Cinema Review NOAH The movie had only been running for about fifteen minutes when it struck me, with head-banging certainty – ‘this is a crock’. It then went from bad to worse. The story of Noah’s Ark, an ‘end of days’ morality saga about what happens if you anger a vengeful master, is told in three short chapters of Genesis. Other than the flood and the animals, there is not a lot of material with which a filmmaker might construct a blockbuster but, with $125 million burning a
hole in his pocket, director Darren Aronofsky has gone troppo and come up with a standard hero (Russell Crowe) versus thousands of bad guys (led by Ray Winston) action flick. What is strange is that, despite his script’s being lifted straight out of the Bible, the word god is never uttered – ‘the Creator’ being Aronofsky’s weak-kneed alternative. In screen adaptations of ancient documents it’s always interesting to see what is taken from the source and what is cut – the raven
sent forth by Noah rarely gets a mention in popular re-telling, but is included here, as is the touching and identifiably human episode in which Noah’s sons cover their father’s body after he’d fallen down in a drunken stupor. Otherwise, it is endless rubbish, veering hysterically from bizarre sci-fi, as fallen angels stumble about the landscape in the form of giant figures made out of stone, to dysfunctional family histrionics. There aren’t a lot of laughs to be had in
the Old Testament, but the sight of Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah scrabbling around in the undergrowth looking for berries to eat as the deluge engulfs him is enough to tickle anybody’s funnybone, atheist or believer. Otherwise, the palette is crushingly black and brown and, sadly, the story’s most eloquent and heartening image – the one painted by countless artists – of the dove returning with an olive shoot in its beak, is an example of In its favour, Noah at least CGI at its most jarringly fake. delivered some overdue
decent rain to the shire. Hallelujah. ~ John Campbell
you can get over those not inconsiderable hurdles, you will have a ball in what is one of the best animations of recent times. How is it that a children’s movie can be brainier and have more heart – by the trainload – than a magnum opus such as the idiotic Noah? In order to mollify the parents of a girl who is bullying Sherman at school, Peabody invites the family to dinner – and yes, he is a spectacularly creative cook and cocktail maker. While he is entertaining the adults, Sherman and his tormentor, Penny, whom he is bound to get a crush on, sneak away and take off in the ‘way back’. Travelling to earlier periods in history has been a seductive daydream for yonks, so the kids’ adventures are a treat for anybody who
has ever indulged in it. From Marie Antoinette’s Versailles, to Tutankhamun’s Egypt, Leonardo’s Florence (he is trying to get La Gioconda to produce that famous enigmatic smile) and the Greeks’ wooden horse at Troy – it is simply fantastic. Along the way, there are scores of grown-up puns and throwaway references to classic films – Midnight Cowboy, Spartacus and Apocalypse Now to name but a few (Agamemnon sticks his nose into his hairy armpit
to say ‘it smells like victory’), but underpinning it all is the theme of rapprochement between father and son, of love and acceptance. This is a visually enthralling entertainment of great fun and good humour,
overflowing with imagination and the boundless possibilities that it opens up. If you don’t have children to take, don’t worry about it – go see it on your own. You’ll be richly rewarded – I was. ~ John Campbell
dog Dig and four camels, she walked 1,700 kilometres to the Western Australia coast, wrote about it for National Geographic, expanded that piece into a best-selling book and, inevitably, we now have John Curran’s excellent screen adaptation of it. There is a wickedly un-PC joke at the outset when, as Davidson, Mia Wasikowska is not permitted to take her camels through Uluru National Park because it is sacred ground, but the targets of wrathful humour are not atypically the fat tourists she encounters (who,
in all likelihood, forked out the money to put her book at the top of the charts) and the paparazzi who converged on her (and without whom nobody would know who she was). Curmudgeonly gripes aside, this is beautifully filmed, paced so as never to drag and richly atmospheric. I was also surprised by incidents of intense emotion – Davidson’s response to an aggressive approach by feral camels is heart-stopping, and Wasikowska’s reading of the moment doubly so. In hindsight, it was at
this point that the film got ‘real’ for me. Wasikowska is wonderful. Physical beauty, by encouraging the viewer to gaze dotingly on it, can often be a hindrance to deeper rapport, but Wasikowska subtly but firmly draws you into her world. She’s great with the animals, too, behaving towards them with unforced familiarity. Adam Driver, channeling Jeff Goldblum, provides pleasing romantic relief, but it’s all about the journey – and we’re all on one of them. ~ John Campbell
MR PEABODY AND SHERMAN Mister Peabody is a small talking dog who wears spectacles and a red bow tie. A successful court case has resulted in his adopting a human boy, Sherman.
Together they live in a specky pad at the top of a New York skyscraper. Mister Peabody, an outright genius, has also invented a time machine that he calls the ‘way back’. If
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26 April 1, 2014 The Byron Shire Echo
TRACKS I don’t know why I didn’t expect to like this – maybe it was that nagging sense that so much these days is done with the book and movie in mind. Popular media will never be able to satisfy the mob’s thirst for thrills and titillation and vicarious achievement (you can buy the T-shirt for $20). Like when that girl sailed around the world to become the youngest person to do it – there has to be a better reason, surely? None of which is meant to denigrate Robyn Davidson’s epic feat. Setting out in 1977 with her
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