The Iron Giant (PG) General release
Published in 1968, The Iron Man was written by Ted Hughes to comfort his two children after the death of their mother, Sylvia Plath, five years earlier. Pete Townshend of The Who adapted the book as a song-cycle in the style of Tommy, and his album The Iron Man was released in 1989 and mounted as a stage show at the Old Vic in London four years later.
Des McAnuff, who worked with Townshend when they adapted Tommy for McAnuff's exhilarating Broadway production of the musical, perceived the cinematic potential of The Iron Man, and after the film rights were acquired by Warner Bros, McAnuff and Townshend became involved as producers on The Iron Giant, a visually striking and consistently engrossing animated feature with appeal for all ages.
The movie transposes the book's setting from England to New England - and back to the Cold War period of the late 1950s. It begins with the mysterious appearance of a huge, towering, metal-devouring robot - voiced by Vin Diesel - in an idealised small Maine town which is aptly named Rockwell, given its lovingly delineated representation. There the robot is befriended by a young boy, the ever-curious and imaginative Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal) who lives with his caring, hardworking single mother (Jennifer Aniston). Like October Sky, which opened here last weekend, The Iron Giant is set against the backdrop of the American fascination with the successful launch of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, and the beginning of the space race. Hogarth and the Iron Giant bond after the boy saves the robot from being electrocuted by power lines, but their relationship and the giant's future are threatened by the arrival of a pompous, snooping federal agent (Christopher McDonald), a figure emblematic of the McCarthy era.
In the great tradition of ET, the robot is not in the least malevolent, just intrigued by this strange world into which he has crashlanded, but while the boy knows this, the paranoid forces of law and order find it easier to believe otherwise. An amiable beatnik sculptor (Harry Connick Jr) - whose scrapyard provides the robot with a huge buffet - delivers the movie's message when he tells Hogarth that we are what we choose to be.
While The Iron Giant falls somewhat short of the sheer magical quality of ET and its pervasive sense of wonder, that inevitable comparison does not detract from the movie's own formidable achievements. Directed by Brad Bird - who worked in television animation on The Simpsons, King of the Hill and The Critic - the new film has a wholly endearing quality that's permeated with a nostalgic affection for Americana. The animation is classically attractive but unshowy, deceptively simple and appropriately evocative. And it is refreshingly free of schmaltzy songs on the soundtrack.
Anna and the King (12) General release
The story that inspired The King and I is given the full-scale historical epic treatment - and without songs - in Andy Tennant's sumptuous production of Anna and the King. Having made a revisionist spin on the Cinderella story in Ever After last year, Tennant returns to the roots of the reputedly factually based story of Anna Leonowens, the recently widowed English schoolteacher who travels to Siam with her young son, and takes up a job as teacher to the children of King Mongkut. The king boasts 23 wives, 43 concubines and 58 children - with another 10 on the way, he adds.
Arriving in Bangkok, Anna is addressed as "sir" because of the lowly status of women in Siamese society, but the king's courtiers, and the king himself, are soon disarmed by her directness, her willingness to break with protocol and her criticisms of the slavery system. "Husband must have been very understanding," the king caustically observes.
But Anna is just as forthright in dealing with a boorish expatriate from the East India Company who proclaims the superiority of the English. And the initial antagonism between her and the king inevitably thaws and gives way to a mutual respect and understanding.
Gorgeously photographed on striking Malaysian locations by Caleb Deschanel, Anna and the King strives admirably for authenticity in the impressively detailed art direction by Luciana Arrighi and costume design by Jenny Beavan. Director Tennant orchestrates the huge crowd scenes and action sequences with skill and gracefulness. Surrounded by the cutest little princes and princesses, the redoubtable Jodie Foster plays the stiff-upper-lipped Anna in yet another of her deeply immersed yet understated performances, and she is well-matched by Chow Yun-Fat, best known as a Hong Kong action movie star from John Woo's earlier films, who portrays the king with dignity and charm. In the key supporting role, Bai Ling (from Red Corner) captures the loneliness and trepidation of a young woman forced to leave her boyfriend to become the king's latest concubine.
With all these attractive components in place, Tennant makes one crucial mistake with his epic, which is to opt for an epic running time which most unwisely over-extends the slender and familiar story. The result is that the central stages, in particular, are overtaken with an air of inertia which could easily have been avoided by chopping out chunks of superfluous sequences.
Inspector Gadget (PG) General release
Based on a television cartoon series which originated in France, this effects-driven romp features Matthew Broderick as a rather naive and inept security guard whose dreams of being the world's greatest police officer appear to be permanently dashed. However, after his car is struck by an explosive, he is rebuilt by a young scientist (Joely Fisher, who played Paige Clark in Ellen) and she equips him with a vast array of grafted-on gizmos which transform him into the crime-busting Inspector Gadget, who travels in his sassy-speaking Gadgetmobile. The role stretches Broderick in one sense - as his neck extends 10 feet into the air, his arms reach all around a room, and he is propelled by springs which pop out of his shoes.
Dabney Coleman plays the police chief who describes Gadget as "Columbo and Nintendo all rolled into one", and Rupert Everett is cast as the bionic man's nemesis, the smirking megalomaniac villain, Claw. "One word, like Madonna," he says by way of introduction.
The plotline is negligible and like Gadget himself, the film is overstretched to pad it out to feature-length. However, the raison d'etre of this RoboCop for the under-12s is its elaborate display of visual effects devised by maestro Stan Winston. With more devices than even James Bond could dream of having, the movie plays like a breathlessly directed live-action cartoon which should keep its target young audience amused all the way.
Cotton Mary (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
The nadir in the career of Merchant-Ivory Productions, Cotton Mary is a feebly scripted and excruciatingly heavy-handed effort set in the post-colonial India of the 1950s with Madhur Jaffrey in a shrill, irritating performance as Mary, a domineering nurse of mixed race who firmly believes she is superior to her friends and relatives. She declares that Indian nurses don't know anything, and that Indian food is too spicy - even though when left alone, she digs into this spicy food with such relish that she eats it with her hands.
Mary realises a lifetime ambition when she inveigles her way into the home staff of a British expatriate, Lily (Greta Scacchi), who is unable to breast-feed her new baby; the ever-resourceful Mary secretly brings the child to her disabled sister-in-law for feeding. While the conniving Mary discredits the household butler, her younger friend, Rosie (Sakina Jaffrey, daughter of Madhur) gets involved in an affair with Lily's adulterous husband (James Wilby), a work-obsessed BBC correspondent.
The Merchant-Ivory movies are generally directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismael Merchant, but it is Merchant who is responsible for directing this glib, patronising and stiffly acted bore of a movie. At just over two hours it makes for an excruciating endurance test, and though it's never quite awful enough to challenge Guest House Paradiso as the worst picture of the year, it comes dangerously close.
Giant steps: a scene from The Iron Giant
