Clown’s back for fright night
JACQUES Tati, Marcel Marceau, The Artist, that weird Benny Hill fixation... the French have a penchant for physical comedy and Thomas Szabo and Hélène Giraud have channelled their national obsession into a wildly imaginative animated series.
Here live-action backdrops and animated insects combine with clever sound design to tell a story without a single line of dialogue.
These characters have been crawling around French TV since 2006 but no prior knowledge is needed to enjoy their second big screen adventure.
This time, the ladybird’s son gets stuck in a cardboard box.As the box is ferried to the airport, his dad flies after him, hitches a ride on the plane and ends up in Guadeloupe. Meanwhile, the ladybird’s ant best friend teams up with an opera-loving spider to launch a rescue mission by tying balloons to a toy galleon.
Pixar fans may miss the quippy dialogue but the adventure is full of humour. Children will be thrilled while older viewers will be bowled over by the animators’ Gallic charm.
THERE are more monsters, more jump scares and a much bigger cast in this sprawling, near-three-hour adaptation of the second half of Stephen King’s killer-clown novel. But while returning director Andy Muschietti crafts a couple of creepy moments, the overall effect is one of overkill. Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) was pretty scary when we saw his demonic eyes peeping out of a storm drain in 2017’s It but the tension plummets every time he pops up in this crushingly repetitive sequel.
The first film, set in the 1980s, was about a gang of troubled teenagers who teamed up to battle a shape-shifting, child-stealing harlequin. Now, 27 years later, they return to their home town of Derry to face him again as messed-up adults. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), the only member of “The Losers’ Club” to remain in Derry, is also the only one who can remember their promise to return home if the clown ever resurfaced.
When It pops up again, Mike calls Bill (James McAvoy), Beverly (Jessica Chastain), Richie (Bill Hader), Eddie (James Ransone), Ben (Jay Ryan) and Stanley (Andy Bean)
who, rather improbably, are all big shots in the city.To defeat him they must return to a childhood haunt, confront an old trauma and retrieve an artefact to use in a killerclown-banishing ritual devised by the local native American tribe.
Hader’s Richie, who is now a famous stand-up, gets the funniest lines but McAvoy’s Bill steals most of the running time. He’s a famous horror writer – and King surrogate – whose novels are being turned into movies.
Every character has a scary encounter where they retrieve an artefact and most of them also get an extended flashback to a terror from their childhood.
The scenes in the 1980s (where they are played by the same child actors from the last film, de-aged by digital trickery) are pointless.They do nothing to advance the plot and as we know they survive to adulthood, they have no sense of peril.
The grown-up scenes are a mixed bag. Jessica Chastain’s encounter with a seemingly harmless old woman is wonderfully staged but McAvoy’s experience in a fairground hall of mirrors must have felt hackneyed when King wrote the novel.As these set-pieces could run in any order, the film feels more like a series of randomly assembled shorts than a coherent
Andy Lea
feature film.And don’t expect to see them brought together in a devastatingly clever finale. It turns out that gag about Bill’s novels is horribly misjudged. DIRECTOR Barnaby Southcombe only needed four actors and one decaying seaside resort to unnerve and intrigue us with his low-budget British drama.
An adaptation of Fiona Evans’ acclaimed play of the same name, this unsettling film follows two teacher-pupil affairs that seem to mirror each other over the course of three days in the North Yorkshire town’s Metropole Hotel.
Nervy Liz (Jodhi May) is in the honeymoon suite with her 16-year-old lover Daz (Jordan Bolger).There’s a similar age gap between art teacher Aiden (Edward Hogg) and Beth (Jessica Barden) who are also enjoying a room with sea view.
By cutting between them and using the same dialogue in the early scenes, Southcombe openly invites us to question how far our moral judgements depend on gender assumptions.
The couples never meet but cross-cutting suggests their paths will eventually cross. The link between them is the film’s biggest surprise. It’s an easy film to admire but a hard one to enjoy.