The Chaffey-Bluth Pete’s Dragon is one of the reference points for THE BFG, in which another eighties orphan develops a Spielbergian relationship with a lonely, victimised monster friend adults can’t see, and whose own problems find a solution through the bond between introverts of different species. Roald Dahl probably wasn’t conscious of Disney’s film as a source for his story, but the parallels are striking enough to have evidently struck chords with Spielberg and his late screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who had just made E.T. together when the book came out. The Mathison/Spielberg film version has delicately Spielberged the plot up a bit, giving the BFG a haunted Schindlerian backstory with an earlier human bean he couldn’t save from the jaws of his fellow monsters (“It says look at what you’s done and there be no forgiveness”), and introducing a touch of 1941 to the Daisy Ashford scenes in Buckingham Palace with a round of frobscottle and jet-farting corgis. But at the heart of it is the quintessentially Spielbergian figure of a misfit catcher and mixer of dreams who hears the secret whisperings of the world and faraway music from the stars, and whose bond with human children allows him to help them stand against the darkness and brutality of those who want to consume them. The plot doesn’t quite stretch, and set pieces go on and on with only the most relaxed sense of urgency or destination, but Mark Rylance’s gigantically captured performance is huge with nuance and pathos, and executes Dahl’s language with a Shakespearean sensitivity to the feel and power of words. In box office terms it’s been a bit of a wet whizzpopper, but Spielberg has engaged strongly with the material and its tricky Dahlian switches between silliness, darkness, wonder and warmth.
It’s been a profitable summer for talking-pet family comedies, with the very middling Finding Dory and Secret Life of Pets cleaning up surprisingly well after depositing rather a lot of mess. Not so Barry Sonnenfeld’s NINE LIVES, a bizarre post-postmodern Euroflop for Luc Besson’s production company: a deadpan body-swap kidcom that leans so hard into its own stupidity that three writing teams (the maximum allowed by WGA credits, but it’s a cert there were more) and even its own producers seem to have lost sight of the joke. Kevin Spacey is the latest and most prescient version of post-ironic icon Donald Trump, a narcissistic workaholic property mogul obsessed with a tower with his name on it, and whose daughter has to spend time with him by playing back his appearances on TV. When he tries to do the right thing for her birthday by buying her a kitty from Christopher Walken’s wonder emporium of extremely dubious mogs, he gets trapped in the body of her birthday fluffball Mr Fuzzypants and has to teach himself life lessons in reprioritisation (“Sometimes love means sacrifice. It’s not enough to tell say you love someone; you have to show it”) to avoid being stuck there for the rest of his nine lives.
With Spacey laid up in comatose voiceover (“We’re not seeing any cerebral activity at all”), it’s left to Jennifer Garner and the rest of the family to keep the idiocy afloat, while the film chiefly entertains with a steady stream of lovingly crafted cat-video slapstunts, some of which manage to go viral within the film despite an eerie absence of anyone in the scene actually filming them. But slowly it dawns on you that the film is about itself, and that if you globally replace “cat” with “film” in the dialogue it makes a new and compelling sense where there seemed to be less than none. “A film is not a person … A film doesn’t care if you live and die, just as long as you give it Friskies twice a day … You don’t pick out a film; the film picks you … Films are horrible beasts that would eat you in their sleep for food.” And Spacey is trapped in a ghastly travesty of everything that’s most awful about family films, till he can learn unconditional love for the ghastliness itself: “We’re cold, selfish, and people still love us.” I caught up with it at a Saturday matinee with a birthday outing of a dozen five-to-eight-year-olds, all of whom were in stitches while their mothers sat stonily and tried not to check their phones. Not one of their dads was there, so maybe they were all home wrapping gift kittens in boxes with bombs and probabilistic detonators for a special birthday surprise.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Editorial
Future Interrupted
Time Pieces
Ansible Link
Black Static 54
The Apologists
Extraterrestrial Folk Metal Fusion
Sideways
Three Love Letters From an Unrepeayable Garden
The End of Hope Street
Book Zone
Laser Fodder
Mutant Popcorn
Back Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Editorial
Future Interrupted
Time Pieces
Ansible Link
Black Static 54
The Apologists
Extraterrestrial Folk Metal Fusion
Sideways
Three Love Letters From an Unrepeayable Garden
The End of Hope Street
Book Zone
Laser Fodder
Mutant Popcorn
Back Cover
Interzone #266 - September-October 2016 Page 19