd like this film much at all, to be honest. I'd seen a scathing Youtube review of it, and it did seem like a rip-off of a franchise which I wasn't sure Disney handled very well to begin with. Yet from the get-go, I was charmed by the catchy songs, the adventures Mary Poppins takes the new generation of Banks children on and Mary herself as played by Emily Blunt. Yes, you can say the film's derivative - the numbers and adventures echo those in the first film in a number of ways - but for some reason this didn't really bother me. I had a good time for two solid hours without feeling that the story dragged.

Maybe the derivative aspect doesn't irritate me exactly because I don't quite consider the first Mary Poppins film a timeless classic. I rewatched it shortly after watching Saving Mr Banks and I liked it fine. For reasons explained in my Saving Mr Banks post, however, I don't see the Disney version of Mary Poppins as the "real" Mary Poppins - she's a far cry from the books (which, admittedly, I only remember very dimly). So as Julie Andrews was already not the Mary Poppins of my childhood, it doesn't feel like heresy to regard Emily Blunt as another manifestation of this particular version of Mary - Disney Mary. In some ways there's even a little more of the strict nanny about Blunt than Andrews, so she's a smidgeon closer to the book Mary, but not by much. Mary Poppins Returns sets out to deliver on the Disney Mary front - good songs, check; magical adventures, one of which includes animated characters, check (and where else do you get to see 2-D animation in the classic old Disney vein nowadays?); pretty uncontentious life lessons, check; heartwarming moments, check - and it does it well. There's nothing wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned.

My main criticism of Mary Poppins Returns relates, unsurprisingly, to its banker villain, played by Colin Firth. To see Firth deadpanning is always fun, but the part he's given is meagre to say the least. The main problem to overcome in the film is that Michael Banks, now grown up, owes the bank money, and will get his house repossessed if he doesn't repay the loan within a few days. The problem will go away if he can show that he was left shares in the bank by his father, as they are worth enough to settle the loan comfortably.

Now Firth's character Wilkins goes as far as to destroy the bank's records of the shares owned by the late George Banks, because for some reason he really wants that house rather than the loan paid in cash. But why? What banker would rather repossess houses than get his money back? Wilkins acts not only heartlessly, but stupidly and downright illegally. On no level does this display good business sense - no wonder his aged uncle sacks him in the end.

True, a Mary Poppins film isn't supposed to give a realistic picture of economic matters. But what bugs me is that Wilkins isn't given any motive at all, besides being evil. I could have bought an exaggerated, whimsical explanation, in tone with the story. He could have had a grudge against the Banks family (maybe the Banks children were always held up to him as shining examples by his tiresome uncles?) or some grandiose ideas about real estate being the Big Future and the only thing to keep the bank afloat during the great slump. It didn't have to be a good motive, as long as there was one.

Luckily, one of the bankers from the original story is reintroduced at the end, in time to reassure us that the film doesn't have some confused All Bankers Are Evil agenda. The bankers in the original film weren't evil: they meant well, and honestly thought they were helping Michael when they tried to persuade him to invest his penny rather than squander it on bird food. In a head-scratching twist from the new film, they weren't half wrong, either. They simply had a different outlook than the one Mary Poppins was trying to promote, and that's fair enough.

So, yes, the whole bank plot could have been better handled. But apart from that, Mary Poppins Returns is fun and occasionally moving escapism (I blubbed once or twice). Plus it's had me humming "The Cover is not the Book" tunelessly ever since I saw it.   

All you need is The Beatles (almost)

I want to be as positive as I can about Richard Curtis's newest film Yesterday. Together with About Time, it marks his return to the genre he does best - the heartwarming rom-com - after the terrible blip of The Boat That Rocked and that awful "No Pressure" commercial. It's also pretty cute that Danny Boyle, a director I associate primarily with grim and gritty fare like Trainspotting and its sequel - films which, alluring cast choices notwithstanding, I've not been able to bring myself to watch - agreed to direct something as lighthearted as Yesterday and stood the course. No "creative differences" here. (Also, I assume it's thanks to Boyle that we get an uncredited cameo from Robert Carlyle, albeit covered in prosthetics. Squee!) Finally, the film has a prominent Beatles theme, and I'm a huge fan of the fab four.

So when I say that I had problems with both the romance and the comedy parts of this rom-com, I know that sounds harsh, but I did enjoy it, honest. Neither Yesterday nor About Time reaches the heights of Four Weddings and A Funeral and Notting Hill (rom-com perfection) or Love Actually (a bit more flawed, but still very, very good). However, they are pleasant to watch, and I appreciate their underlying sweetness. Curtis, in my view, is at his best when he doesn't shy away from sentiment. I'll keep wishing and hoping (to quote a non-Beatles song) that he'll come up with another rom-com masterpiece, and if he doesn't, films in the style of Yesterday will do just fine.

The premise of the film is that its hero, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a failing musician, is just about to give up his music career when the whole world has a power shortage at exactly the same time and he's run over by a bus. He survives, but when he wakes up he finds that only he remembers The Beatles and their songs. The film isn't really interested in what exactly happened during that power shortage. It's less a sci-fi conundrum, more of a plot convenience so as to be able to set up the main story. There's also a running joke about random other phenomena who are unknown in this new reality. Fair enough: geek as I am, I still realise that a Beatles-themed rom-com is hardly the time or place to get into parallel universes and alternate realities. So, we just take it as read that Jack knows about The Beatles and everyone else (almost ) doesn't.

Jack is unable to resist passing off The Beatles' work as his own, and in time he achieves huge success. However, he feels dreadfully guilty. What's more, his new career takes him away from sweet schoolteacher Ellie (Lily James), his friend and (somewhat implausibly) manager during the lean years, whom he has just realised that he loves.

Yes, it's that old chestnut. The main problems with this film has to do with the story. First, the hero is a real whinger. Patel sings well - which is important - but struggles to make a convincing romantic lead, and no wonder. Even Hugh Grant in his heyday would have had his work cut out trying to make the glum Jack, who's miserable when he's a failure and miserable when he's a success, appealing. When Ellie, in good old Curtis-heroine fashion, takes the first step and confesses her love, Jack freezes instead of responding - not once, but twice. What's the poor girl to think except that he's just not that into her?

Second, the "fame and fortune versus true love" setup is not only a cliché, it's a very irritating one. It always bugs me when protagonists are called upon to sacrifice worldly pleasures like money, fame or power for the sake of their loved ones. Because why would their loved ones demand that of them? What kind of bastards are they, that they can't be happy when someone near to them hits the big time? An image which has stayed with me as an illustration of this kind of storyline is from a Barbara Taylor Bradford adaptation: the successful heroine's husband is lounging by the swimming pool while complaining via phone to her that he never sees her. Well, how do you think she pays for that pool, you jerk? Ellie gives mixed signals regarding her feelings about Jack's fame - she claims that she's thrilled for him, but at the same time asks him to stay with her when he has important meetings to attend, as a sort of evidence that he does care for her. I suspect his success isn't really the issue here, and that had he simply said "I love you and I want you to be by my side" at the right time, she could have got used to a life in luxury in California fairly easily.

For these reasons, the Jack-Ellie romance didn't grip me, and as for the comedy, I could have done with more of Curtis's trademark wit. The dialogue doesn't dazzle in, say, Notting Hill fashion (and speaking of Notting Hill, Anna Scott got to keep her movie career and get her man - only sayin'). Many of the funny lines go to Jack's American manager, who's blunt and unapologetically greedy, but her schtick gets old after a while, and when we see the last pop-eyed freeze-frame of her we realise how one-dimensional the character was all along.

What does work, and saves the film, is the admiration and affection it shows for The Beatles. Not only do we get to hear a great number of their songs, as rendered very creditably by Patel, Jack is hailed as "the greatest songwriter of all time" on the basis of their output. Curtis is never one for half-measures: just like Vincent van Gogh according to the Curtis-scripted Doctor Who episode "Vincent and the Doctor" was the best painter ever, so The Beatles, in his view, is obviously the best band ever. Reviewers have speculated that the film would have been more interesting if Jack had failed to make the Beatles songs popular in the modern age; in my opinion, they're missing the point. By having Jack's audiences being wild about Beatles songs, Curtis not only tips his hat to the band and its enduring appeal, he shows a touching faith in the taste of the masses. Like all his rom-coms (I'm not counting Boat) and "Vincent and the Doctor", Curtis's latest film is life-affirming.

Patel is at his most convincing too as a Beatles fan. I can partly make peace with Jack's misery because he clearly hates stealing from John, Paul, George and Ringo, although in his reality they're unaware of it. One of the best scenes in the film is when he meets the two other people in the world who remember The Beatles, and things unfold in another way than he feared.

Seeing as how he managed to coax Paul McCartney into singing "Hey Jude" at the 2012 Olympics inauguration ceremony, I expect Boyle shares Curtis's enthusiasm. Ultimately, you could say, they're just two fanboys, standing in front of a band, asking it to love them.

My my, I actually really enjoyed the Mamma Mia sequel

It might be a good idea to start the year on a positive note. A couple of months back, I watched Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again in the cinema and found myself enjoying it a lot more than I expected. So why were my expectations so low to start with, seeing as I'm a massive ABBA fan? Well, people seem to assume that if you love ABBA, you'll love the Mamma Mia films and if you don't you'll hate them. However, it's not quite as simple as that.

I've loved ABBA since I first heard "The Winner Takes It All" as a girl and thought: "Wow, what a power ballad! And all about betrayed love *swoon*". And so, although ABBA the band hadn't been playing for ages, ABBA songs became part of the soundtrack of my teenage years. It follows, then, that I don't like ABBA songs "ironically"; I happen to think they are darned good songs, both melody- and lyrics-wise. When Mamma Mia the musical started playing in London, I went to see it and thought it was great entertainment. Although the plot was paper thin, professional musical artists and a witty script ("I'm old enough to be your mother! Well, you can call me Oidipus") made sure the soufflé didn't sag.

Then Mamma Mia! the movie came out, and was frankly a disappointment. The script felt dumbed down, and it was soon very clear that the line-up of famous actors who played in the film did not become famous for their singing talent. The only one whose singing really impressed me was Amanda Seyfried who plays Sophie, the daughter of Donna, who doesn't know which of her mother's three old admirers is her dad. Also, there was a lot of mugging all round. Everyone seemed to be in it just for the larks, and the message came across as "look, we know these songs are campy and cheesy, but c'mon, let's all have some fun!" As a true ABBA fan, I took exception to this. The film didn't seem to have any idea of what made the songs good or the musical entertaining in the first place. As mentioned, funny lines were cut and replaced by heavy-handed slapstick. "Our Last Summer", which in the musical was a touching reminiscence piece sung by Donna and one of her old beaux, became a fairly pointless number with Sophie and the three (possible) dads. One song the film didn't manage to ruin, though, was "Slipping Through My Fingers", which remained, as in the musical, an affecting moment between mother and daughter.

So when the first clip I saw from the sequel was in the same forced larky vein, I groaned. "When I Kissed The Teacher" is the only pop song I've ever heard about a teacher crush, and pretty much nails its subject matter. Though it is light-hearted - the original music video, with Magnus Härenstam as the hapless teacher, is hilarious - there is no doubt that the girl singing the song is well and truly smitten. In the film, a young Donna sings the number in lieu of a speech at her graduation from college and only kisses the teacher (a female don) for fun. Then she and her fellow graduate students run out and dance and sing, throwing their graduation hats in the air etc. Honestly, how do you manage to miss the point of a song so completely? I wasn't looking forward to the rest of it.

It turns out, though, that Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again shows more appreciation of its musical source material than the original film, and above all sounds a lot better. Most of the songs are given to Amanda Seyfried and to Lily James as young Donna, who also, mercifully, turns out to be sweet-voiced. The film takes the trouble to listen to what the songs actually say and fit the action to it rather than hamming it up at every turn. "One of Us" is allowed to be about a sticky point in Sophie's relationship with her boyfriend. "Knowing Me, Knowing You" is really used to illustrate a sad break-up - although, as Donna and Sam had only been together for a week or so, the melancholy lyrics more fitted for the break-up of a long marriage don't really feel earned. "The Name Of The Game", where young Donna comes down with a bump from cloud nine at the end, works well, as does "Mamma Mia", which she now sings after she's had her heart broken but is trying to get herself together as the lead singer in a band. Donna's two old friends may still camp it up in "Angel Eyes", but at least their antics are nicely undercut by Sophie's real anguish over her boyfriend situation. I also liked how less well-known ABBA songs were smuggled in here and there: the melody of "I Let The Music Speak" is played as accordion accompaniment in a Paris scene; the amateurish Greek band Donna joins are performing "Kisses Of Fire" when she first hears them; at Sophie's party, people are dancing to "Hasta Mañana". A highlight worth mentioning is when Cher - who plays Sophie's glamorous grandmother - delivers an outstanding "Fernando" (though it's never made clear how she and her old love were separated, nor how they can get together again so smoothly without any recriminations).

The film does cheat occasionally. It almost completely changes the lyrics of "I've Been Waiting For You" and "My Love, My Life". The first song is originally about a girl with implied heartbreak in her past who falls head over heels in love again. Her jubilant optimism drowns out any misgivings one might have, considering that the object of her affections may not yet know about her feeling or feel the same way ("I feel you belong to me/Someday you will agree/Please believe me"). The situation in "My Love, My Life" is similar to the one in Céline Dion's "Think Twice" (you've gathered by now that my music taste is not in any way cool). The woman who sings the song knows that her relationship is coming to and end, and that her significant other - whom she still loves - is working up the courage to break it off. Unlike the singer of "Think Twice", though, she's not going to plead: she accepts that it's over ("But I know I don't possess you/So go away, God bless you/You are still my love and my life/Still my one and only"). In the film, these two songs are all about the mother-daughter relationship between Donna (who has died when the film starts) and Sophie, and very touching it is, too, especially when Meryl Streep shows up as Donna's ghost at an important family event. But the original songs have a special place in my heart. All the same, they do work this way, and at least they're not delivered "ironically".

Yes, the film has its fair share of somewhat clumsy comedy, but it didn't really bother me this time around. I left the cinema in the right sunny mood, feeling that some justice had been done to one of my favourite bands. If you need something to temporarily drive away the January blues, by all means take a chance on this.

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.     

Jolly holiday

Ah, the Swedish summer holiday – the best reason not to emigrate. I don’t think many other countries would tolerate four weeks’ holiday in a row, but it’s standard in Sweden, and exactly what’s needed after months of hard labour. In fact, four weeks can seem a bit short, especially when you’re back at work and can’t get hold of anyone because they’re on holiday.

My blogging ambitions during summer times are modest, but in view of the catchy song “Jolly holiday” from the Disney film Mary Poppins, it might be fitting to write about the film Saving Mr Banks which I caught up with on DVD a few weeks back.

My mother read the Mary Poppins books to us when we were children: I don’t remember much about them except the feeling of magic, all the more powerful because it contrasted with the dour personality of Mary Poppins herself. Consequently, I grew up despising the Disney film, which I’ve only seen once and that ages ago, because it showed a young, pretty and accommodating Mary Poppins in the shape of sweet-singing Julie Andrews.  Saving Mr Banks has achieved its goal in wanting me to give the Disney version of Mary Poppins another go, but in many other ways it is problematic.

The film claims to tell the story behind Disney’s adaptation of the first Mary Poppins novel, where the novelist P.L. Travers (real name Helen Goff) was given script approval rights. As every review I’ve read of Saving Mr Banks has pointed out, the film isn’t honest: what we see is P.L. Travers slowly coming to terms with and accepting the Disney team’s vision of the film, while in real life she wasn’t pleased at all with the finished product and made sure Disney never had a hand in adapting one of her books again. The film’s story is a much better one: in fact, the real-life scenario would have made an indifferent film. Where’s the development, the story arc? Intransigent author remains intransigent, and as discontented with her deal with Disney as at the beginning? No, I can understand they didn’t make a film like that. What I do wonder, in view of the facts, is why they made a film at all.

The answer is probably because they wanted to go to town on the battle between two formidable personalities: P.L. Travers, not unlike the real Mary Poppins in her vinegary snappiness, and Walt Disney, a man with considerable steel under his genial exterior. Emma Thompson as Travers is  the undisputed star of this film, but Tom Hanks does a good job of Disney, too. You can’t expect a Disney film to show Uncle Walt in anything but a kindly light, but you do get a sense of his toughness, in Hanks’s steamrolling manipulativeness as well as in his employees’ attitude towards him. There is terror on their faces when Travers insists on Mr Banks being depicted as clean-shaven: the request that he should have a moustache comes from “Walt himself”. When it comes to intransigence, Travers has clearly met her match. It reminds me about what Carl Barks said about Disney: that he always gave you the last word, and that last word was always “Yes, Walt”.

The premise of the film – that Travers saw her own father in Mr Banks, and that Disney got around her by making sure he had a redemptive ending – is a weak one, as also mentioned in reviews. The author’s father (according to this film at least) was an alcoholic dreamer, which means that the only thing he had in common with Mr Banks was that he worked in a bank. With an author as imaginative as Travers, there is surely no need to look for far-fetched autobiographical echoes. She defended her fictional characters – including Mr Banks –because she created them: there has to be no other explanation. Moreover, the flashbacks to Travers’s/Helen’s childhood weigh down the film, which would have been more enjoyable if it had been shorter. That said, young Helen (or Ginty as her father calls her) is played with pathos by Annie Rose Buckley, and the scene where the Sherman brothers’ “bank song” merges with a speech made by the drunken Mr Goff on Market Day in deepest Australia is very well made.

What’s extraordinary is that even knowing the facts have been tinkered with, and realising that the “saving flawed father” premise is weak, I was still left feeling more lenient towards Disney’s Mary Poppins than I’ve been before. No-one disputes that P.L. Travers did get script approval and was deeply involved with the film in its initial stages – though she had no power over the film editing – which means that, at some point, she must have accepted a young and pretty Mary Poppins. I saw the musical version of Mary Poppins more years ago than I care to remember, and there too we had a good-looking Mary, and many of the film’s seductively hummable songs. IMDB quotes Travers as saying of the film at one point: “It’s glamorous and it’s a good film on its own level, but I don’t think it’s very like my books”. Maybe this is the best way to view Mary Poppins in its Disney version: as a product that is separate from the book’s Mary Poppins, but good “on its own level”.

From Time to Time - Not quite Downton for kids (but very nice)

When you see there's a film around starring Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville, scripted by Julian Fellowes and obviously taking place in historical times, you could be forgiven for thinking that its main market is meant to be the Downton crowd. And superficially, there are similarities between Downton and the time-travelling tale slash cosy ghost story From Time to Time. After all, it contains these elements:

• A matriarch with a touch of steel and a heart of gold (Maggie Smith)
• A benevolent but somewhat clueless patriarch (Hugh Bonneville)
• An atmospheric country house that's belonged to the same family for centuries
• A wise housekeeper
• A romance between a morally upstanding servant (gardener, in this case) and a loyal maid who stands by him in times of distress
• A handsome, unreliable manservant

Apart from Smith and Bonneville, there are other familiar Downton faces. Allen Leech (Branson) plays the righteous gardener, and I'm sure I glimpsed Mrs Bird in the kitchens. But what a Downton fan suffering from withdrawal symptoms must bear in mind when watching this film is that it's really in another genre entirely. From Time to Time is a classical children's story, and the adults above serve mostly as a backdrop for the adventures of the child protagonists. It is big on atmosphere, negligible on character development. It contains tales of fires, hidden passages and lost treasure and has more in common with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe than with any costume drama featuring grown-up concerns such as marriage, inheritance, thwarted desire, work rivalry and, er, cricket.

The central character, a boy called Tolly, is sent to stay a while at his paternal grandmother's house, a grand place called Green Knowe. It is the end of the second world war, and Tolly's mother is trying to trace his father, who is missing in action. Tolly refuses to admit that his father might be dead and is initially suspicious of his grandmother, who didn't think his mum was good enough for his dad (and still doesn't). However, grandmother and grandson bond over an exciting story from Green Knowe's history, especially after Tolly starts to see ghosts of the Regency folk that his grandmother's told him about. He is even catapulted back in time and witnesses key scenes of the drama. He befriends the then family's youngest child, a blind girl called Susan, and her companion, the plucky runaway slave boy Jacob, and is able to be of use to the goodies generally. Will he be able to find the lost jewels that could save his grandmother from selling the family home?

Yup, it's that kind of story - sweet, morally straightforward, and conveying the sense of magic when another world (this time, the past rather than a land containing witches and somewhat pompous lions) opens up before a weary child hero. It's adapted from the book The Chimneys of Green Knowe, apparently one in a series of well-loved children's books about the house in question. I love children's adventures like this, but sometimes the clear-cut Little-Lord-Fauntleroy morals of the piece riled me, rather. I mean, a blind girl and a plucky runaway slave boy? Get away - could the dice be more loaded? Needless to say, I felt some defiant sympathy for Susan's bad big brother Sefton because 1) his Hindley-like jealousy of Jacob is not entirely unfounded (and I think that spur-nicking was jolly mean) 2) he is played by Douglas Booth who really, truly, is a looker 3) the odds are so ludicrously stacked against him 4) he's called Sefton. Gettit? As in Uncle Sefton in A Family at War? Bonneville's character's shrewish wife has a case too, in my view: she is stuck in a country house with neighbours who despise her (she's a Dutch diamond merchant's daughter) while her husband is away most of the time. The moment hubby comes home, he undermines her authority and foists a nobly saved foundling on her. No wonder she feels like bitching - and she bitches a lot (do unhappily married couples really bicker as much as they do in films and on telly? It sounds exhausting).

For all my reflex-like defence of the baddies, though, I must admit that they are paper-thin characters, and this applies even more to the villainous butler Caxton. He doesn't have a character at all. The only unexpected thing about him is that he is played by Dominic West - not my type, but admittedly a far cry from the eye-patched, livid-scarred Bad Servants you otherwise come across in tales like this. But he has no inner life, no motivation - except primitive greed and, at the end, an even more primitive vindictive streak - and no sliver of a back story. How did he become a butler in such comparatively young years? Why does he pal up with bad boy Sefton? Is he really the lover of the lady of the house, or is that just gossip? This and many other questions remain unanswered. You could argue that this is supposed to make Caxton cooly mysterious, but my guess is we're just not meant to care. Here, the film's roots in a children's book become apparent. Caxton is the bad guy, and that's all we need to know. Still, better an empty husk of a sinister manservant than no sinister manservant at all.

I really enjoyed From Time to Time, as will those who like stories in the style of the above-mentioned Lion, Witch, A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy. But Downton it ain't.

Behind-the-scenes dramas are great - but there are limits

Yesterday, I watched the - by now - no longer brand-new film Topsy Turvy (made 1999) about Gilbert and Sullivan and their creation of The Mikado. It was too inert for my taste and far too long, but I still enjoyed parts of it. I've never actually seen The Mikado, but I know some of the tunes pretty well: I've grown up with flowers that bloom in the spring - trala - and have nothing to do with the case and with people who shake hands with you, shake hands with you like that. More importantly, though, I've been stage-struck since as far as I can remember. When I was a girl, I wanted to be an actress (that or a lawyer - don't ask me why, this was before Tulkinghorn and Co.), and the dream stayed with me until I was finally convinced of its impracticability by a combination of lack of talent and other, more fruitful creative interests. But I have always been and always will be a sucker for anything connected to acting and the stage.

This makes me the ideal audience for behind-the-scenes dramas. I'm an avid viewer of those making-of featurettes that are now blissfully standard on most DVDs. True, they are a bit tame. You don't get people involved in a film or prestigious TV series rubbishing each other or admitting to tiffs on set - understandably, as that would make them look pretty shabby. But still, it's fascinating stuff. I must admit to a shamefully one-sided interest in the writing and acting part of things. When you think of all the people involved with making successful films and TV series and all the effort they've put in to make your experience as enjoyable as possible in unobtrusive ways - cameramen, the costume department, composers and sound mixers, the special effects department, those who cut the whole thing into shape and what have you - it really is too bad of me, but there it is. What I want to see is the director, producer and/or script-writer discussing the story and characters, the casting and the actors, plus the actors in their turn discussing much the same thing (and ideally displaying suitable Character Loyalty by talking about their particular character as if he/she were their best pal on earth). My interest is not wholly character-based: I also enjoy "deleted scenes" features, but only if there is a commentary by the director or similar explaining, firstly, why the scene was deleted and, secondly, why it is included in the DVD feature. It's the mechanism of storytelling that's the appeal in this case, and you get a healthy respect for those involved - I have seldom seen a deleted scene which I felt would have made the film/TV feature better if it had been included.

But, as I said, as to juicy gossip, there is none. Curious Georges like me are reduced to over-interpreting anything the least bit out of the ordinary in the friendly, gushing speeches of cast and crew. We have no way of knowing if our fantasies are correct, though. And here's where the fictional behind-the-scenes drama comes in. Here we get loads of gossip, and we can at least imagine that some of the backstage gripes and romances may have real-life counterparts. I just love the in-jokes about endearingly vain actors and writers, and the characters' commitment to putting on a good show despite all squabbling. Shakespeare in Love is an example of a behind-the-scenes drama that works beautifully. I still giggle every time I see Ned Alleyn taking it upon himself to criticise the performance of the actor who plays Tybalt ("Are you going to do it like that?"). What's more, he's absolutely right.

Topsy Turvy is no Shakespeare in Love, though. There are quirky characters and mildly interesting anecdote, but no real drama. You realise why the makers of Shakespeare in Love had to invent a completely fictional love story for its hero. And even then, that story still risked being upstaged by what is actually performed - Shakespeare and his Viola aren't a patch on Romeo and Juliet. In Topsy Turvy - though it's fun to see how Gilbert must have tailored the comic opera's parts to the talents of the actors of an existing troup - you sometimes wonder why they didn't just do a film version of The Mikado instead.

One little white lie? Forget it - you're in high school

Well, that didn't go so badly. Like most Swedes, I'm pretty chuffed our song made it to third place in the Eurovision Song Contest. Gone are the days when we would sulk every time we didn't win. Now we're happy to make the final in the first place, and as for becoming one of the top five - marvellous.

Mind you, I was a bit worried. The song is catchy, but the charming Finn in Swedish Television's Eurovision panel gave a word of warning. He doubted that the lyrics - about a boy who dreams of being popular so he can win the prettiest girl in school - would appeal much to the over-thirties. And he has a point, not because we don't remember what it was like in school, but because we do. Not that many people were popular in school. And while non-cool kids like me took a dim view of the popular crowd, the wannabes weren't that much better. They knew, and we knew, the surest route to popularity: picking on those lower down in the pecking order, i.e. us.

Still, who's to say: maybe dancing and breaking the odd glass wall might do the trick as well. I was prepared to think so, and so, it appears, was Europe.

In one respect, I was lucky in school experiences, at least I get that impression when I see American high school comedies. Secondary school (junior high school in America) may have been Alcatraz, but senior high school was actually all right. It was a far cry from the world of petty feuding and one-upmanship shown in the films. It varies, of course, and some Swedish high schools are rumoured to be cliquey and hard to navigate, but on balance I'd say that if you've survived Swedish secondary school, you're over the worst. Whereas, it appears, for the poor yanks, your problems are only just about to start. I remember a character in the film version of "The Jane Austen Book Club" (I don't think it was in the book) stating very emphatically, after having run into an old enemy from her school days, "High school is never over".

Boy, it's fun to watch, though, as long as you haven't lived through it yourself. High school comedies are an extremely guilty pleasure: compared to them, a Disney cartoon is an art movie. The formula, and the variations on it, are part of the fun. Of course there has to be a bitch. Of course she has to have well-groomed sidekicks. Of course the film's heroine - after really trying to keep out of trouble - will have her patience tried to such an extent by the bitch's plotting that she retaliates, quite justifiably. Cue the most enjoyable part of the film where the heroine stoops to mean tricks and we are still allowed to root for her. But then, invariably, she goes too far, becomes a bitch herself, and risks losing her Real Friends who are always profoundly uncool. Then there is a Disaster and she ends up hated by the whole school, only to make a triumphant comeback after having patched things up with her uncool pals. The bitch is defeated, and then they all go to college and live happily ever after. Sometimes it's a boy who makes this journey of discovery, as in the teen movie classic "Can't Buy Me Love", which unfortunately means less backstabbing.

What is rather tough in these films - and this is a thing they have in common with Disney cartoons - is that no deception, however minor or excusable, is tolerated in the long run. If you have any secret at all it will be all out in the open at the film's climax, and the one person you wanted to keep it from will know all about it. I'm all for the message Be Yourself and To Thine Own Self Be True, but films aimed at youngsters seem to be obsessed about it. To name but two examples, Mulan must be unmasked as a woman and the "warrior" insects in "A Bug's Life" must be revealed to be failed circus artists, because only by being themselves can they triumph - in the films, that is. Being Yourself in the real world isn't always that rewarding, especially not for a kid or a teenager. Still, there's self-respect to consider, so in the long run the moral message is the correct one, if only it weren't hammered in quite so incessantly. Once in a while, I would like to see a hero or heroine of a high school comedy - or a Disney film - get away with a lie.

One shouldn't get too sniffy about the To Thine Own Self Be True story arc, though. Dickens used it brilliantly in "Great Expectations". Maybe it's his turn to get the high school comedy treatment after Shakespeare ("10 Things I Hate About You" etc.) and Austen ("Clueless")? Estella would make a first-class high school bitch.