purvesgrundy Reviews

Fly Away Home (1996)

Beautifully Delicate

[30 March 2000]

Following Toy Story comes Fly Away Home, another string to the increasingly large bow of children's films that adults can also enjoy. The story follows Amy, a 13-year-old New Zealand girl who is forced to live with her estranged father in Canada following a car crash that kills her mother. Amy becomes increasingly withdrawn and upset until she finds a collection of similarly orphaned goslings that she takes care of, nurturing them until they are ready to migrate to the southern United States.

The film could easily have fallen into the sappy ‘family film' category. However, it never lets itself, choosing to concentrate more on characters than moments. Amy's character, played with breathtaking maturity by Anna Paquin, is better developed and more complex than characters in most films aimed at adults. The supporting cast also flesh out their strong characters to make the whole film much more believable.

The cinematography is beautiful, the dusky-autumnal scenes are captured in an explosion of reds and yellows and oranges that seem to wash over you time and time again, and the final flight sequence is a wonderful closing to an incredibly refreshing film.

Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997)

Really awful

[15 March 2000]

This film really doesn't work. It seems the director has totally missed the point of the story. The great thing about the Disney version (which made it scarier than this adaptation) was that all the dark gothic scenes came in moderation. For example, in the scene where Snow White runs through the gothic woods, we feel threatened and genuinely afraid. In the dwarfs she finds something warm and friendly in a dark and forbidding area. In this version all the stops are pulled out to make it as scary as possible and it just ends up a vague blob of something that could have been scary had the effort been put in. Sam Neill and Sigourney Weaver are wasted and the supporting cast fill out thankless roles.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Over rated

[1/10 · 14 November 1999]

I first saw this film when I was 15. I thought it was brilliant, really original and generally great. However, now (3 Years later) I realise it is nothing more than a pretentious piece of garbage.

Sure, it looks good, but when you really get down to it it's not doing anything. It doesn't have any real substance, it's not commenting on anything, it's just a totally throwaway product. Tarantino is talking loudly and saying nothing. And THAT narrative structure - it looks and feels original, but independent and foreign movies have been doing it, better, for years and years.

A truly trashy piece of postmodernism at it's worst.