The Producers

Over the bank holiday, the news reported that Gene Wilder died at the age of 83. Unsurprising news in some ways because of his age, unsurprising also because 2016 continues to mow down all beloved celebrities in its path and it must have been all of 20 minutes since the last one (are you on commission, 2016? Is there a quota??). I digress.

Gene Wilder, to me, is the ethereal eccentric from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and if I'm honest I haven't seen him in much else. Tonight it was suggested that I watch The Producers (1968). Now, 1968 was nearly 50 years ago. The world was a mere two decades out of WW2. People were more repressed, less worldly wise than we are now in 2016.

Or so I thought.

20 minutes into this film and there has been mention of S&M, fetishes, roleplay, cross-dressing and rape. And this is even before a Broadway play is staged in which Nazi stormtroopers goose step around a camp, stoned Hitler while singing "Springtime for Hitler (and Germany)!" in order to con the general public out of a load of cash so the two main Jewish protagonists can run off to Brazil.

No seriously. That's what it's about.  Which begs the following question...

How did this film get made? How did they get away with it? How has this bonkers spectacle not only slipped past the sensibilities of the general public, but also become an Oscar winner (Best Adapted Screenplay), Oscar nominee (Gene Wilder, Best Supporting Actor), be deemed "of significance" by the US Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Library? How? How??

How???

The short answer is that I have no idea. It's not because of the level of fame of the people involved (they weren't that influential at the time). It's not because the public were demanding it. I don't  think filmmakers could get away with it now - the closest thing I can think to compare it to is 2004's Team America, a film that has achieved cult status but I doubt will ever be revered like The Producers. Maybe it was "just one of those things" - a film that hit a zeitgeist at a particular moment, and worked because of a mood or an appetite of the time. Except...that it endures. It reappears again and again in lists of "the greatest film ever".

What can we take away from this story? Closer research tells us that Mel Brooks found the film almost impossible to back until he found a few like minded individuals who believed the following:

"If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win...That's what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."

All of a sudden, 2016 and 1968 don't seem so different.


So if we can't quite explain how it came to be (and I would be interested if anyone can shed a bit more light on this), we move to the lessons we can take from this barmy piece of filmmaking.  And they are universal. 
1.  Point out the ridiculous. Laugh at it. Laughter is arguably more potent and powerful than anger (a theme referenced in Monsters Inc) Particularly where politics is concerned.
2.  Persevere. Make what you want to make and someone will find benefit and use for it. And if they don't, make it anyways for your own benefit..  
A theme Gene Wilder returned to in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:

Come with me and you'll be

In a world of pure imagination

Take a look and you'll see into your imagination

We'll begin with a spin

Traveling in the world of my creation

What we'll see will defy explanation

If you want to view paradise

Simply look around and view it

Anything you want to, do it

Want to change the world?

There's nothing to it

There is no life I know

To compare with pure imagination

Living there you'll be free

If you truly wish to be...

Ah go on.  Might as well get a cuppa and watch this while we're here.

David Brent: Life On The Road

The Office is one of the few programmes that I can’t binge watch for fear of putting my fist through the television screen.  But I saw Alpha Papa (I have similar “cringe” issues with Alan Partridge) and enjoyed it.  Giddy with the success of leaving the cinema screen intact, I went to see David Brent: Life on the Road.

Watched more than one episode of The Office - things went badly for the TV.

Television struggles to make the transition to film – partially because a film has to appeal to fans of the show, while not alienating the people who have never seen it.  What we end up watching is often a feature length episode, wacky hijinks, oodles of cameos (in the vague hope that the audience will be so distracted that we won’t notice there’s no plot).  There also seems to be a more notable divide between critical acclaim and audience response – The Inbetweeners Movie (20121) for example, only has a 54% aggregate rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it set a new record for the most successful opening weekend ever achieved by a comedy film in the UK after grossing £2.5million in its opening day and won a BAFTA for Special Achievement.

More often than not, the television/film crossover takes the main character and plonks them abroad – a fish out of water story without the security blanket of familiar surroundings (The Inbetweeners Movie, Kevin and Perry Go Large (2000), and Absolutely Fabulous (2016).  Not so in the David Brent film.  Its closest comparison is Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013).  A 40-something who has dreams of being famous and believes that the only thing thwarting him is the stupidity of those around him, lacking the self-awareness to understand that the world neither wants nor needs his particular brand of ego.

 

Hello ladies...

The conceit has the potential to be interesting – a film crew are making a follow up to their original documentary and want to catch up with David Brent (Ricky Gervais).  He is no more successful than he was 15 years ago.  Life has been unkind and following a breakdown, admission into “a facility” and ongoing therapy, he’s now a sales rep in (worst of all) an office full of Fincheys.  The women mainly find him repulsive, the men mainly make him the butt of their jokes.  We have no sense of his home life.  There’s no mention of any of the other characters from The Office.  His new plan is to take his band – Foregone Conclusion Part 2 – on tour in an attempt to summon fortune and fame.  

It’s as agonising as usual.  The tour amounts to nothing more than 6 or 7 gigs all within easy driving distance of home, but Brent insists on the full rock and roll lifestyle (all entirely funded by him) including luxury tour buses and hotel rooms.  The band cannot bear to spend any time with him, the gigs are poorly attended.  Brent constantly pushes himself forward to sing unbearable (but well intentioned) songs about Native Americans, disabled people, and terminally ill orphans.

The main issues, however, are these:

·         Stakes: there are none.  We know that David Brent has spent upwards of £20k on this tour and has cashed in a number of private pensions in order to afford this lavish lifestyle.  But nothing rides on this – if this doesn’t work out, he’ll try again later.  Everything’s fine.  So it’s difficult to care too much about whether this plan succeeds or fails.

·         Self awareness: there is none.  The Brent from The Office at least shows moments of self awareness – and these are the moments  that the audience hold on to, to wish better for him (if only so that this will be a little easier to watch and we can stop digging our fingernails into our face).  The Brent from the film just carries on blithely, unaware that when he is being given verbal reprimands by his manager for telling sexist and racist jokes that this is a warning to rein it in.  Unaware that if you have to pay people to come and have a drink with you, they’re not your mates.  Unaware that it’s really not appropriate to ask the only non-white person you know to refer to you as “my nigger”.

·         Salvation: it’s a stretch, really (as are my attempts for alliteration).  After all those cutaways of the band saying that they can’t abide him, after all the interviews with his colleagues saying that they know he’s going to fail, the film ends where they all like him.  It feels like a step gets cut out.  Brent doesn’t change, but everyone starts to like him for no reason.

That said:

David Brent is a horrific comedy character, and my hands bear the marks of where I tried to gnaw off my own fists while watching this film.  However I don’t want bad things to happen him.  I don’t want him to succeed (it would be no good if he achieved all is dreams of fame and fortune), but likewise I don’t want him to lose, stuck forever being crushed by the Fincheys of this world.  And that must be testament to the writing of the character. 

Conclusions:

There’s a better film in here somewhere, and it would only take minor (though significant) tweaks.   I wonder if it misses the influence of Stephen Merchant (notably absent from the writing credits).  And Brent – love him or loath him – always provokes a reaction, which is a kind of a win.  There were a lot of horrified laughs from the audience when I was at the cinema which is still a positive response in itself.  But, like David Brent, the film isn’t a winner.  But neither is it an out and out loser.  It has its redeeming features.  You just have to really look for them.

Ghostbusters

I really liked this film. Really liked this film. It’s not a masterpiece, it didn't change my life. It doesn’t deserve some of the criticism it has received though, so this is a few of my thoughts in response to some of the criticisms.

Criticism 1: It’s not as good as the original. This is an odd one, because those people who tend to make this statement tend to be the same age category as me, meaning they were kids when Ghostbusters first came out. Now when I was 9 (when GB came out), I wasn’t particularly skilled in cinematic criticism, identifying plot devices or narrative structures. I wanted to be entertained, and be able to play at ‘being’ those characters afterwards – a fairly simple requirement that GB delivered to me when I eventually watched it on video (about 2 years later – those crazy 80s times of having to actually wait for a video release!). So when people are saying ‘this film isn’t as good as the original’ I wonder how many of them are feeling this because they can’t go out and pretend to be a Ghostbuster (aside from men when they ‘cross the streams’). Their memories of GB mean that no remake could ever be as good as the original because the original film is bound up in memories of childhood and therefore becomes so much more than a film. When those of us that saw GB for the first time in the 1980s, we’re watching the new GB as adults, often with children, most definitely with commitments, worries, stresses etc. This GB could never hope to be what the original was, because effectively, we are different people.

Criticism 2: They’re women. Yes they are. As none of the roles require penises or back hair, there’s no reason why they can’t be. But what I particularly loved about the new GB was the fact that there wasn’t a focus on the characters as women – just as there wasn’t a focus in the original of the fact that they were men – they just were. Yes, there was the odd comment about clothing, but it would be odd if there wasn’t; some women do care about clothing and have particular ideas about dress, just as some men do too. There was no ‘yay, Girl Power’ as part of the film, which I loved as it just means that women are doing stuff that’s perfectly normal, it’s no big deal.

Criticism 3: The black character wasn’t a scientist. Well no, she wasn’t. Neither was Winston in the original GB, so if you want a remake to be close to the original, then accept this. But more importantly, films do reflect some kind of social reality. The (very sad) fact of the matter is that it is far more likely that a black woman in the US will be working on the subway, rather than being a professor in some form of hard science at a university. Even in the UK, out of the 83,000 science, engineering and technology professors, only 83 are black. Add female into the mix, and the number drops down to around 20 (see the Times Higher Education ). But, lack of professorship aside, it is Patti who brings the team together and importantly, she has the knowledge of the city that the others do not have that helps them save the day.

I thought the film was great. I’m not out playing, pretending to be a Ghostbuster, but perhaps the 9 year old me would have seen those women and thought ‘I can do that - science isn’t just for boys' or ‘it’s OK to stand up for myself, it's OK to be confident about my skills’ or ‘I want a cat called Michael Hat’. 

Ghostbusters

I haven't seen the 1984 version for many years but remember it being a joy.

I'd say this reboot is a success but not a huge one. I was in a fairly empty cinema for an early showing but the people who were there were laughing and there was plenty of female laughter. I thought there were too many nods to the old movie and maybe it could have been more original in some ways but glad that Spud made an appearance. As with the latest Star Trek movie I was frustrated by having to view all those fx in 2D  and have considered rewatching both movies in 3D. Well, the 2D viewings are freebies and I have one more freebie to use, thanks Nectar points.

The most entertaining people in the movie were Chris Hemsworth playing a comic idiot and Kate McKinnon as the most eccentric and weird of the Ghostbusters. Melissa McCarthy was solid in the lead and  Kristen Wiig a little dull in support. I feel somewhat spoilt for really funny females with Big Bang Theories' brilliant Mayim Bialik, Christine Baranski and Laurie Metcalf and the also very funny Melissa Rauch and Kaley Cuoco. Hey, maybe Ferrari, Prady, and Lorre should have written this movie and cast them all in it.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't made any difference, except to the prejudiced, whether they used men or women for the parts of the new Ghostbusters. The movie is probably a bit too nostalgic while feeling the need to explain e.g. where they got the car and the suits, and I feel that's not necessary in such a comic book universe unless the explanations were funnier. Glad to see Sigourney Weaver if very briefly and Bill Murray playing a professional sceptic although I failed to recognise some of the other original actors in their cameos. Do wait until the end of the credits as there is a little bit more to see.

Tallulah

The other day I decided to watch Tallulah (written and directed by Sian Heder) for the first time because I think Ellen Page is great and that’s about the only reason why. Also it’s a Netflix original and they seem to be quite good. Anyway, I’m going to write about it.

It's a fairly new film (having premiered only a few weeks ago), and in the 2016 fashion of making films that are actually about things other than men doing manly things, this film is about women (*trumpet sounds*), and sees Juno’s Ellen Page and Allison Janney reunited as a kind of mother and daughter-in-law duo. It also sees a mainly all-female cast, is directed by a real human woman (hurrah!), and every one of the characters is different. Ellen Page’s character, the eponymous Tallulah, is a carefree gypsy-esque youngster who lives in a van, and impulsively decides to rescue a small child. Margo, played by Allison Janney, is a mother and wife who has recently been abandoned by both husband and child, and is unsure of how losing both happened. Tammy Blanchard’s character Carolyn is a dissatisfied drunken mother who has never been alone with her child before until the night she and Tallulah met. The three become intertwined over Carolyn’s 1 year old, Maddison.

Page and Jenney looking the same age as they did in Juno, 9 freaking years ago.

The storyline’s fairly predictable, but that doesn’t matter – it’s predictable because it’s entirely plausible. Because of said plausibility, the scenarios and characters are incredibly easy to empathise with – which is impressive since the main story arc is wrapped around motherhood, and I have very little desire to be a mother. An objective point of view from someone who hasn't see the film, might find it easy to think it’s irritating (hell - even boring) that a film about women is also about motherhood, but it isn’t like *that*. The women aren’t defined by their motherhood. Certainly, the concept of what it is to be a mother – and a good one - plays a huge role in the film, but the character’s lives are not hinged by it. They feasibly exist without it, which is another reason why this film is actually quite excellent.

Heder’s writing effortlessly allows for the characters to be very real and show their dynamism. Tallulah at one point recounts the story about her own mother that led to her reckless lifestyle, and she divulges: “I think it’s better not to be needed”. The film’s full of moments like that one, yet it’s not cringe-worthy or cliché. Tallulah doesn't ask for anyone to take something away from the film - you can enjoy it as a piece of entertainment, or you can take what you want from it. Though there is something to be learned from both Page’s and Janney’s characters that is left to some degree for the viewer to interpret.

The film leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy. Again, objectively, the ending would seem kind of simple, but it doesn't matter how the film ends. What matters is how the characters feel. And, you get the idea that they're going to be okay, which is all you could ask for from an empathy evoking film. It's well shot, well directed, well acted, and well written. Apparently, the story is based on Sian Heder's experiences of being a babysitter, and I've found that it is always obvious when writers are writing about what they know about. Heder clearly knows what she's writing about, and that is all you could ask for. Anyway, it's a great film and I'll stop gushing over it now. It's been a while since I saw a film like Tallulah, and I hope it's not too long before I see another one.

Suicide Squad

As previously established, I love films.  I love going to the cinema.  Tonight I went to the cinema to watch a film - ah, two of my great loves combined, yes?

No.

Tonight I went to see Suicide Squad.

I had thought, based on the trailer and the hype, that this might be DCs equivalent of Deadpool - a darkly comic super hero film.  The antidote to the dark, brooding noir of Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise, and the angst of the Spiderman saga.  We seem to be moving to a lighter, frothier superhero age - Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool (oh, I've said that already).  The premise is simple - what if there's comic book film based entirely based on a group of bad guys.  We love the bad guys, don't we?  Heath Ledger's Joker won him a posthumous Oscar, Tom Hiddleston's Loki won him a legion of fans - he was more popular than some of the actual heroes.  So the logic makes sense - surely we'll go nuts for Suicide Squad?

I loved a talking stick, for crying out loud

So a cast is assembled.  And it's an impressive cast.  I count a couple of Oscar winners and nominees - Viola Davis, Will Smith, Jared Leto, Ben Affleck.  I have no issues with this cast - they act their socks off.  Margot Robbie is a complete scene stealer, and Harley Quinn's relationship with the Joker is a complicated and fascinating thing to behold.

And it's got to be attention grabbing.  Which it is.  This film looks fantastic.  Punkish, sleazy, stylised and beautiful.  It's visually arresting.  And the soundtrack is fantastic - featuring The Rolling Stones, Eminem, the White Stripes, Grace and Skrillex (side note: decent soundtracks are really making a comeback, aren't they?  I digress.)

Brilliant - let's sort the plot.  "No!" laughs David Ayer, the writer and director.  Clearly a man who has heard the saying that the majority of communication is expressed through visual and auditory non verbal means, and that only a tiny fraction of what we actually say should be heeded.  And found it deeply profound.  And decided not to put a plot in his film.

So let's look at the characters:

I have just finished watching these characters for

2 hours and couldn't tell you the names or motivations

of half of them.

The first 20 minutes is Viola Davis spelling out who everybody is and why they're bad.  And then a lot of information is flashed up on screen and disappears again almost instantly.  It's like a terrible Powerpoint presentation.  And then after she's completed her massive info-dump, we get shown it all again in flashback.  The plan is to use them as disposable assets for the US government.  The US government is understandably dubious, and rightly so because this plan goes almost instantly wrong and Enchantress is released, who hatches a plan to...take over the world...with her brother...(ah pants, didn't introduce him.  Crowbar him in, quickly!)...so that they can...do...something.  No idea.  Sorry.

We meet Deadshot, played sympathetically by Will Smith.  He quickly demonstrates that he is Not A Bad Guy, and may as well have been playing his character from Wild, Wild West.  Margot Robbie plays Harley Quinn, and is an absolute scene stealer as well as the closest thing this film has to nuanced.  [Peeve: she (and everyone else) is repeatedly referred to as "psychotic", when they actually remain in complete awareness of reality at all times.]  Then there's everybody else.  They're just there, really.  Katana gets shoved into the film halfway through as an afterthought.  As if a team of 8 new people wasn't enough to get your head round.

Some very poorly explained things happen and a lot of things blow up for 2 hours.  It seems like a lot longer.  At the end some people win.  As an audience member, you are not one of them.

I was discussing this with one of my friends who said "what do you expect - it's a comic book adaptation.  That's what they're like."  But I disagree.  Television has brought us Jessica Jones and Daredevil, which deal with complex characters and issues with nuance and subtlety.  "The Avengers Model" proved that audiences will buy into the long game - introducing one character per film for a couple of years, so that when they all came together that world was richer, vibrant, and full of characters that we'd already been hanging out with.  And understood.

So maybe this is what Suicide Squad should have tried - a film with Deadshot, a film with Harley Quinn, a film with Killer Croc, and then bring them all together for Suicide Squad.  Problem: back stories tend to neuter bad guys somewhat.  Hallowe'en is scary because we don't understand Michael Myers.  Unless you watch the 2007 remake, in which we understand what motivates Michael Myers and instantly stop fearing him.  Plan B: make films in which the characters in Suicide Squad are the villains, so at least we know a little more about them, who they are and what makes them tick.  So that when Slipknot appears on screen, we need little more than a prompt to remember who he is.

This image looks great on film.  Close up, they

look like Barbie Dolls.



The script is wafer thin, full of clichés upon clichés (example: "I'll accept the consequences" "I am your consequences").  The whole thing is a meme, the characters will become great fancy dress fodder.  But so far they aren't great characters.  To paraphrase, this film is "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I got that from a book...

The Films That Pull You In

"There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place"

                                                                                                                                                                                - J. K. Rowling

I was debating how to start with this whole blogging malarkey – I’ve never done it before but when my sister asked if I wanted to take part in ‘Girls on Film’ it seemed like a good idea.  I thought about films I had seen recently, films I had liked and not liked, but instead, for the first post, I have gone for something a bit more general.  I want to talk about films that give us The Feels.

Now I don’t necessarily mean films that make us cry (although some of them might make the list) or films that make us want to be better people and live more meaningful lives.  I’m talking about those films that you’d be quite happy to sit back down and watch again straight away.  Films you lose yourself in.  Films that everyone you know must watch now, this very minute, why aren’t you watching it yet???  Films that, when they end, you are startled to find that you were not a character in that story, and you do in fact live in a different reality to the one you have been inhabiting for the past 90 minutes or so.

Quite frankly, I tend to get this immersive feeling a little more from books, possibly because reading is a solitary experience, and there are less people around to remind you of your reality.  When reading a good book, I do feel like I’m dragging myself out of the story every time I put the book down.  I get this less with films, but there are a few that stick in my mind, and it’s a bit of an eclectic mix to be honest.

Up

I love this film.  I saw this film (for about the 10^th time) with my husband the day we got engaged.  I recommended this film to my mum as soon as I’d seen it the 1^st time in the cinema, and she texted from the cinema saying ‘I thought you said this film was happy!!’  Every time I watch it, I have forgotten just how devastatingly it begins, and I never have enough tissues nearby.  And every time I watch it I am filled with incredible joy when the balloons lift Carl’s house.

Baaaallllooooooonnnsssss!  Sorry, wrong film...

Inside Out

I have only seen this film once.  I really must buy it and watch it again, as I do think most films improve on repeated viewing (my husband does not understand the need to re-watch things again and again and again – surely it can’t just be me?).  I watched this in the cinema and was practically sobbing out loud by the end of it.  Many tissues were used.  And thinking about a previous post on this blog, does it count as a coming of age film?  I think so.  Different perhaps to the usual but I believe it counts.

Stardust

I wondered if my love of this film was just for Captain Shakespeare but I actually really like all the characters in this.  I think it’s very well written and has some very excellent and clever scenes in it.  A bit different from the last 2 on the list, but I came out of the cinema after seeing this thinking it was the best film I had seen in a very long time (admittedly though I can’t remember what films I had been watching immediately prior to this).

Google 'Captain Shakespeare' and you get this.  Not quite what I had in mind!

Finding Neverland

Again, I remember coming out of the cinema thinking what a good film this was.  And also weeping.  I cry very easily at films.  Not entirely sure what it is about this one that I like so much.  Probably the mixture of reality and fantasy.

Admittedly this emotional scene has lost some of its punch since it became popular meme fodder

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

This is the exception to the rest of the list in that I will probably not watch this one again.  And I didn’t see it in the cinema (the rest I did – I wonder if this is part of the reason I found them so immersive?  It would make sense, given that you can get much more immersed in the story when at the cinema when compared to watching at home, where there are more distractions, and more of a tendency to talk or pause the film, and thus disturbing the flow of the story?)  Anyway, I digress.  I shouldn’t have liked this film.  I don’t really like Steve Carell and Keira Knightley’s pouting can annoy me, but there was something about this odd pairing that worked for me.  I think though it was more the story-line.  The story of an oncoming apocalypse told from the point of view of 2 ordinary people, rather than from the point of view of the important people trying to prevent the oncoming doom.  It made it more real to me in a way that Armageddon (terrible, terrible film) and Deep Impact (which I really like) didn’t quite manage to do.  Although there is much of the film I don't really remember, it made it all rather too real, and pretty devastating to be honest, and when the film finished I was very glad to come back to reality to discover that the world was not about to end and I wasn’t about to die imminently.  Which is why I probably won’t watch it again – I like not feeling like I am about to die imminently.

So there you go, a brief foray into blogging, and more specifically a quick look at films that have drawn me in.  Most of these films I could watch again and again and again, although I do find that it’s never quite the same when you know what’s going to happen next – the immersion into the story isn’t quite as total as that first viewing.  This list is by no means exhaustive, but they are the ones that stick in my mind, at least at the moment.  I’d be very interested to hear which films have drawn in other people – I suspect that the list would be very different for each person.

When you wish upon a star...

Disney animation has always been a staple part of my upbringing. If I think hard about my
childhood, I remember (amongst other things) Christmases involving a new packet of VHS blank
tapes, upon which as many Disney feature films were recorded as the holiday season would allow.
To this day, I expect certain films to pause for the adverts, Alice in Wonderland to be immediately
preceded by the Queen’s Speech, and Mary Poppins to cut out part way through from where the
plug got knocked out of the VCR mid-recording.

So it should come as no surprise that my first trips to the cinema were to watch Disney films. The
first film I saw – certainly the first I remember seeing - was Pinocchio. I can’t quite work out when
this would have been – the internet suggests it was in 1984 but given that would have meant I was 2,
I’m not sure that’s right. Disney’s standard procedure for theatrical release was that a film would be
released in the cinema, and then rereleased once every 10 years or so. Every so often, there would
be an announcement that something was being screened for the final time. Which seems like a very alien concept in 2016.

Pinocchio was first released in 1940, and is the second animation produced by Disney (and the first
ever Disney animation to be released on VHS). It won two Oscars (Best Music – Original Score, Best
Music – Original Song) but was initially a commercial disaster until its rereleases. It’s now regarded
as one of the greatest animated films ever, as evidenced by its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, its
inclusion on a number of lists of “Best Film”, and its ongoing storytelling legacy (lies make your nose grow, your conscience is a physical entity with corporeal form). Its Oscar winning song (When You Wish Upon a Star) is currently the opening music to every Disney (and Pixar) film, and in my brain may as well be the shorthand for “you’re about to see something absolutely fantastic”.

This makes me so happy.  Every time.

Which of course I cared deeply about when my age was still in single digits.

I assume I must have gone with my parents – definitely my dad. And I definitely had a Mr Man Mr
Strong strawberry ice lolly. And I definitely dropped it on my cinema seat and spent most of the film
sitting on the armrest while it melted. I do remember the smell of the cinema, which hasn’t changed
that much in all my cinema-going years (warm popcorn). That an episode of The Wuzzles was shown before the film, that…hold on, actually, let’s take a moment and talk about The Wuzzles. It was a series of short cartoons about creatures which were made out of combinations of different animals.  Like Rhiokey, which was an amalgamation of a Rhinoceros and a Monkey. I loved The Wuzzles. They lived on the imaginatively named island of Wuz, and they all had wings, although not all of them flew. I loved Butterbear (part Butterfly, part Bear) and Bumblelion (part Bee, part Lion – because these are all animals that needed splicing together?). I cannot remember the theme tune, but YouTube helpfully informs me that it sounded like this:

                                    It rings absolutely no bells for me, but sings happily about

               “originality…living with a split personality”. No one ever remembers the Wuzzles…

I’ve become distracted by YouTube videos of 80s cartoons. This was a mistake…

I rewatched Pinocchio last year and was surprised by the following things:

a) How quickly it zips along
It really packs a lot into 88 minutes. Yet I distinctly remember there being a break halfway
through the film (I got my doomed Mr Strong ice lolly from the usherette). Why was there a
break in a film that was less than an hour and a half long? Hmm…

b) It’s a beautiful piece of work
And worth remembering that people drew it. By hand. Frame by frame. That’s a skill I can
never hope to achieve.

      Look at that.  It's fantastic.

c) It’s TERRIFYING!
Ah Disney – so light, so fluffy, so innocent and sweet. The first time Pinocchio leaves the
house, he gets kidnapped by a talking fox who sells him into slavery to a travelling showman
who locks him in a cage, refuses to pay him, and threatens to turn him into firewood if he
talks back.

After Pinocchio escapes, the same fox trafficks him to Pleasure Island where unruly boys are
encouraged to drink beer, smoke cigars, break windows and play pool (not really sure why
pool is a big deal, but okay then). And when they do, they turn into donkeys and are sold.
The transformation in this is frightening. The undercurrent of it all is horrific (the Coachman
strips the clothes off the donkeys who can no longer speak, and sells them on. The boys
who look like donkeys but can still speak are separated out – WHAT HAPPENS THEM???)

Take a moment, watch this, think about the youngest child you know and remember that this is a scene from a "U" rated film...

After Pinocchio escapes that, he discovers his father has gone looking for him, and been
swallowed by a whale. So he rescues his father and then dies in the attempt.

He DIES! Dead! Yes, he becomes a real boy, but not before his father brings him home lays
him out, and he, Pinocchio’s conscience and the family pets cry over his disfigured corpse.
At this point, all his father had ever wished for was for Pinocchio to become a real boy. And
as soon as he went into the real world, nothing is safe for Pinocchio again.

There are FIVE bad guys (Honest John, Gideon, Stromboli, the Coachman and Monstro).
FIVE! There is trafficking, slavery, and abuse. And all of them get away with it. There is no
retribution, there is no comeuppance. We believe Disney sells happy ever after, but it’s
more sinister than that – it’s only happy ever after for some.

And suddenly that Oscar winning song is so much more ominous when you consider that all
the characters must wish…

“When you wish upon a star

Makes no difference who you are

Anything your heart desires will come to you.

When your heart is in your dreams

No request is too extreme

When you wish upon a star as dreamers do…”