“Will you say multi-dextrose for me again? It’s too cute.”

I really expected this to be an intolerable nightmare saved only by Elle Fanning, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing through it a lot more than is probably acceptable, even a couple of l’il tears in my eyes in places. Angelica Huston is practically perfect if a little familiar (she even gets a similar ending here to her character in Ever After) as the evil headmistress of a first class pre-school trying to thwart the relatively restrained Eddie Murphy’s attempts to start a more homely form of daycare, and Lacey Chabert is fun as her sidekick. The kids are adorable almost without exception – they all have their “moments”, particularly at the end when announcing to parents being shown around Huston’s school how they’ve benefited from the daddy day care. Steve Zahn is perfect as a Trekkie who’s able to handle the kids better than anybody since he accidentally read Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare.

The movie’s mood veers effortlessly from toilet humour that threatens to go too far at times yet never does and is actually surprisingly effective (“I missed!”) through to pure schmaltz and heartstring tuggery. For family entertainment, I found it almost literally bang in between the astonishing R.V. and the abysmal Yours, Mine and Ours that it most resembles … I don’t know what that means to anyone else, but to me it means I really have no objections, I loved it.

I’ve gotta stop starting reviews with “I’ve gotta admit …” lol … but I’ve gotta admit I didn’t know much about this comic book (I know even less about the forthcoming Iron Man, that should be fun …) and I was pleasantly surprised by where the story went here, regarding Elektra thinking Daredevil killed her father, etc. That said, the whole thing is smoothed over (well … resolved, cut short, however you wanna put it the conflict doesn’t last is what I’m saying lol) a little too quick for my liking – the idea of the alter-ego’s love interest being the superhero’s enemy is fascinating – of course it’s done even better in Batman Returns with Catwoman, but even then I think there’s room for expansion (btw, like I said I’m really not big on comicbooks – if I’ve just detailed an archetype that’s found in hundreds of the things then forgive me lol).

Anyway … it’s dumb but it’s slick, the cast (outside of Garner and Affleck, at least) is impressive (you’ve gotta love the Kevin Smith cameo), and best of all it’s short. The visual effects are particularly stunning, I think there are some digital actors in here that are way more convincing than those in the same year’s Matrix sequels, and I love the rain/seeing thing. It’s just about enough to forgive the corny repetition of “Stay with me …” and the even cornier use of Evanescence on the soundtrack, lol. The ending really took me by pleasant surprise too.

Finally I get original and remake lined up the right way round, lol. I had the Tobe Hooper remake of this hanging around for ages, was saving it for this year’s Halloween but I noticed this week that both versions were showing on TV by what looks like pure coincidence on different channels so I couldn’t resist watching them in succession.

It’s embarrassing to say, but I really got lost by this one in the end, mainly because I just wasn’t ready for a lot more than the kind of average mindless slasher it’s easy to have on in the background yet still somehow absorb completely. It opens appallingly, bad acting and all, and I feared the worst; but then the nailgun sequence kind of turned my head and it gets a lot better thereafter in all departments: except, as I say, for a subplot with a kidnapped girl that I really think I missed the details of.

I’d certainly watch it again on a Halloween sometime paying closer attention. For now, for the nailgun scene alone it’s worth checking out – it reminded me of Last House on the Left a little, it’s ghastly, horrible, wrong, but somehow beautiful and impossible to avoid looking at, that song playing over it very like David Hess’ stuff on the Wes Craven movie. Which reminds me, the score deserves mention too – I always find it amazing that these days even a lot of large budgeted movies resort to Sampletank and the like for their music, when back in the 60s and 70s so many of the lowest budgets seemed able to afford some kind of orchestra, lol.

Again, I’m guilty of not having seen the original here which probably makes me a bad film lover, though it seems to be the right way to approach the thing as the director really made it almost exclusively because he felt too few people had seen the non-English-speaking production … which is kinda sad in itself to begin with.

I guess I want to start before I go “off on one” so to speak (it’s not guaranteed but it’s possible … oh it’s always possible lol …) by saying, I get what the director is trying to do and say with this film (and, presumably, the original) – if only because his self-confessed intentions have been so well-documented. Again, I find this kind of sad – like the saying goes, if you could put it into words, well, what’s the point in painting it? And a lot of the more positive reviews of this movie seem to go in one direction against the criticism, amounting to, “You don’t get it. THIS is what it means,” which to me really says it all.

I didn’t personally get the intention in the end. By which I mean – I get it, but it didn’t work for me as apparently was intended. Though none of the horrors are actually shown onscreen, I felt as the end credits rolled that I’d seen them anyway – that I’d got my kicks, as it were, despite the approach. I saw Naomi Watts in her underwear and tied up, I heard her screams, and those screams were so terrifying that I looked away even though I knew there was nothing to see. So I won’t deny its incredible use of cinema … but, honestly, I never really felt like it was any different from what has come before – Texas Chainsaw, Last House, Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs. Frankly, Cannibal Holocaust did a much better job of making me feel “involved” in the horror; in this whole department, there’s really only one short sequence here that lived up to what I expected.

Haneke is a fine film maker – you can feel a lot of Kubrickian influence here and I’m interested in seeing his other work. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are fantastic. All the technical stuff is top notch. It takes a long time to get going, though, and even once it does it’s far from gripping; and in the end, personally I feel it fails miserably in its aspirations. I think those who think the naysayers are missing the point on this one need to go back and look at how intelligent a lot of the old nasties really were.

As with the original Star is Born and the political thrillers mentioned in my Vantage Point review, it’s been too long since I last saw one of the original St. Trinian’s movies for me to make a fair comparison here other than to mention that I know for sure I was a huge fan of them when I was little. I imagine it was one of my early, “I want to be one of them!” experiences even if I didn’t really know it at the time. When Rupert Everett first started talking about his involvement with the new version (a few years ago now I think), I was pretty excited but that excitement ebbed as Mischa Barton first joined the cast, then the whole Girls Aloud involvement, the way it was marketed, and finally the reviews.

Ultimately I came to the movie expecting it to fail on all levels – the nostalgia of the old movies, a re-imagining or modern updating thereof that actually worked, even the slightly dodgy “perv appeal” a lot of the criticism has been aimed at. To my astonishment, I enjoyed every second of it and I imagine it’s a movie that I will wind up watching far too many times for my own good in the future. It works on all of the levels mentioned above and then some. No, it’s not going to win any awards. But though it mightn’t seem like it sometimes, I do enjoy a little pure entertainment from time to time; and this is the kind of thing that for me fits the bill. It couldn’t have been better.

Wow, there are some pretty awful things said out there about this lol. It seemed like a perfect partner for the Streisand Star is Born and I wasn’t far wrong. I certainly wouldn’t go as far in damning this as some have – even in the area of Neil Diamond’s “performance” I found nothing to really despair over. People have called it bad acting. I’d say, thank god he didn’t act, because, it’s true, he clearly can’t. What he gives in front of the camera is importantly not acting, and I think compared to a lot of so-called “acting” over the years – even, dare I say, some of Streisand’s stuff in the aforementioned Star is Born, deserves the bad-mouthing more – I honestly have to say, he’s not that bad at all. This is one case where the Kermode “I’d rather an actor who can sort of sing than a singer who can sort of act” rule is well-broken in my eyes, maybe because I’d always rather the writer of the songs sang his own songs rather than anybody else … that this in itself is a whole part of the story here makes Diamond the only honest choice for the part.

The only real problem with this movie is, like A Star is Born, the way it feels so by the numbers over the story. The conflict is shattered the moment Diamond’s father gives him his blessing way too early in the game (I haven’t seen the original of this – yes, spank me – but I thought this familial conflict was like the whole point of the story? lol, here it’s like, “no, no, no … oh, okay …”) ... and as such, the great songs notwithstanding, I have to say I was probably moved more by the Krusty the Clown version on The Simpsons lol …

But the songs are great, and it’s great to see Diamond singing them. It deserves to be repeated how great a double bill this and A Star is Born are too. Despite how disappointed I was with both of them, there’s something about the very idea of their existence that makes me know I’ll still do it again one day, probably more than once. They certainly feel like great movies because of the giants behind them, and there are definitely glimmers of their genius that break through the iffy surface.

I think I may have half-seen this before ‘cos some parts of it I recognised (and not from the original). What can I say … the guy’s wishes suck, the gender divide is too broad (though there really should always be a sex change wish in these things, whether intended by the wisher or not, I have to say LOL), and it makes the terrible, tired, terrible, tired gay musical-lover gag … but I can’t help it. Maybe it’s that you give me a movie like this and it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad because I’m happy enough for 90 minutes thinking up my own wishes and how I’d phrase them lol; maybe it’s that Brendan Fraser’s surprisingly good, reminding me at times of Trevor Fehrman in Clerks II when he’s the “real” Elliot; but I found this a surprisingly decent remake of the surprisingly fun Peter Cook/Dudley Moore version – I felt as much right from the “Big Mac and a Coke” version of the “sixpence iced lolly” scene. I really can’t think of a truly bad thing to say of it outside of those personal nitpicks above.

I’m not about to spoil this movie for you. The tagline for this movie is “What Makes Us Different Makes Us Beautiful”. It’s about Christina Ricci born with a snout instead of a nose. By the end of the movie, she has a normal nose. I really think that’s all I need to say but bear with me ‘cos I feel a rant coming on. Now, maybe with The Hottie and the Nottie going around those cinemas that can afford to show it, my nitpicks over movies like this and Enchanted having fairly depressing implications about society seem beyond nitpicky. But hey, if nobody else is gonna say it then I will; if I didn’t just say what came to mind while watching a movie then I wouldn’t write anything at all.

“I know this face repulses you,” Penelope (Christina Ricci) tells Max (James McAvoy complete with pointless US accent) ”... And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t dream of asking you to accept it. But this isn’t me, the real me is inside here somewhere just waiting to get out and you can make that happen and once the curse is broken I’ll be just like anybody else.”

“What if the curse doesn’t get broken? What if the curse can never be broken?” Max replies.

“Then I’ll kill myself. I promise, I promise I will. Marry me, Max. Marry me.”

And there’s the rub. If you happened to like Enchanted, honestly, I couldn’t recommend a better double bill companion than Penelope more whole-heartedly. Personally, my luck amazes me that I resisted seeing both on my birthday in February because either one of them would, to be blunt, have put a damper on my day. Though this movie didn’t upset me quite as much as Enchanted did – duh, it’s Christina Ricci with a snout, frankly that alone is worth my 90 minutes – I spent all those 90 minutes, as I did in Enchanted, dreading how it all would end, hoping the film makers would explain why every man who looked upon The Nose had to jump through glass or cause a scene, why not one of them would even hesitate a moment and consider the rest of her. Is she supposed to look as grotesque as what these guys seem to be reacting to? In which case it’s bad casting and makeup, and I hope that’s the case. Otherwise, it really upsets me that apparently little girls across the land have gone cuckoo for this movie that is telling them this is what they should expect if they don’t look like Reese Witherspoon.

I’m sure I’m not just being my strange and kinky self … seriously, Christina Ricci with a snout is almost even cuter than just plain Christina Ricci. I know it’s a story and the movie would end pretty quick if someone just walked in the room and said, “Hey! Cute nose!” ... what I’m saying isn’t as simple as that at all and you maybe need to see the whole movie to get the full sweep of how badly I feel it’s handled, I don’t know … it just basically sat badly with me. Maybe it’s as dumb as I’ve a feeling my response to everyone so rapidly believing Briony in Atonement was … but when something doesn’t sit with me, it doesn’t sit with me: all I can do is share the response.

I don’t have as many problems with it as I do with Enchanted – that movie had its wonderful moments and this one has even more on top of the simple fact of the Ricciness who can really do little wrong in my book. Joby Talbot’s music is gorgeous, one of those scores that, if I still bought soundtrack CDs, I’d snap up in a flash. Peter Dinklage is always worth the watch – he has one of the more interesting lines in the movie, perhaps moreso coming from him, when he says, “She’s out there on her own. Declaring her independence.” It even makes me happy enough that Christina Ricci even chose to do a project like this, it’s the kind of thing that made me go psychocrazy over her all those years ago. It’s quirky, it’s silly, it’s particularly indie-spirited even while being particularly appealing to the mainstream by its sheer freakshow nature.

But I’m loathe to sound too enthusiastic about the whole thing, because the overall message of it really makes my tummy squirm – from Grease to She’s All That I’ve always been sick of movies that basically tell people, especially girls and women, “Hey! You don’t have to be beautiful on the outside! But it helps ...” and again, even though it comes from character and is a perfectly logical part of the movie, I have to say, the moment at the end here where Catherine O’Hara (being even more loathsome than she was in For Your Consideration) starts suggesting even more “work” on Penelope’s nose even when it’s back to human form, it actually almost made me feel physically sick. Given I’ll take any opportunity to tell people my own insane dreams of magical transformation, I know how this sentiment probably makes me a big hypocrit. I don’t know what to say to that. Maybe we’re all a little hypocritical sometimes, but with me these days honesty overrides everything, and like I said, this just did not sit with me.

As I’ve said on many an occasion: any movie that can get me in such a twist as this has gotta be worth the time somehow … it just depresses me if this is what it takes nowadays. It depresses me almost profoundly. Gimme Elphaba proudly getting in people’s faces with her green skin any day over this kind of thing. She had the good sense to leave the world entirely when it turned its back on her. Nobody should have to change to fit in. That Penelope’s transformation here comes right after and as a result of her own admission that she’s “happy the way she is” just adds insult to injury in my opinion.