Well, what a film! Like most of Terry Gilliam’s other films, for example Time Bandits, Imaginarium takes place in a world that is something like the real world, but a real world in which, just around the corner somewhere, there is a doorway to an entirely different reality. In this case, the doorway is a large mirror-frame with a couple of sheets of reflective plastic giving the appearance of a mirror, except it is possible to plunge through, pushing between the two sheets, and enter the world of the plunger’s imagination… I’m going to refer to this device as a mirror from now on, to keep it short!

Well, the world entered is not exactly the world of the plunger’s imagination: it is mediated by Doctor Parnassus, an ancient monk now living the life of a fairground attraction. Customers are invited to take the plunge and see what they find. As he describes it, he is a facilitator, allowing people to see dreamlike imaginary worlds. The worlds they see are not entirely free-form. Instead, what they see is based upon their fantasies: greedy people see get-rich-quick schemes, romantic people see flowery worlds, and so on. But it is not so simple. They also are presented with choices, and the what they choose determines whether they (or their souls) become the Devil’s property or are freed. When they choose the lazy, the easiest options, they are doomed. For really bad people it appears to be possible to be doomed anyway, in fact, as the character Tony is smart enough to choose the harder way but still doesn’t get away with things. But then, perhaps he didn’t actually choose the harder way, as he was being chased by a mob at the time…

So the film is a metaphor for the way we live our lives. As it is in the Imaginarium, where most plungers (as I’m going to call them) didn’t really understand the choices they were making and the consequences that would flow from those choices, so it is in real life too, where most of us fail to notice how much of what happens in our lives flows from the largely unconscious choices we have previously made: the easy, the lazy, the simple choices, tend to lead to a downward spiral of more and more hassle. Just one more doughnut won’t hurt… And, as in real life too, most people are really not interested in taking the plunge and possibly improving their lives. Most people are more interested in getting drunk down at the pub, or shopping, or money, or basically anything other than improving themselves. The difficulty Doctor Parnassus has in finding souls to save mirrors the blind way most of humanity seems to live.

Well, I haven’t said much about the story-line of the film, and perhaps I don’t really need to. It is a fairy-tale of sorts, with Doctor Parnassus and the Devil being the main protagonists. They both seem to me to represent forces of Nature rather than being actual humans. The Devil in particular, a quirky fellow with a New York accent, a black suit, bowler hat, and a liking for cigarillos, does not choose the most evil path all the time. Instead, he plays very strictly by the rules, only accepting souls that have freely chosen their doom. He reflects very nicely the ultimate neutrality of the Universe: we choose, we get the consequences. There is no favouritism. In real life there can be luck, perhaps. Doctor Parnassus doesn’t believe in coincidence though, so perhaps in the fantasy world, luck doesn’t count: the world reflects the plunger’s nature 100%. In real life, perhaps, the ratio is more like 80:20 - it is possible to be dealt a very bad hand of cards, after all, and some people seem to have all the luck. But mostly, real life is more of a mixture. Even so, our choices do make a difference some of the time, and I suppose the film is emphasising it. I don’t think I need to say much about the acting either: I have no complaints.
So, do I like this film? Of course I do. If you hate thoughtful, quirky, metaphorical, fantastical and fun films, give this one a miss. Me, I give it 9 out of 10.

It is getting increasingly rare to find genuine science-fiction movies these days: most turn out to be action-thrillers in a sci-fi setting instead. However Director Duncan Jones’ “Moon” (2009) turns out to be the real hardcore stuff, for once. It reminded me both of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Oddyssey” and Douglas Trumbull’s “Silent Running”.
Why? Because it depicts a lone astronaut, Sam Bell, admirably played by Sam Rockwell, manning a moonbase and troubleshooting things when the automated mining machines break down. He is assisted by a robot, Gerty, whose voice (Kevin Spacey) is remarkably similar to that of the dangerous computer HAL in 2001. I couldn’t help but be suspicious of Gerty as a result, and it turns out I was both correct and incorrect… Spacey’s Gerty had me wondering throughout the whole movie.

Moon (2009) Trailer

Because of the setting, actor Sam Rockwell has to carry the entire movie, and he succeeds brilliantly. Other actors appear in video messages and the like, but for the most part, it is just him, on his own, 250,000 miles from Earth and looking forward to getting home at the end of his three-year contract. And going a little space-crazy… or is he?

With only two weeks to go, he takes a buggy out of the base to fix a mining machine that has gone wrong, but gets involved in a collision and ends up trapped in the buggy. He falls unconscious.

And wakes up back in the moonbase. Gerty is reviving him… but now there are two of him…

From there, things start to get complicated… so I’ll leave the spoilers out: you can watch the movie.

What is the film about, exactly? True science-fiction is basically subversive, in that it looks at features present in society and projects them into a future world to see what is wrong (or right) with them. In this case, the film is looking at corporate greed and (without mentioning it) the legislation that currently makes it compulsory for companies to look after the bottom line ahead of all other values, such as, when this goes too far, human life. As with many movies these days, the company regards Sam as expendable, but the multi-layered depth of that expendability in this case comes as a big shock as the plot slowly unfolds. Having said that, there is some hope at the end: it isn’t all bad news. I like happy endings, although the other sort tend to have more impact, I’ll admit. The ending of this film is mixed, which is perhaps more realistic.

This is a slow-moving, cerebral movie. If you want action, look elsewhere. If you want 93 minutes of proper sci-fi, however, this is the place to look. The film had a low budget of just US$5,000,000 and just about broke even at the box office due to lack of proper distribution by Sony. Probably, it will more than double this with DVD sales and syndications. I hope so. Action movies are good fun, of course, but a bit of thinking now and then is good for you. I’ll give this movie 7/10, knocking a bit off as it is, yes, a little slow, but I didn’t get bored or tired watching it. Far from it.

Director and writer Christopher Nolan came up with a great idea for this sci-fi movie. It is set in a world in which espionage is done by slipping into people’s dreams and influencing their subconscious minds directly (a bit like advertising, some cynics might say). A good idea, and quite a watchable film, but what could have been a great movie ends up being only OK. The execution suffers from the same weaknesses Christopher Nolan has displayed in other films of his, for example The Dark Knight.

st of all, it suffers from too much realism. Most of it is supposed to be happening in people’s dreams, yet apart from the odd bit where the ground heaves up (which was also entirely incidental to the plot and not repeated after the one occasion it happens), the dream worlds are almost entirely anything but surrealistic. They could be happening outside your front door right now. Surely people’s dreams (going by my crazy night-creations, anyway) should be quite fantastic, fluid and with a weird logic all their own, such as the magical worlds depicted so brilliantly in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus? But no, these could be any city, anywhere, complete with all the hassle, clutter and obstacles of everyday life. The Director did the same thing in The Dark Knight, imagining Gotham City using modern-day Chicago: a complely ordinary, even boring, setting. Compare this with Tim Burton’s vision of Gotham in his movies and you will see what I mean.

re were problems with consistency too, especially as DiCaprio’s character Cobb kept breaking his own rules. The usual Hollywood rebel character maybe? No, I think it’s just an excuse for bad writing. Sure, in real life, rules have to be bent now and then if things are to get done, but it becomes a bit tiresome when the heroes always do it, and when it is logically unnecessary anyway.

Philosophically speaking, the film is asking the age-old question: how do you know if you are awake right now, or if you are dreaming this life? Well, one clue I have given above is that real dreams are more chaotic and less mundane than everyday life, but that doesn’t apply in this film, of course.  In the film, the characters carry a ‘totem’ - an object that they know and understand very well, so they can watch its behaviour closely and determine if it is behaving properly or not and thereby tell if they are dreaming or not. In Cobb’s case, it is a little spinning top. As it turns out, this is his dead wife’s totem, in fact, and that has implications for the meaning of the very last scene in the film, which I will not spoil by telling you about it here. But you will have to have your head working when you watch it as you can easily miss what it implies…

Cobb’s wife is dead because she killed herself, convinced that this was indeed a dream world. In the film, killing yourself is the only way to make yourself wake up, so she did. Cobb is guilty about this as he planted the idea in her subconscious mind that she needed to wake up from a previous dream life they had shared for many years - only the idea persisted into this life. As a result she becomes something of a villain in the dreams of whoever’s mind he infiltrates, because his own subconscious guilt projects her into the other person’s dreams along with whatever Cobb is trying to do consciously there. These ideas are all very interesting and are pursued pretty plainly in the plot.

There is rather a lot of verbal explanation of what is going on (rather than showing things visually), but with such a complex plot involving dreams within dreams, perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. It was in fact quite hard to follow the nesting dreams and action, but if you’re paying attention, I think it all hangs together in the end. Some of the fight scenes were a bit hard to follow too, as I couldn’t make out who was who some of the time - the camera didn’t show people’s faces long enough for me to keep track of them as they booted each other about the rooms, especially as most characters were wearing pretty dull business suits. It was clear who won in the end, of course.

Ellen Page did a good job as a university student co-opted onto the team to be Cobb’s dream architect (designing the dreams before they plunge into them), and DiCaprio himself seemed convincing enough in his role given the flatness of the writing. I don’t really have any complaints about the other actors either; their characters were a bit under-explored, perhaps. But then, the film was long enough already, at 2 hours 12 minutes (on the DVD version that I have). I have not watched the special features yet, so can’t tell you about them, but I do plan to watch the one about dream research, at least.

Overall, this film is a good idea for a sci-fi movie, and is thankfully more complex than the usual Hollywood so-called sci-fi (but really action) movie as well. Indeed, in my mind, it actually does qualify as real sci-fi for once: the technology is crucial to the story and it is not just about some hero or bad guy with a grudge, for a change (even the Star Trek (2009) movie came down to this, unfortunately). The execution is a bit flat, but the film remains watchable. I give it 6/10: worth watching but don’t expect too much.

A vast alien spaceship arrives and parks itself high in the air over... Johannesburg. And then, nothing happens. After about 3 months the humans get impatient and break into the ship to find a couple of million aliens in need of rescue. So, they bring them down to the city, but they turn out to be rather a rootless, aimless bunch of criminals and losers and cause so much hassle with the local population that the aliens end up being coralled in a ghetto, called District 9.

That's the premise of this 2009 sci-fi film by Neill Blomkampp and Terri Tatchell (with Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame as an executive producer). And for once, the term 'sci-fi' is accurate, because this isn't just a normal Hollywood action film in sci-fi dressing, this is proper science fiction for once. By that I mean that the story is a subversive look at a possible future for humanity - which is what real science fiction is supposed to do. In this case, the future being looked at is what happens if humanity can't control its over-exploitation of the Earth's resources: will we end up with a small super-rich elite living in gated and heavily guarded communities, and everybody else living in foul slums like Johannesburg's Soweto (where this was largely filmed)? In this film, the aliens stand in for the poor.

The acting in this film is exceptional, especially that of the star, Sharlto Copley, who plays the reluctant hero Wikus Van De Merwe, a very ordinary guy - stupid, selfish, cowardly and prejudiced - placed in charge of managing the eviction of the aliens from District 9 because the authorities (MNU, an evil military corporation, basically) wants to move them 200km out of the city and well out of everybody's way. Much of the film is shot in handheld documentary style, as the idea is that as Wikus goes about his business, a documentary is being made. So as he goes about his business he is talking to the camera, explaining what he's doing, being embarrassed as he makes mistakes, and so on. As a novice, he glances at the crew behind the camera too, just as a not-too-clever newbie might in this situation.

He's a reluctant hero because he doesn't care for the welfare of the aliens at all, really: he is only concerned with his own situation. However it all goes wrong for him and he ends up having to ally himself with a rather smart alien called Christopher in an attempt to steal some alien gunge from MNU. You see, he gets infected by some advanced alien... stuff... and begins to turn into an alien. For a prejudiced man like Wikus, this is perhaps even worse than it would be for most. The alien, for his part, wants the gunge so he can power-up the crippled alien starship and get the heck out of this slum.

So what we have here, as well as the science-fiction angle, is a personal, psychological angle. Wikus is a rather low type of human being, but as it turns out, the alien is of the noble variety. We can see them as two sides of the same person: Wikus the conscious side is a selfish coward, but as he slowly transforms into an alien, his superior inner nature, represented by the alien Christopher (Christ) gradually comes out. So Wikus loses his humanity in order to find it...

It goes without saying, of course, that there's a racial angle to this film too. Set in post apartheid South Africa, it could hardly be avoided, and the bureaucratic way it is implemented in this movie rings true, along with the way Wikus lectures the camera and his black assistants about what "the Prawn" needs, wants, should do, etc. But rather than saying how bad the racism under apartheid was, the film is more importantly saying that it is still with us: humans are still the same. As filming began, there were riots in Johannesburg with South African blacks burning and killing Zimbabwean refugees. Nigerians have a rather bad reputation down there (and elsewhere) too. And we should not forget just who the aliens really are in South Africa.

A film like this naturally has to have a ton of CGI and it is done extremely well. Not only that, but the director doesn't dwell on it - there are no time-wasting gee-whizz shots. The focus is always on the action and the characters, and the story moves on constantly.

Overall, this has to be one of the best, if not the best, sci-fi film for years. I rate it 10/10.

District 9 Trailer [2m]

Mongol: The Rise to Power of Genghis Khan (2007) by Russian director Sergey Bodrov aims to tell the true story of how Genghis Khan came from almost nowhere (he was the son of a minor tribal chief) to found what would become the largest contiguous empire in history - and, more importantly, why he did it.

Well, I’ll leave the viewer to decide whether or not the Great Khan was a murderous psychopath. The film certainly doesn’t paint him this way. Instead, it is compatible with what is known of his history. At the time (around 1200), that part of Asia was a mess of competing tribes, constantly raiding each other and causing general mayhem. To protect his family, he set out to impose the rule of law - his law, but still, law.

The director claims the movie is faithful to the historical facts, and overall it does seem to be, except insofar as Temujin (his real name) calls upon the help of the Mongol’s favourite god Tengri every now and then, and the god actually intervenes. I suppose people of the time would have believed such stories, so perhaps they were recorded as fact. A little director’s license isn’t totally out of place, I suppose.

Overall, the film charts his rise to power in considerable detail, showing how he was captured as a child, how he escaped, how he was captured as a adult, how he escaped (with the help of his wife, Borte)… It is a shame therefore that the film ends with a bit of a jump, showing him with a big army without a clear explanation of how he managed to acquire it.

This is only a minor quibble though. This movie could probably have been more successful if the marketing had been more accurate. Worldwide it only grossed some US$25M at the box office. It was marketed as a bloodthirsty man-fest, and this is just not accurate, so probably a lot of men were disappointed. While there is plenty of masculine posing and battle scenes (inevitable in a movie about Genghis Khan, I suppose), it is in reality a rather unusual member of the romance genre. What the movie charts with just as much emphasis is his (mostly long-distance) relationship with his wife. It was to protect her and later his children that he embarked on most if not all of his military activity, and a greater emphasis on this might have attracted a wider audience.

I have no complaints about the acting or the actors. It was plain, subtle and realistic. The effects also were excellent. Indeed I think the sets were much improved by the absence of too much CGI and the use of real stone and wood to build the sets (because Chinese law wouldn’t allow the use of artificial materials in the nature reserves used for most of the filming): they looked entirely authentic to me.

Overall, this is an excellent movie and an eye-opening look at one of history’s most remarkable people. With only minor quibbles I think I can reasonably give this one a score of 9/10.

Mongol: The Rise to Power of Genghis Khan (Trailer)

This agreeable low-key comedy is an independently-produced movie about a seven-year-old little girl’s quest to be a winner, especially in children’s beauty contests and similar events. She manages to win a local contest and gets the right to enter a children’s pageant in California and so the family, somewhat reluctantly, sets off in a cranky old VW microbus across the country.

Although it has its moments, this is not the normal Hollywood-style setup, punch line, setup, punchline, setup… kind of movie. I described it as ‘low-key’ because it is a far gentler kind of humour, even though a bit risque at times. I didn’t find it offensive, but maybe a small minority might. Much of the movie goes on without any jokes as such. Indeed the first 20 minutes of the film are somewhat serious, as the characters are gradually introduced to us, including uncle Frank who has just managed to survive a suicide attempt after a colleage beat him to top place in the Proust scholar stakes, and substance-snorting foul-mouthed grandpa who also happens to be coaching the little girl Olive in her dance routine for the show. Olive’s father is trying to promote his 9 step program for winners, not too successfully. Mother is trying to support her daughter and run the household. Perhaps she isn’t so obsessed with winning. Older brother Dwayne is though. He wants to be a pilot and has taken a vow of silence until he can achieve his goal.

The characters really make this film. We have quite a motley crew of flawed human beings and they get along with each other badly, as any semi-functional family of obsessives might. As a result a lot of the humour is based on their interactions, and this is really well acted, particularly by the less well-known actors.

In many humorous films, the actors act in a jokey way, unable to avoid signalling that they are in a humourous mode, but not here. Instead, the acting is very naturalistic, with the characters taking themselves very seriously, making the whole thing far more believable. Olive, played by Abigail Breslin, does a particularly good job, as does Toni Collette as her mother. However, all the family were great.

So what’s it all about? Winning and losing seems to be the theme. Father thinks that winning is everything, yet he is a loser himself (perhaps this is why he’s obsessed with winning). Uncle Frank the Proust scholar can’t stand being second place in the academic rankings. Older brother Dwayne has to become a pilot. Olive has to win the pageant. In the end, coarse-mouthed Grandpa probably has the most balanced view of things: the only losers are those who don’t even try.

It seems little Olive understands this idea too, ultimately. Her entry in the children’s pageant causes quite a stir but she is not in the end concerned with whether she won or not.

I would give this movie a good 7 out of 10 overall. It is a fine, warm-hearted family comedy. Sensitive parents may want to preview it before allowing children to watch it, but it has a good message in the end.

This 2009 film starring Ben Barnes and Colin Firth is a fairly pedestrian retelling of the famous Oscar Wilde tale, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ I say ‘pedestrian’ because, while watchable, I wouldn’t say there is anything particularly innovative about the way it is done or the way the story is told. The publicity made quite a lot of the special effects, but in fact I was not impressed by that either. The effects were pretty obvious much of the time, whereas good CGI should be inconspicuous. On the other hand, not much harm was done by them either. They were just similar in quality to the rest of the film. Colin Firth stood out as playing the most interesting character in the story, Lord Henry Wotton, who corrupts young Dorian, and he did his job well.

For those of you unfamiliar with the basic story, Dorian inherits a fortune, and falls in with wealthy people of a basically amoral character - Lord Henry Wotton, an intellectual, and Basil Hallward (Ben Chapman), a painter. They take Dorian out for a drink in seedy Whitechapel, and between being propositioned by prostitutes in the pub, Lord Henry essentially sums up the question the film is asking. He says, “There’s no shame in pleasure, Mr Gray. You see, man just wants to be happy, but society wants him to be good and when he’s good man is rarely happy and when he’s happy he’s always good.” Dorian asks him about the price on one’s soul for such behavour and the question is answered with a drink to the devil, in effect. Henry says, “Everything is possible for you because you have the only two things worth having: youth, and beauty.” Shortly afterwards, he adds, as Dorian misses out on talking to an attractive young woman, “People die of common sense, Dorian: one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment: there is no hereafter. So make it burn - always - with the hardest flame.” Back at his house, Basil has finished a portrait he has been painting of Dorian. On seeing it, Henry points out that the painting will always stay the same, but Dorian will grow old and die. Dorian abhors this fate and asks that it doesn’t happen to him. Lord Henry quickly incants a spell as if reciting from a piece of literature and asks Dorian if he would really want this… Dorian says, “Yes,” and the spell is cast. The painting takes on all his infirmity, all his evil, all his venereal disease even, and he stays young for the rest of the film as others age around him. He lives the life of a rake, having any women (or men) he pleases, with no physical consequences for him, however much harm it does to others. He murders to hide his secret, and gets away with it… and while he stays the same, the painting becomes uglier and uglier as it shows the real Dorian…

So in a way, the film is asking, is beauty a more important virtue than goodness? This is a very relevant question in today’s world of commercialised prostitutes-as-stars, where appearance is everything. And, interestingly, in the film, the women Dorian seduced, on the whole, were rather plain by modern cinematic standards, perhaps to underline this point: they were real people, being used and hurt by him, not fashion icons with no fundamental reality.

The attribute of beauty in the modern age has been at once exploited in the world of the mass media, and at the same time ignored in society in general: our buildings, for example, are no longer designed with the idea of ‘beauty’ in mind, as many were in a former age (Dorian Gray’s Victorian times, for example). Today, functionality is all. The same is true for, say, furniture. Much of what is available in the shops, in the way of products in general indeed, is functional but ugly. One could argue that modern products like iphones and imacs have some beauty about their design, and they do look nice - but slick and modern and minimalistic is only one sort of beauty - and it is strictly commercial. Beauty is being used to advertise and promote products, including film & TV ‘personalities’ (LOL) and even presidents and prime ministers, arguably, but not for iteslf. Beauty too is just functional in the modern world.

The film also asks, is happiness more important than pleasure: is the pleasure-ridden life of a rake actually worth it? Does it make Dorian happy in the end? Well, of course not. I suppose I don’t need to say any more about that: you can watch the film to see how it turns out.

So that’s the philosoply, how about the film??? Well, nothing special, and I would add, a little long. The story is told, certainly. I just feel it could have been told better. Some of the ideas in the film are just too simple-minded. For example, the way the picture changes and animates gets more and more laughable but if you can suspend your disbelief you can probably survive to the end. As a film, I would say that it does answer the questions it sets out to ask, as described above, but I would still only score it maybe 5/10, but since it raises some interesting philosophical questions about modern life, and as Oscar Wilde certainly wrote a cracking good story, 6/10 overall: watchable, but only just.

I was a little disappointed by this cartoon at first, because many of the characters, although in theory “vikings,” are in fact dressed up obnoxious American teenagers. I managed to get over this though, as once the hero of the story gets going, the other kids come round to his point of view, of course…

And ‘hero’ is the right word. The plot is, as usual for Hollywood-style adventure movies, the hero’s journey, in which our hero is rejected and misunderstood by all, and has to redeem himself by being himself, and doing what he believes to be right. In this case our hero is a viking boy, but a weedy intellectual one. And he is in a world where his village is being attacked by dragons and the thing to be is a tough guy who can kill the dragons. Still, although nobody understands him, they are more-or-less tolerant of him, which is just as well, of course, as in the long run his brains are going to save the day when the monster granddaddy of all dragons emerges later in the film…

This movie isn’t called ‘How to Tame Your Dragon’ for nothing, of course, and one of our hero’s gadgets manages to down a Night Fury - a particularly fearsome type of dragon. However, nobody believes him and he goes off into the woods in search of the downed dragon by himself.

I’m giving nothing away by telling you that, of course, he finds the dragon, and it is not dead, just injured and tangled up in the remains of our hero’s gadget. Instead of killing his nemesis, he frees it, and, by trusting his instincts and with the help of some fish, makes a new friend. The dragon itself is clearly modelled on a cat. This is a good basis for a dragon, I think: the cat-like nature of it gives it a great deal of charm and not a little dangerousness.

In psychological terms, the dragon presumably represents the hero’s specialness - his uniqueness. When leaving home for the first time, as he did here, he is challenged (by meeting the dragon) and has to deal with it somehow (which he does by making friends with his special powers as symbolised by the dragon: he accepts who he is, and can therefore use his accepted abilities and uniqueness as needed, without shame, in future).

He returns to the village and has to join dragon-fighting school, but it turns out to everyone’s surprise that he is a champion at dealing with dragons (having secretly tamed one) and he soon becomes recognized by all, except his father who is away on a dragon-hunting expedition. Psychologically, having accepted his personal power by taming the dragon, he has access to resources people without those abilities can’t understand, but they can see the results clearly enough: he is growing up.

Well, I’m not going to tell you the whole story here! Suffice it to say that although his father tries to continue things in the old ways, still not getting the idea that his son has grown up, the mega-dragon is too much for them and only our hero can save the day… for which the reward is a better village, lots of nice dragon pets, and the local hot babe.

So… is it any good? Well, at first as I say, I was a little disappointed, but I came round in the end and particularly enjoyed the big battle at the end of the film between our hero, his friends and their tamed dragons, and the monster granddaddy of all dragons. There was one particularly memorable shot of the viking warriors on the ground watching this gigantic dragon climbing into the deep sky, far away, as the battle raged far above them. Certainly, it was a formula film; Hollywood seems capable of little else these days. But it was well done and enjoyable in the end. I would give it 7/10 overall. The cartoon quality was in the plasticky style of Shrek: it remains watchable but lacks some organic warmth, I feel. Many of the backgrounds were very nicely done, although the style varied from time-to-time throughout the film.

Well… What a strange film this is. On the face of it, a children’s story with big furry people and whatnot, but really, I don’t think many kids would find it all that interesting, somehow. Not much happens in it. On the other hand, maybe girls would like it more than boys: no action, but quite a lot of relating to people (or furry people, anyway).

That might suit a lot of adults too.

So, what’s it about? Well, a lonely but creative boy, Max, gets to feel a bit frustrated when none of the kids or adults around him really connect with him, and he tends to get into tantrums every now and then as a result. In the end, he runs away from home, and ends up on an island populated by big furry people. He makes friends with them, sort of, but has to hedge it a bit because they might eat him, so he claims to be a king, and they accept this, more or less.

They want him to make them happy, so he gets them building a big fort on the island: a nice safe place where they can all be together. However, these people, and indeed Max himself tend to be argumentative and it only really half works out. One of the furry people, Carol, is creative like Max, and indeed, gets angry like Max when things are not going his own way… in the end, this drives Max to leave the island and head back home.

So… what’s going on here? My way of thinking about this film is in terms of instincts. Each of the non-human characters represents various instincts or sides of Max himself. When he goes to the island, he positions himself as the king, or ego, who thinks of himself as being in control of the rest of the person (instincts), but in reality is not really: because, if he can’t make them happy, he isn’t doing his job, and they will cause trouble - which they do.

In the end, though, he sees from this behaviour the trouble that his unruly anger can cause, and at that point is ready to return home to his mother. When he leaves the island, it isn’t that he’s giving up on it, it is that he has learned the lesson. Even the angriest instinct, Carol, returns to him as he is leaving, because he saw that the ego has its contribution to make. On their own, the instincts are just wild and directionless. It takes a willingness to work with ourselves to begin to mature, and to develop an inner ecology where everyone gets along together pretty reasonably most of the time…

So, how to score this? Well, it is probably worth watching, for adults into psychology, but I wouldn’t say it was the most exciting film out there. Maybe 6/10. I don’t think children would find it all that fun, but it could have some resonance for some, like Max.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors

I haven’t read ‘The Rational Optimist’ by Matt Ridley, but I have read this review:

Review

And… it has put me off. It is a book arguing that free, unregulated markets work better than regulated ones, and that the environment is not deteriorating. But, according to the review by George Monbiot, the book is full of blatant distortion. Like not mentioning how relatively free, unregulated markets led to the Credit Crunch, indeed particularly so in Ridley’s own company, Northern Rock (he was chairman of the company!), which needed a GBP £27bn bailout when it crashed due entirely to slack regulation, greed and stupidity (presumably on his part at least). As readers of my blog will know, I’ve forecast this economic depression for a long time now. Who listens? Not people who should know what they’re doing, anyway.

If you have read any of Carlos Castaneda’s books and wondered what the heck he was on about, then maybe Don Miguel Ruiz’s “The Four Agreements” is for you. Subtitled “A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom” it covers some of Castaneda’s ground, but in plain English. While Castaneda’s books are fascinating, he rambles a lot because he was learning at the time he wrote them. Ruiz instead gets right to the point and he clearly understands what he is talking about. In a nutshell, the book is about how to free your mind of negative, self-limiting thoughts and habits, using the ostensibly straightforward method of making four simple agreements with yourself. He says that what he is teaching is Toltec wisdom, that is, native American shamanism (Ruiz claims to be a nagual), but wherever it comes from, it makes a lot of sense to me. Indeed, I was gratified on reading it to discover that I already apply much of what he teaches: maybe I understood more of Castaneda’s books than I realized! Of course, I’m not rich yet, but I am much happier than I used to be, most of the time.

The four agreements, in summary, are these:

1. Be impeccable with your word: i.e., be honest with yourself and others and do not talk yourself or other people down;
2. Don’t take anything personally: when people ‘insult’ you or behave selfishly or foist their opinions on you, remember that it is not to do with you, it is to do with them: they have their own issues and viewpoints, which are not your problem. You do not need to worry about what they say or think;
3. Don’t make assumptions: before jumping to conclusions about what people mean by what they do or say, ask them. Go to great lengths to avoid any misunderstanding.
4. Always do your best: you can avoid much self-criticism when you can reply to yourself, “I did my best,” as long as you remember that your best will vary from time-to-time and you are prepared to forgive yourself for your weaknesses.

He also explains some of Casteneda’s other terminology, such as the dream of the second attention. But whether you have read Castaneda or not, read this book. It is one of those books that everybody should read and I am quite sure that it can change lives - for the better.

The Four Agreements: Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (Toltec Wisdom)