A quick update. Since scribing a few words back there in my last blog on Better Things, I ought to tell you that I also saw Helen, also in contention for the Michael Powell award and Wall-E, Pixars latest animation which I'm sure is in contention for one the biggest grossing hits of all time if my blockbusterometer is functioning correctly.
But first to Helen. Like Better Things it has loneliness and in particular identity at its heart. Joy, a young college student disappears in a wood near a public park sparking a police manhunt after her possessions and distinctive jacket are found lying on the ground. The police organise a reconstruction of her last known movements and choose Helen (Annie Townsend) another college student to play the part of the disappeared girl. Helen, a shy and painfully withdrawn parentless teenager gradually starts to feel she has a place in the world by slowly assimilating herself into Joy's world.
It's a brilliant premise and the film has a haunting atmospheric mood to it throughout feeling at times like a cross between Blue Velvet, Antonioni's Blow Up and snippets of the suburban dreariness of American Beauty's family scenes. The first fifteen minutes of the film are absolutely stunning and suck you in with their hypnotic visuals and moody atonal score. Sadly, the film doesn't deliver in the end. It's let down by a poor script full of naff exposition and an ending that leaves too many questions unanswered and situations unresolved.
Despite Annie Townsend playing it pitch perfect as a young woman waking up to her potential, many of the cast are rather weak in their roles although I suspect the script played a part. There are some flashes of genius here and there and it's quite a bold attempt to do something a little bit differently from the norm but its doesnt quite gel overall. Still, directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor will be worth looking out for in future.
And now to something completely at the other end of the spectrum and the other end of the universe in some scenes is Pixar's latest offering, the utterly magical and breathtakingly stunning Wall-E.
I'm not going to give too much away but suffice to say this is another leap forward in design and animation. It was digitally projected when I saw it and the clarity of detail in the urban wastelands and landscapes and the colour palette that it's painted with really stunned me.
The first five minutes are quite jaw dropping as the film introduces us to Earth in the not too distant future where a lone service robot 'Wall-E' still thriving on solar power, busies himself tidying the entire world of all the industrial waste that's been left behind by us. All of humanity has fled the self made environmental disaster, where nothing green thrives no longer and launch themselves into space aboard the giant Noah's Ark spaceship known as Axiom.
Wall-E gets more than his tidying up garbage programme designed him for when a female robot 'probe driod' visits Earth to look for any signs of organic life. I wont say anymore except that Wall-E goes on an epic intergalactic odyssey that is hilarious, action packed and tear jerking. My only gripe is that some of the mad caper action towards the end went on a little too long and got a little convoluted, but it's a minor quibble for this is an extraordinary technical accomplishment that is a wonder to behold at times.
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