Ruining Kids Movies: The Jungle Book

Ooh eeh ooh, I wanna be like you-ee-oo…

…Or rather I did, once upon a time, but upon recent contemplation I’ve had second thoughts.

Day 02 – My Favourite Movie

There are very few films that I really want to watch over-and-over again; that isn’t the say that I don’t watch them over-and-over again – after all I paid good money for the DVD so I’m going to get every last drop out of the shiny disc.

I like light and fluffy 80s films – ideally those directed by John Hughes or, at the very least, starring Molly Ringwald:  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off^*, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Sixteen Candles.  They are films you don’t really have to pay attention to; I’ve seen them often enough that I could pop in and out at any moment and almost immediately be up to speed with the teenagery drama that’s unfolding.

^*Although why it’s Ferris Bueller‘s Day Off when it’s all about Cameron Frye escapes me.
If I’m sitting down specifically to watch a film, I like ones which hold my attention: if I’m seeing a film for the first time, put me down in front of a heist/crime drama then come back for me 121 minutes later after Clive Owen is done.

Let me pick a film, however, to sit down and seriously watch [not just as background noise], then I do have a particular favourite.  I don’t watch it a lot, specifically because I do like it so much [there's a part of me which thinks if I do something I like too often it looses its specialness].  This film ticks all the boxes for me: it’s German, it’s funny, it’s set in two Berlins, it has a heart, it has a story and it’s historically accurate: it’s Goodbye Lenin!

In 1989 as the first cracks appear in the Berlin Wall Frau Kerner – a devout Socialist – falls into a coma.  Eight months later when she comes around, the two Berlins are now one and the world she knew is gone.  A shock of that magnitude would certainly kill her, so her son [Daniel Brühl] sets about keeping the DDR alive in the 79m² of their apartment.

The film treads a thin line, while it will probably appeal to those Germans suffering from Ostalgie, the ease with which the now-defunct state could so easily be recreated – simply making up the news – is certainly not too far from the bitter truth.  Yes, Goodbye Lenin! is satirical, but it’s an equal-opportunities-satirist, giving both the communist and capitalist sides of the Wall the same treatment.  At the end of the film, you have no idea what side of the Wall the writer/director wishes he were on, and that is the mark of a good storyteller.

District 9

I seened a movie.  ‘Twasn’t the movie we really wanted to see but a big FAIL! on my part in reading cinema times meant we arrived at about the only time in the day when (500) Day Of Summer wasn’t about to start.  So the choice was District 9 or Dorian Grey.  Despite my unadulterated love for all things Wildean, the trailers are not doing it for me.  I get the feeling that it’s not a cinema film, it’s a £3-DVD-out-of-the-bargain-bin-to-sit-next-to-Queen-Of-The-Damned-on-the-shelf-film.

The eponymous District 9 is a ghetto in Johannesburg where a race of stranded aliens [derogatorily referred to as prawns] have been living for the past twenty years.  However, recently the good people of Jo’burg have been getting a bit fed up with the aliens being around and decide they want to ship them off to the arse-end of nowhere so they don’t have to look at them anymore.  Of course, the aliens don’t particularly want to be evicted from their slums into an even worse area so they’re going to put of a little bit of resistance.

The problem with District 9 is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, it’s shot like a documentary, it starts off down the path of social commentary, but it doesn’t really stick to the path for that long – after all you can’t really have lots of fugitive-style-running-about with a straight up social commentary.  Then, for a moment or so, it looks like we’re going down the buddy film route, complete with a cute little kiddie, but no, again that was nothing but another ploy to keep us viewers on our toes.  All it really wants to be, after all the flipping and flopping, is a shooty, bang!, bang!, guns’n'trucks’n'blood’n'gore alien-fest. There are some pretty heavy-handed indicators early on as to what is going to happen, and yes, what you think is going to happen is what is going to happen.

In short, if you happen to show up too early for (500) Days Of Summer then you might want to hang out for a while playing with the swinging grabby cuddly toy machine or eating ice cream or any of the other things you can do in the cinema foyer.