Pinocchio grows a lot scarier than you’d imagine
PINOCCHIO ★★★★✩
(PG, 124 mins)
Director: Matteo Garrone
Stars: Federico Ielapi, Roberto Benigni, Massimo Ceccherini, Marine Vacth
BABYTEETH ★★★★✩
(15, 118 mins)
Director: Shannon Murphy
Stars: Eliza Scanlen, Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis, Toby Wallace
SPREE ★★✩✩✩
(15, 93 mins)
Director: Eugene Kotlyarenko Stars: Joe Keery, Sasheer Zamata, David Arquette, Mischa Barton
IF YOU want to get a sense of how the idea of childhood has changed over the years, take another look at Disney’s Pinocchio. In 1940, the top kiddies’ film featured d children being locked in cages, turned into screaming donkeys and sold into slavery.
At least the little tykes get a break in Pleasure Island.
After what Walt put them through, you can hardly blame them for sucking down cigars and getting hammered on hooch.
It turns out this is tame e stuff compared to what was considered childappropriate in the 1880s.
Director Matteo Garrone makes no concessions to the delicate little flowers of today with his astonishing new live-action Pinocchio. This is the dark, gothic fantasy about the wooden boy that hardy Italian kids have been reared on since Carlo Collodi’s book was published in 1883.
This time, the bit where Pinocchio (an oaky-faced Federico Ielapi) gets brutally hanged from a tree makes the cut. As does the scene where he hurls a hammer into the face of an annoying talking cricket... although I always thought he was asking for it in the Disney version.
There are no songs and only one hooter-growing scene. After he stops telling porkies to the Blue Fairy (Alida Baldari Calabria), his nose gets whittled back down to size by a flock of woodpeckers.
The creatures, mostly created with costumes and prosthetics from double Oscar-winner Mark Coulier, range from the delightfully whimsical to the mildly terrifying.
Pinocchio himself is far from cutesy.
His expressive eyes are stuck in a stiff, expressionless face that makes him look both human and eerily otherworldly. I got a similar sensation from the judging panel on the last series of The X Factor.
Still, per perhaps modern kids are more r resilient than we think. This went down very well in Italy before Christmas and a the very slickly d dubbed English version, which features the heavily accented voices of the original cast, could be a minor post-lockdown hit.
Realism is a tradition of Italian cinema and Garrone Ga honours this by shooting sho his gothic fantasy fan in the grimy streets stre of rural Italy.
Here, his journey to enlightenment (and real boyhood) is about poverty as well as morality. Geppetto (Oscar-winner Roberto Benigni) is an impoverished carpenter who carves him out of a magical wooden log.
When he comes alive, he erupts with paternal pride and sells his clothes so he can buy him a spelling book and send him to school.
But Pinocchio’s ordeal begins when he skips class to watch a puppet show and ends up kidnapped by a circus master. Other trials include facing an exasperated gorilla judge, being swallowed by a sea monster and almost being buried alive by rabbit undertakers. The cricket only pops up occasionally to tell him to listen to his father. The Blue Fairy is more prominent but she only offers to make him human very late in the film. It’s a tad overlong but the ending is genuinely touching.
Pinocchio becomes a real boy when he finally thinks about the feelings of his old man. Like generations of Italians, he has been scared into behaving himself.
On paper, Babyteeth sounds like a gruelling experience too. Like The Fault In Our Stars, Everything, Everything and Midnight Sun, this is a tear-jerking romance about a young couple kept apart by an ugly disease. But Shannon Murphy’s debut, a multiple winner at this year’s socially distanced film festivals, isn’t your typical teen weepie.
Here, the details of our heroine’s illness are kept off-screen so we can concentrate on a messy family drama.
Milla (Eliza Scanlen) is a 16-year-old who is undergoing treatment that will soon require her to wear a wig.
She isn’t the only one on medication. Her pianist mother Anna (Essie Davis) is suppressing her anguish with tranquillisers doled out by psychiatrist father Henry (Ben Mendelsohn).
Then Milla runs into Moses (Toby Wallace), a face-tattooed, drug-addicted, homeless 23-year-old. When the unwashed youngster sweetly attends to her nosebleed on a train platform, sparks fly. Milla needs some excitement and invites Moses home for tea.
Obviously, this doesn’t go down very well. To Anna and Henry, a cocky tramp with one eye on their daughter and another on their silverware is a brand new nightmare.
But to Milla, he represents something else. Is he a knight in shining armour? A fellow lost soul? True love?
Rita Kalnejais’s clever script and Scanlen’s soulful performance ask us to fill in the gaps.
Spree is one of those indie films that makes a low budget work for it. Here, the set-up precludes the need for a big crew or expensive sets.
Most of the action is being captured live by Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keerey), a social media obsessed mini-cab driver who has wired his car up with tiny cameras.
Keery (the big-haired kid from Stranger Things) raises a few laughs by revealing an edge of desperation behind Kurt’s cheery online persona. Then he starts live-streaming himself butchering his passengers and the film hits a dead end.