Lilo & Stitch and Tarrac are in cinemas
Back in the day, when I obsessively watched and wrote something about every new release, I would have included Fountain of Youth which dropped this weekend on Apple TV+. Directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Natalie Portman and John Krasinski, I might have felt duty bound to pass on a opinion or two on something that will be watched – or at least started – by many thousands of people.
But Ritchie seems to putting out plenty of “content” on various streaming channels that is proving inessential or worse. The buzz on Fountain of Youth has been very low key and I’m still feeling burnt by Apple’s last foray into star-driven romantic comedy adventures. So, I chose not sacrifice another Saturday night and instead we watched Bong’s Mickey 171, a film that I was lukewarm on when it arrived in cinemas back in March but that at least has some originality about it (and the editor in-chief and reader SBM of Silverstream hadn’t yet seen it).
Turns out it plays like gangbusters at home – SBM gave it 10 to of 10 – and we all felt that this was a Bong film that – like Snowpiercer – audiences will find and enjoy over time. Pattinson is an absolute hoot.
Anyway, if you did watch Fountain of Youth this weekend, please let me know what you thought in the comments. It may not be too late for me to pass actual judgement.
Meanwhile, Disney’s recycling of their animated intellectual property continues apace with Lilo & Stitch, a remake of their hand-drawn family favourite from 2002. The choice of director felt positive – Dean Fleischer Camp created the charming Marcel the Shell With Shoes On stop-motion films so there was a strong possibility that this version of Lilo & Stitch would arrive with its heart intact.
I’m sorry to say that isn’t, in fact, the case. It tries hard enough and there has clearly been an attempt to reverse engineer what made the original work but it feels engineered, the result of check-box filmmaking rather than anything truly inspired.
Stitch starts life as Experiment 626, a genetically engineered super-weapon made by a galactic mad scientist (Zach Galifianakis). He’s so dangerous that he is considered to be an abomination and is exiled by the Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham). (By the way, has anyone from the Ted Lasso-verse made as much hay as Waddingham? She’s also on the big screen at the moment commanding an US Navy aircraft carrier in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and was a villainous movie producer in last year’s The Fall Guy remake.)
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That exile proves to be in Hawai’i where Stitch attempts to go undercover as a cute but untrainable puppy in the care of six-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha), herself still reeling from the Disney-loss of her parents and looked after by her big sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong).
Both Lilo and Stitch have major impulse control problems and trouble seems to find them everywhere, but eventually they form a deep bond just at the moment that authorities (law enforcement, social agency and galactic council) arrive on the scene to tear them apart.
One of the problems I found with the conversion to pseudo-live action is that the relative poverty of Nani and Lilo, the recklessness of Lilo and Stitch’s adventures and the jeopardy they end up in, are much less charming than when they look real. There’s an ick-factor now that the original cartoon never got close to. By being more grounded, this film is much less fun.
Aiming lower but hitting its target more successfully, the Irish language feel-good sports movie Tarrac is as pleasant a way to pass an hour and a half as I’ve seen recently. Aoife (Kelly Gough) returns to the small Kerry fishing village from her big city finance job in Dublin so that she can look after her widowed father, Bear, who has just had a heart attack (Lorcan Cranitch). He’s not much interested in being looked after and, with all this spare time suddenly, Aoife reconnects with the amateur rowing team she was part of as a youngster.
They’ve made it to the All-Ireland quarter-finals but – with no track record to speak of and not much in the way of talent or organisation – Aoife takes over as captain and they start to believe in themselves.
Sometimes, an utterly predictable story can work because of the uniqueness of the environment it takes place in and a sense of place is what Tarrac has in spades.
We have a subscription to Max in the US and the streaming scene is competitive enough over there that big films are arriving for home viewing much faster than they do here. Whether this is a good thing overall, remains to be seen.
