Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on March 30, 2023.

(M) ★★★★

Director: Guillermo del Toro.

Cast: (voices of) Gregory Mann, David Bradley, Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, Ron Perlman, Burn Gorman, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Tim Blake Nelson, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro.

"Sign this, and Netflix owns your soul."

The Wall Street Journal says there are over 50 adaptions of Carlo Collodi's 1883 serial The Adventures of Pinocchio. There a version where Pinocchio goes into space. There's Roberto Benigni's ill-fated take where the boy-puppet is played by the then-50-year-old Benigni. There's even a porn version (hint: it's not his nose that grows).

By and large the original story, which is dark and strange, has proven eminently adaptable due to its core moral of "be good and you will be rewarded". It's a simple karmic idea with a hint of magic and fantasy that works in a range of settings, including war-time Italy, such as in this masterfully animated take from iconic director Guillermo del Toro. 

Just as Disney's acclaimed 1940 version cherry-picks from Collodi's story, so too does del Toro's. Pinocchio (voiced by Mann) is crafted by Geppetto (Bradley) after the woodworker's son Carlo was killed in a WWII bombing raid. Initially bad-behaved and ill-mannered, Pinocchio runs away to a circus to make money for Geppetto and no longer be a "burden" on the old man. But Geppetto, who is joined by raconteur insect Sebastian J Cricket (McGregor), is desperate to find Pinocchio and bring him home. 

It's hard to think of a director better suited to working in the world of stop-motion animation than del Toro. Even his lesser films such as Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak are visually stylish, but working in the stop-and-go minutiae of this kind of process seems to give the Mexican director the perfect opportunity to paint masterpieces on the screen. The models and sets put together by his team are works of art themselves. And in the service of this intriguing story, with exquisite lighting and great voice performances, it's top-shelf stuff.

The source material is also well suited to del Toro. His passion for a war-time backdrop (see also The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth) works well, but it's the strangeness of the original material that is most fitting. He revels in the darkness of the story and takes it to odd new places, including a fascist boys camp with a cameo from Mussolini. 

One thing it falters with is the moral at the heart of Collodi's tale. While Walt Disney's classic gave us Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's conscience, del Toro's version separates puppet from cricket, leaving the morality lesson to be a little foggier and ill-defined. It becomes more of a series of unfortunate events, as opposed to an inner journey to goodness, but is no less entrancing for this - just perhaps less impactful.

We reached peak Pinocchio last year, with three new versions released. This is the only one to bother watching. It's a wonderful take on an old story, with a hint of darkness, and some truly masterful animation.

The problem with Poker Face

(M) ★★★

Creator: Rian Johnson.

Cast: Natasha Lyonne, Benjamin Bratt.

Is that a plant growing out of the corner pocket of the pool table?

Crime stories, whether it be on the page or the screen, rely on mystery - who did it, how did they do it, why did they do it. We watch or read these stories to find out the answers to these questions. That’s the tension that drives the narrative and keeps us engaged, often because it puts us in the shoes of the detective/CSI unit/crime-solving old lady. We can even play a game of trying to figure out the answers before the protagonist does. It's half the fun, right?

Poker Face is different. Almost every episode starts by showing us who did it, how they did it, and why they did it. With these typically essential questions answered, its central mystery becomes the equivalent of “how will the protagonist find out it was Colonel Mustard in the living room with the lead pipe?”.

It’s a bold ploy, because by erasing the majority of the mystery, it wipes out the bulk of the tension. Some episodes leave a question or two to be revealed - usually the “why did they do it?”, and the minimal anxiety of how our heroine will get to the bottom of it before she gets killed too. But for the most part, we’re left watching Charlie Cale (Lyonne) use her superpower (she can always tell when people are lying) to solve a puzzle we already know the answer to.

Thankfully Lyonne is fantastic and makes Charlie great company and her superpower is intriguing. Or perhaps, more accurately, its intriguing to see how the writers either write around her superpower (the key trick is for people to answer her questions with a question) or plant the most odd and inane lies to trip up the colourful collection of killers they've created.

But you can’t help but wonder if the bold approach undermines the potential of the show. I’d love to see a re-edit of several episodes that removes the first 20 minutes and puts us in Charlie’s shoes rather than waiting for her to figure out what we already know. Would it be more entertaining? Potentially. There would certainly be more tension in most of the episodes.

Poker Face is at its best when it manages to preserve some of that tension by giving us an actual mystery to solve - episodes 9 and 10 do this best, though it feels like there are more nail-biting ways to unravel those episodes too.

The show has proven popular enough to be picked up for a second season. I'd like to hope that's because of Lyonne, the fascinating rogues gallery and the wit of the writing, rather than the possibility people are enjoying not having to figure out the whodunnit, the motive and the opportunity. Like they're too lazy, boring or stupid to bother with being confused or to not know the answer. Imagine if we reached a point in society where people decided they wanted their mysteries served up without any actual mystery in them. I really hope that's not why people are watching Poker Face.

65

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on March 16, 2023.

(M) ★★

Director:  Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.

Cast: Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King.

"I mean, yeah, I could walk on the dry bits, but that wouldn't look as cool, would it?"

Let's start with the obvious - 65 is a terrible name for this film. Just about anything else would be better. Adam Driver Vs The Dino-creatures would be better, and that's the dumbest name I can think of, yet it's still preferable to 65. I think more people would go see a movie called Adam Driver Vs The Dino-creatures than a movie called 65. Tell me I'm wrong.

What about Day Of The Dinosaurs? Dino Planet? Cretaceous World? The Lost Planet? No Way Home? Off World? Dinosaurs In Space? Cretaceous Crashlanding? Seriously, anything would have been better than 65.

Even 65 Million Years Ago would be better, although that particular title, as well as the film's promotional material, posters, trailers, tagline, and weird title screen 20 MINUTES INTO THE MOVIE deprive us of what could have been a great Planet Of The Apes-style twist. That twist - "It was Earth all along!" - surely would have attracted people to see this movie. Or at least attracted more people to see this movie than are currently seeing this movie (at last count it had made $22m worldwide against a budget (after tax rebates) of $45m).

The plot, in case you haven't figured it out from my ramblings, follows resourceful deep-space pilot Mills (Driver) and lone surviving passenger/plucky child Koa (Greenblatt) as they try to survive life on Earth 65 million years ago following a spaceship crash.

With man-eating dinosaurs at every turn, Mills and Koa must cross dangerous terrain to reach the other half of their ship, which contains an escape pod that will get them home. 

As at least one YouTube commenter noted, it's great to see a dino movie that's not part of the Jurassic Park franchise. And 65 isn't great, but at least it gets us back to dinosaurs being threatening and scary creatures - not trainable anti-heroes.

Its core premise is strong - Adam Driver vs The Dino-creatures - and those are the best bits, but the film is ultimately disappointing. There are some solid jump scares, the dinosaurs look excellent and dangerous, and the edge-of-your-seat elements are good, but the film falls down in just about every other department, including a sadly mis-cast Driver.

He is undeniably a great actor, and leverages every bit of his immense talent to try and save 65, but Driver's Mills comes across as uncharismatic and sullen. Moments where he tries to add depth are quickly brushed away in the editing, leaving his performance feeling unconvincing and out-of-place. The film really needed a hero to get behind, and Mills isn't it. His relationship with the kid falls flat, and the accumulation of close scrapes and narrow escapes can't get us to care more than a perfunctory amount.

An unnecessary introduction gets the film off to a slow start, and I know this shouldn't matter, but I can't recall another film that buries its title card so deep into a movie. It has to be at least 15 minutes in, although maybe the laboured beginning just made it feel that long. Also the title card is weird because it's not just the title but also tells us OMG THEY'RE ON EARTH 65 MILLION YEARS AGO.

65 is as disappointing and oddly misfiring as its title. Yeah, the dinosaurs are cool, but that's about it.