April 8, 2012
E6
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Aardman takes to the High Seas! he Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (dir. Peter Lord, cert. U) brings Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit team into new territory with a tale of the high seas. Resisting making the script too much like “Talk like a pirate day”, me hearties, they’ve cast Hugh Grant to voice The Pirate Captain who makes one last bid to be “Pirate of the Year”. As he’s up against rather more booty-laden competitors Cutlass Lil (Salma Hayek), Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry), his chances seem slim, especially as his choice of ships to raid is poor (plague ship, school outing, etc). Then he goes after The Beagle and captures Charles Darwin (David Tennant). As Polly, the ship’s parrot, looks uncommonly like a dodo, a whole new thread to the story takes us to London, despite Queen Victoria’s hatred of pirates, to display Polly at the Royal Society. Pirate Captain even slips the word and the concept of evolution to Darwin. The storyline is adapted by Hamish McColl from Gideon Defoe’s first Pirates book (no doubt with more to come from the series) and seems rather slimmed down in plot detail. Making up for it is the visual stuff, which is just brilliant: the application form for Pirate of the Year has a section for “roaring” where the strongest rating is “Brian Blessed”, and then Brian Blessed turns up voicing the Pirate King who presides over the contest. Anachronisms extend in all directions from the supposed 1837 setting, beginning with long-dead Admiral Collingwood at an audience with Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton), but we also get electric light, lifts, and even a prototype nuclear bomb. A ship with a reversing warning is another novelty, though sadly not enough for the rowing boat in the way. There are not that many huge laughs, but it hardly matters as the plot takes one crazy twist after another, culminating in the not so far-fetched idea of a Victorian dining club specialising in eating endangered species. Try the pygmy elephant nuggets. The crew are identified by attributes. Number Two (Martin Freeman) is actually billed as Pirate with Scarf, Brendan Gleeson as Pirate with Gout, Russell Tovey as Albino Pirate, and Ashley Jensen as Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate. All the characters are in Aardman’s traditional claymation. The model for the pirate ship is actually 15 feet long, and built by a company called Cod Steaks, based in Bristol (so very shipshape). The drawn background flies by: there’s a tavern called Napoleon Blownapart, and the motto of the Royal Society appears to be “Playing God since 1449”. Then when most of the audience has left, stay for the marvellous illustrations during the end credits showing a succession of contemporary posters for events like Cockney Baiting, and consumer goods – there’s even a pauper repellent, “Urchin-be-gone”.
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ore serious fare can be found in Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Into the Abyss (cert. 12A). After looking at primitive cave drawings in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog turns his attention to primitive elements of our own time, as Michael Perry awaits his execution in Texas for a brutal murder. Herzog examines why people kill, and why the state kills killers.
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Coming up over Easter, other than the Pirates there’s not much aimed at the school
holiday market. French film Le Havre seems a heart-warming story of an elderly man looking after an African boy who’s escaped from a container of illegal immigrants. Questioned about the boy, he says he’s his brother: “I’m the albino of the family”. Of course, ITV’s feeble TV serial version has served to enhance the reputation of the real thing as James Cameron’s Titanic makes a 3D return to the big screen – or take your sou’wester and head for the nearest IMAX. Steve Parish
DVD PICK OF THE WEEK Lost Kingdoms of Africa (Acorn Media) an you believe that there are some parts of the planet that even David Attenborough has not filmed? In this surprising BBC mini-series, Dr Gus Casely-Hayford takes us to parts of Africa that are hardly ever seen, exploring four ancient kingdoms. Blowing away desert sands, he shows how green, fertile and immensely rich Africa once was. In the first of these 55-minute episodes, we see Nubia’s pyramids, which still remain as testament to when Nubia was powerful enough to conquer Egypt. We also get a peek into the Old
Nubia’s pyramids
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Testament land of Cush. Casely-Hayford then asks whether Ethiopia’s
emperors really descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. En route, he shows Lallibella’s huge church, dug out of solid rock like a massive sculpture, and Debra Doma’s hilltop monastery – one of the oldest permanently- occupied Christian communities in the world. The Great Zimbabwe story reveals a gold-rich African kingdom and a city whose amazing huge and precision-fit stone walls still puzzle us today. The final episode shows how the displaced people of Benin (now parts of Nigeria and Mali) kept their identities alive from ancient times through wood and metal images, some of which are now in the British Museum. This is a visual treat, with some dramatic landscapes, breathtaking rock-built settlements, a castle and bright colours, virtually all of it uncovering an Africa that most people did not know existed. Discovering these civilisations is a particularly fresh experience. Derek Walker