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The 50th CinemaDays : CineWorld cinema, Xscape complex, Milton Keynes (UK)
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DAY ONE (Thu 6th Oct)
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Kirk Jones's NANNY McPHEE [6/10] : USA (US-UK) 2005 : 98 mins
Elaborate whimsy is the order of the day in this opulent-looking, frightfully-posh children's fantasy, very loosely based on the Nurse Matilda novels of Christianna Brand (an author best known for old-timey adult-oriented whodunnits like Green For Danger.) The script is by Emma Thompson, who reportedly spent many years trying to bring the project to the screen and herself appears - behind some drastic uglifying prosthetic make-up - as the title-character, a witchily solemn cousin of Mary Poppins.
Her daunting task is to tame the uber-naughty seven children of a recently-widowed undertaker (Colin Firth), the brood residing in a gaudily-coloured rural mansion during what looks like an indeterminate late-Victorian/early-Edwardian period. Raucous shenanigans duly ensue as the kids - led by spirited, self-possessed little Thomas Sangster - realise that the spell-casting Nanny McPhee is a (perhaps literally) world away from the seventeen previous nannies they've managed to drive out.
After a rather shaky start, director Jones (in a belated followup to 1999's lotto-themed comedy Waking Ned) and scriptwriter Thompson hit their stride around halfway mark as Nanny exerts her special skills on the brats. And it's Thompson's eerily calm, intriguingly solemn performance which becomes the quiet core around which the sometimes-rickety enterprise revolves. Her presence steers the picture through some less-than-inspired episodes - Jones would have been well-advised to drop the CGI donkey for example, not to mention the cutesy-cutesy "talking" baby (though both may appeal to the very youngest audience-members.)
On the plus side, Thompson seems to have called in plenty of favours from her thespian pals: an impressive supporting cast includes Angela Lansbury (her first appearance in a theatrical feature since 1984's The Company of Wolves, and seemingly channelling Lady Bracknell as Firth's domineering Aunt Agatha), Derek Jacobi, Patrick Barlow, Imelda Staunton and Celia Imrie... all of them at full tilt or beyond.
Their presence bolsters the general atmosphere of classiness that pervades the entire production, from the alluring cinematography to the audaciously eyepopping production-design, set-decoration and costumes. The persuasively romantic snowstorm-in-August wedding-finale, meanwhile, rounds things off a genuinely magical note - and is commendably economic in its avoidance of cumbersome last-act explanations. As the tykes soon discover, sometimes Nanny does know best.
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Burton & Johnson's TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE [6/10] : USA (US-UK) 2005 : 75 mins
That title is a touch misleading: Burton only co-directed, and isn't actually one of the three credited scriptwriters (namely John August, Pamela Pettler, Caroline Thompson). But this entertaining little larky-gothic animated fable is, like the Henry Selick-directed Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), very much a 'Burton project', containing whatever surplus baroque weirdness (and songs) that didn't make it into his (very) recent career-crowning Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Burton reportedly kept the two productions on the go more or less simultaneously, and Corpse Bride deploys many of his usual collaborators in both the crew and the voice-talent departments. The resulting air is of a minor but wildly elaborate doodle, dashed off as a battery-recharging break between bigger projects - though it's one which seems likely to earn Burton an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, so rapturously has it been received by American critics.
Set in an unspecified, gloomy 19th-century European town, it's the story of Victor Van Dort (Depp), the nervy son of nouveau riche parents keen to marry him off to the local aristocracy. The hard-up Everglots are happy to oblige, prodding their daughter Victoria (Emily Watson) towards the altar. But when he fluffs his lines at the wedding rehearsal, Victor flees into the forest where he inadvertently brings a recently-deceased 'corpse bride' (Bonham Carter) back to something approaching life. No ghoulish zombie she - rather a delicate, beautiful young woman whom fate has dealt a cruel hand. And when Victor journeys with his new 'bride' to her underworld home, he discovers a town rather more lively than the one he's left behind "upstairs."
Corpse Bride is seldom less than striking to look at (the animation an impressive, distinctive hybrid of stop-motion and CGI) and, while the songs do tend to get in the way, the film is also pleasing on the ear. Watson and Bonham Carter provide an effective contrast in modes of feminine sweetness, while Hammer-veteran octogenarians Christopher Lee and Michael Gough (a welcome return to the limelight at 87!) contribute vivid voice-cameos. But while Burton fans will undoubtedly love every one of its 75 minutes, the slightly strained, self-indulgent air of hectic morbid fantasia makes this less inviting for general audiences than the accessible tastes provided by his wonderful Chocolate feast.
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John Hillcoat's THE PROPOSITION [5/10] : Australia 2005 : 104 mins
Uneven, ambitious/pretentious Aussie western from a script from Nick Cave - who appeared in and co-wrote Hillcoat's remarkable 1988 debut Ghosts... of the Civil Dead. In the wake of that film's belated international release great things were expected of the director - making it all the more disappointing that all he came up with between then and now was 1996's little-seen To Have and To Hold. The Proposition, though not without interest and evocatively fly-blown in its convincingly sweaty, scruffy, grimy details, is unlikely to boost his reputation.
It's very much a film of two halves: the most engaging and complex work comes in the scenes chronicling the strained domestic life of Ray Winstone - outstanding as a brutal-but-conflicted lawman in a late-1800s outback hamlet - and his demure wife Emily Watson. Winstone is tasked by his superiors (represented by an entertainingly preening/prissy David Wenham) with ending the terror-reign of the notorious 'Burns Gang'.
He captures the two of the Burns brothers - played by Guy Pearce and Richard Wilson (a young Aussie thesp, not to be confused with the One Foot in the Grave curmudgeon) - after the violent gun-battle which starts off the movie with a bang. But his main target is their enigmatic, little-seen big brother (Danny Huston), and he presents Pearce with the "proposition" of the title: track down and kill big brother, and little brother will avoid the hangman's noose. Pearce accepts.
From this point on the focus is split between Winstone and Watson at home, working through their dysfunctional marriage, and the dusty travails of Pearce. The (picturesque/pretentious) latter story-strand isn't handled as well as the (nuanced/claustrophobic) former: the Burns family are Irish ('Oirish' more like), and the picture rapidly bogs down into an slow, unappetising mix of Australian and Irish blathery-blarnery mysticism, liberally sprinkled with whisperingly poetic voiceover and punctuated with moments of jarring violence (one of which is, it has to be said, truly jawdropping in its suddenness and graphic nature).
But it never quite goes far enough down the gruesome trail trod by Cormac McCarthy in novels like Blood Meridian - we've expect more extreme and baroque stuff from Cave, who seems to have watered down his usual uber-gothic sensibilities here in search of the global multiplex audience. What he ends up with is a kind of Ned Kelly with ideas far above its station an ostentatiously grim 'horse opera' that takes itself awfully seriously.
Neil Young
6th/7th/10th October, 2005
The other days at CinemaDays October 2005:
Day 2 (Friday) including Broken Flowers, The Libertine and Flightplan
Day 3 (Saturday) including Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Murderball and Mad Hot Ballroom
Day 4 (Sunday) including A Cock and Bull Story and The Matador
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