Blogfromthebarn

Movie Review - The Fantastic Mr Fox



There's an old chum of mine (let's call him Charles, that being his name), who would go to a multiplex and just go into the next film that was showing, no matter what it was, believing that this random selection process presented him, sometimes, with quality movie offerings he'd otherwise have missed. His delight with random selection was less obvious when forced to live with some of my bidding decisions at bridge but that's a whole different bed of nails. Anyway, I prefer to make my own movie choices, Mrs Stuffy permitting (obviously).

Howsoever, ChaCha and I found ourselves with a couple of hours to kill recently and thus ambled, with no particular aim in mind, into the new Vue cinema in Newbury. The first movie that met our timescales was the Fantastic Mr Fox and having waited for the noisome swarm of baffled and bewildered in-bred halfwits to clear from the amazingly simple self-service booking machines we purchased a couple of seats, some revolting nachos and settled down, with few expectations, to watch this adaption of the Roald Dahl story.

It is a fantastic film in many senses, it's not, in my view, a kids film although ChaCha did enjoy it enormously, it is a very grown up, quite surreal approach to telling a very silly story in a captivating, engaging and totally different way. Using stop-action animation in a jerky, yet wierdly slick way puts it in a very different place to the, now commonplace, smoothly animated CGI offerings and the sharp edges of the story, the sharp edges of the script and the sharpness and detail of the model-making puts it miles away from Aardman's smoother, softer productions.

It was for me , a delight, a very different delight, a "we've a couple of hours let's go see a movie" surprising delight, go see it, then see it again to see the stuff you missed, and if you can explain how the wolf fits in I'll be eternally grateful to you.

A fantastic haiku ?


Fur and feathers fight
sharp surreal story takes flight
a delight, with bite

posted by Stuffy @ 4:50 pm