What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

Beauty at rest.

(2021) Drama (MUBI) Giorgi Ambroladze, Oliko Barbakadze, Giorgi Bochorishvilli, Ani Karseladze, Vakhtang Panchulidze, Aleksandre Koberidze (narration), Irina Chelidze. Directed by Aleksandre Koberidze

From time to time, a pair of people very much in love are said to be “meant for each other.” When you consider the odds of two souls meeting in this life that are perfectly suited, it’s a wonder that anyone finds a soulmate. Sometimes, life itself conspires against them.

In this gentle Georgian film, Giorgi (Ambroladze), a professional soccer player and Lisa (Barbakadze), a pharmacist, literally run into each other in the ancient Georgian town of Kutaisi. Although we only see them from the knees down, we get the sense that something is happening. Later, they meet accidentally again (this time viewed in a far shot that makes them look like ants). The two agree to meet the next day for a date at a café.

But for reasons never made clear, the couple attract the evil eye who levels a curse on the two young people; during the night as they sleep, they are transformed in appearance. They also lose the skills they had in their professions, causing them both to lose their jobs. To be sure, new actors take over the roles of Giorgi (Bochorishvilli) and Lisa (Karseladze).

Now the two get menial jobs working in, ironically, the same riverside bar but they don’t recognize one another. With all of Europe overcome with World Cup fever (and Kutaisi is no exception) the two would-be lovers go on with their lives, never aware tht the person that had caught their fancy is so near at hand. Will they find each other despite the obstacles?

Now I know, dear reader, that this sounds like the plot of a 20-year-old rom-com, but this is most assuredly not that. Koberidze doesn’t make it that easy, nor is he interested in spoon-feeding his audience a machine-made happy ending. Instead, the movie captures the rhythms and tides in a small Georgian city, and in a way the film is a love letter to that city, but it isn’t just that. There is a bit of fable to it as well, although one not so much written by the Brothers Grimm but perhaps by Carlos Castaneda.

Koberidze is fond of using odd images that are meant as visual puzzle pieces for the viewer to figure out, such as seeing only the feet of the two protagonists as they meet for the first time. What a person looks like is immaterial, Koberidze seems to be saying, and to drive that point home, he changes their looks to see if the two will fall in love all over again – although we never know if they would have fallen in love anyway had they not been cursed with the appearance change.

But the danger in that kind of thing is that one can get carried away with the imagery and symbolism, and that’s exactly what happens here. We end up with a two-and-a-half-hour movie with enough story to fill about an hour and a half of that. The filmmaking goes marching past metaphorical and right into self-indulgence without missing a beat.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to recommend here. Koberidze has a lovely sense of whimsy which he does utilize throughout the film, and the gentle (albeit slow) pacing really helps immerse the viewer in the location. There is also a beautiful score (sparingly used) by Giorgi Koberidze. What is most notable about the movie is the gentle spell it weaves, one sturdy enough to last the full 150 minutes but fragile enough that the slightest distraction might blow it away like a puff of smoke on the wind. It’s a lovely film, but it also requires a fair amount of patience.

REASONS TO SEE: There is a lovely sense of the whimsical.
REASONS TO AVOID: Often devolves into cinematic masturbation.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some mild sensuality.
TRIVIAL PURSUITS: The two middle-aged documentary filmmakers are played by Koberidze’s real-life parents.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: MUBI
CRITICAL MASS: As of 1/27/22: Rotten Tomatoes: 88% positive reviews; Metacritic: 85/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: 50 First Dates
FINAL RATING: 6.5/10
NEXT: Kate

Advertisement

The Holy Game

Who is going to be struck by lightning after one too many crude altar boy jokes?

(2021) Documentary (Gravitas) Grayson Heenan, Felice Alborghetti, Eric Atta Gyasi, Robert Sserate, Oscar Turrion, Duarte Rosado, Daniel Russian, Michael Zimmerman. Directed by Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly

 

There’s no question that the Roman Catholic church needs some image rehabilitation. Following the bombshell revelations that the church hierarchy covered up for priests committing pedophilia and knowingly reassigned these priests to new parishes who were unaware of the past indiscretions of the transferred priest, there seems to be some movement in that direction. For one thing, there’s a new Pope in town, one who seems intent on modernizing the church and acknowledging the sins of its recent past, but the damage has been done. The Church is having a hard time recruiting new candidates for the seminary (something that isn’t overtly mentioned in the documentary). Something tells me that at least initially, this film was meant in some ways to help rectify that issue.

Every year, the various seminaries in Rome stage a soccer tournament called the Clericus Cup. The various seminaries, representing all corners of the globe – which is an odd thing to say, given that the globe is a round object with no corners – and played in a spirit of friendly competition and spiritual devotion.

The movie follows a number of seminarians playing in the tournament, like Grayson Heenan, who is entering his final year of study in Rome. A native of Michigan and from what seems to be a fairly well-to-do family, he encountered resistance from his parents who were hopeful he would continue the family name, but he chose a life of celibacy and service. And, apparently, soccer, a sport he loves to play. He represents the North American Martyrs seminary, a once-powerful team that has in recent years underperformed but are favored to return to the finals, particularly given that Grayson is one of the best players in the tournament.

Then there’s Eric Atta Gyasi, a cheerful fellow who is always smiling. He is from Ghana and has spent 13 years trying to get ordained (most finish in four or five years), which leads one to believe that he’s in no particular hurry to return to Africa.

We hear about their daily routines and how soccer represents a break from that routine of studying, prayer and classes. We see Grayson being taught how to administer the Last Rites, and he seems to be able enough and certainly a compassionate sort. He talks repeatedly about service, of giving comfort to his community and seeing the priesthood not as a job but as a vocation, a calling that means more to him than the idea of starting a family, something that didn’t sit too well with his girlfriend at the time (she was invited to his ordination ceremony but declined to come, for which one could hardly blame her).

The public image problem is discussed, although more in terms of how people only see the negative side of the Church in the papers. And then we discover that one of the interview subjects being followed has been forced to leave his job in the church for having fathered a child after being ordained. For the sake of transparency, I think I should insert here that while a student at a Jesuit university, one of my teachers – a priest – was defrocked for having a relationship with a woman, whom he later married. He was also stripped of his job as a teacher and department head, which I thought was excessive. Certainly there were plenty of non-clergy teaching at the University, but this was a little while ago and they were far less tolerant of priests deciding to follow their hearts I suppose.

On a technical note, there were at least two fairly sizable portions of the film that had a graphic posted that the footage was not displayed due to a rights clearance issue – hopefully those will be resolved and those watching on VOD will either see the missing footage or have the audio cut from the film. It makes viewing the film as a critic a bit awkward.

The movie tended to skirt the issues a little bit. I don’t think it was the filmmakers intention to bring it up at all, but I think that all those looking to join the Roman Catholic clergy need to be aware that this is an issue that they are going to have to grapple with for some time to come. Getting the trust back will be a long and difficult process, and while seeing them cavort in shorts on the soccer field may at least humanize the priests a little bit – they are all human beings, after all – the movie doesn’t quite succeed in making the priesthood an attractive vocation, nor does it deal with the ongoing problem that the Church is faced with very well. There are moments that are fun, and interesting, but there isn’t a whole lot of depth here.

REASONS TO SEE: Humanizes members of the priesthood.
REASONS TO AVOID: Comes off as a recruiting ad for the priesthood.
FAMILY VALUES: Suitable for the entire family.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The Clericus Cup was founded following soccer stadium violence in which a police officer was killed by rioting fans; members of the clergy who loved the game wanted to show it could be played peacefully with great sportsmanship.
BEYOND THE THEATER: Fandango Now, Microsoft, Vudu
CRITICAL MASS: As of 7/2/21: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet; Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Religion of Sports
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Rebel Hearts

House of Hummingbird (Beol-sae)

A conversation on the landing.

(2018) Drama (Well Go USA) Ji-Hu Park, Sae-byeok Kim, Seung-Yun Lee, In-gi Jeong, Sang-yeon,  Son, Su-Yeon Bak, Sae-yun Park, Yun-seo Jeong, Hye-in Seol. Directed by Bora Kim

 

The most recent Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards was a Korean film, which gives you an idea just how vital and thriving the film scene is there. Korean directors are unafraid to take chances with oddball humor, or unspectacular thematic material handled in a quiet, reverent manner.

Eun-hee (J-H Park) is 14 years old in 1994, and lives in Seoul with her baker father (I-g Jeong) and her distracted, depressed mother (Lee). Eun-hee has not been doing particularly well at school, being forced to go to “cram school” to get her language grades up. With her best friend Ji-Suk (S-y Park), she goes out to juvenile karaoke clubs, experiments with kissing and occasionally shoplifts. In the meantime, the World Cup dominates her father’s attention as does the bakery which is dangling on the precipice of failure. A North Korean dictator dies, leaving the people of Seoul to wonder if war is coming.

Her cram school tutor Young-jii (Kim) is the only adult that gets the desperately lonely Eun-hee. Betrayed by her friends, marginalized by her parents, ridiculed by her schoolmates and beaten by her older brother (Son) who is under tremendous pressure to pass his exams and get into college which would all but assure him of a decent job.

Eun-hee is used to not being taken seriously, but she has aspirations of being a cartoonist and she might not necessarily be as dumb as she’s made out to be. However, the challenges in her life grow exponentially as a mysterious growth behind her ear might be serious, requiring an operation that could leave her face partially paralyzed. On top of that, her relationship with Young-ii is growing more complicated and a family tragedy rocks her world. It’s nothing, however, to the tragedy that is fast approaching.

Although Bora Kim has been making short films for more than a decade, this is her first feature-length film and it has the taste of autobiography to it. The film has had an acclaimed Festival run, winning awards at both Tribeca and the Berlinale. The film deserves the accolades; this is a smart, affecting film that looks critically at Korea’s patriarchal culture and through Eun-hee tries to find a young girl’s place within it.

There is a realism here that is refreshing; the sexual exploration of Eun-hee isn’t particularly sweet but fumbling and awkward. She is a definite scholastic underachiever (to which I could relate) while at the same time having a definite goal in mind. Seoul, which at the time was undergoing a building spree and had become a world economic center is definitely a character in the film; clearly the director feels affection for it especially in the way her cinematographer Kook-hyun Kang shoots the urban scenes through almost a nostalgic haze.

Kim takes her time telling the story and isn’t afraid to meander a little bit, but that is anathema to American audiences who prefer their storytelling taut and efficient. Kim prefers to allow the story to unfold at its own pace although there are times that I did wish she’d get on with it. Americans, right? In any case, this is an impressive feature debut for a talent who seems destined to be one of the very best in a film scene that is crowded with talented young directors.

The film is currently available via virtual cinematic experience which benefits local art house cinemas and is being handled by the good folks at Kino-Lorber. Click on the link below to find the nearest theater benefiting from its run; for Floridians, theaters currently promoting the film include the Movies of Lake Worth and the Movies of Delray in Miami, the Corazon Cafe and Cinema in St. Augustine and the Tampa Theater here in Central Florida.

REASONS TO SEE: Ji-Hu Park is an engaging lead. A slice of life in the Korean working class.
REASONS TO AVOID: Attention-span challenged American audiences may find it long.
FAMILY VALUES:  There is some profanity, sexual situations and domestic violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: A line about wanting to be a cartoonist in the letter from Eun-hee to her teacher Young-jii was taken directly from director Bora Kim’s adolescent diary.
BEYOND THE THEATER: Virtual Cinematic Experience
CRITICAL MASS: As of 6/126/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 100% positive reviews; Metacritic: 79/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Seoul Searching
FINAL RATING: 7.5/10
NEXT: Cold Pursuit

Diamantino

Attack of the fluffy puppies.

(2018) Comedy Fantasy (Kino Lorber) Carloto Cotta, Cleo Tavares, Anabela Moreira, Magrida Moreira, Carla Maciel, Chico Chapas, Hugo Santos Silva, Joana Barrios, Felipe Vargas, Maria Leite, Manuela Moura Guedes, Djucu Dabo, Leandro Vieira, Vitor Alves daSilva, Abilio Bejinha, Vitor de Almeida, Elisabete Pendeira. Directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt

 

Most movies are fairly straightforward. Some, however, are a little bit on the weird side. Still others are just so out in left field that the best thing to do instead of thinking about it too much is to just go with it. Diamantino is one such film. How to describe it? IndieWire critic David Ehrlich described it as a “technicolor glitter bomb of a movie” and that’s as close to a perfect description as we mortals are likely to get.

Diamantino (Cotta) is the world’s best soccer player, leading his Portuguese team into the 2018 World Cup finals. He is a good-hearted, terminally naive but dumb as a rock man. His career is guided by his loving father (Chapas) but also in the picture are his amazingly venal twin sisters (A. Moreira and M. Moreira) who see their lunk of a brother as a never-ending meal ticket and from whom they embezzle cash at a terrifying rate. It has gotten to the point where the Portuguese authorities in the persons of Lucia (Leite) and Aisha (Tavares), a pair of federal agents who also happen to be lesbian lovers.

Diamantino owes his success to being able to eliminate distractions of the crowd and even the other players on the pitch by visualizing the stadium as a field of cotton candy in which giant Pekingese puppies the size of trucks cavort.  When he is fouled in the final seconds of the game and has a chance to tie it up after being awarded a penalty kick, the Portuguese announcers assume that they have the tie in the bag. Inexplicably, the visualization fails and Diamantino misses the kick by a country mile, going from national hero to international disgrace in the blink of an eye. The situation is so unthinkable that his dad has a fatal heart attack.

Stunned by the double blows, Diamantino decides to do something inspiring and adopt a refugee child. The agents recognize the opportunity and insert Aisha as “Rahim,” a young boy from Madagascar. Nobody in the household seems to notice that Rahim is an adult female. The sisters, now freed from the constraints of their father, decide to further exploit their brother by delivering him to Portuguese nationalists who want Portugal out of the EU and use Diamantino as the poster boy for that movement. In addition, a mad scientist (Maciel) working for the Portuguese government is allowed to conduct experiments in an attempt to clone Diamantino and extract the source of his genius which has something to do with combining clownfish DNA with his, consequently causing female breasts to grow above his magnificent pectorals – and it gets weird from there.

Fans of French absurdist Michel Gondry will likely be doing cartwheels in the theater at the sight of this feature for first-time feature directors Abrantes and Schmidt. There is a whimsical, almost fairy tale-like tone to the film that plays like one of those dreams that make no sense at all but make perfect sense while you’re asleep. I couldn’t help but suspect that there is an allegory going on here and there are certainly a lot of salient political points, addressing the refugee crisis, rampant European nationalism, genetic manipulation and the exploitation of sports stars.

Despite the political points this isn’t a political film and the filmmakers tend to address their subjects superficially. This is, after all, a comedy and one suspects that even the filmmakers don’t take the movie too seriously. It is a mishmash of genres, including espionage thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, satire, spoof and sports film. In other words, something for everybody – well, nearly everybody.

The effects are low-budget and look it but the cinematography is strong and the score is really nice, augmenting the mood well. Some are definitely going to find it too radically weird so those who find Monty Python too high-brow might want to give this a miss. For the rest, this is a remarkably entertaining, endearing and occasionally sweet morality play that ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to heart-tugging pathos. Any movie with giant puppies can’t be all bad.

For Florida readers, the film is currently playing only at the MDC Tower Theater on the campus of Miami Dade College so if you want to catch it in a theater, you’ll have to go there. Keep an eye out for it at your local arthouse; otherwise expect it to be available to stream later this year.

REASONS TO SEE: Extremely imaginative from the plot to the effects. A really nice score.
REASONS TO AVOID: May be too whimsical for some.
FAMILY VALUES: There are some sexual references and nudity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The lead character was loosely based on Christiano Ronaldo and the story inspired by a pair of essays by David Foster Wallace.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 6/2/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 88% positive reviews: Metacritic: 77/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Science of Sleep
FINAL RATING: 7.5/10
NEXT: Free Trip to Egypt

The Miracle Match (The Game of Their Lives)

Zachery Bryan and Wes Bentley are chagrinned to discover that nobody wants to see a movie about soccer.

(2005) True Life Sports (IFC) Gerard Butler, Wes Bentley, Patrick Stewart, John Rhys-Davies, Jay Rodan, Costas Mandylor, Louis Mandylor, Zachery Bryan, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Gavin Rossdale, Terry Kinney, Craig Hawksley, Nelson Vargas, Richard Jenik. Directed by David Anspaugh

The most popular sport in the world is what we call soccer and every other civilized nation on the globe calls football. For some reason, it just doesn’t resonate with the American psyche and for the most part, the popularity of soccer in this country has resided in the immigrant communities, particularly European and Latin American immigrants who grew up with the game in their blood.

In 1950, soccer barely registered at all to the American public but in St. Louis – particularly in the Italian enclave known as “The Hill” – it was more than a passion, it was a pastime. There were many who felt that the best soccer in the nation was being played there, especially to St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Dent McSkimming (Kinney) who covered the soccer beat for the paper. When the U.S. wangled their way into the World Cup (back then, it didn’t have the long and involved qualifying tournament), most Americans reacted with a “what’s that?” – if they reacted at all. However, McSkimming and some of the St. Louis soccer players were excited when Walter Geisling (Hawksley), one of the great promoters of soccer in this country during that era, came to town to announce try-outs for America’s first World Cup team. 

Because it had been pulled together at the last minute, the team would have little time to develop. Laconic coach Bill Jeffrey (Rhys-Davies) has two completely separate schools of play to choose from; the extremely disciplined style of the East Coast, led by Walter Bahr (Bentley) and the freewheeling style of the St. Louis Italian clubs, whose best player is goalie Frank Borghi (Butler). Somehow, the players had to figure out a way to blend their styles into something new, something stronger if they had a chance of competing. Winning a game? Not possible. They would be going up against national teams that had lived together and played together for months, with the best players in the world playing on them. When they went to Brazil, the team was hoping merely not to embarrass themselves.

As luck would have it, they were scheduled to play against the English team, the clear favorites to win the cup and a team led by the greatest player of the time, Stanley Mortensen (Rossdale). They would have to play the game of their lives to pull off the greatest upset in World Cup history, but somehow, you know what the outcome will be.

This movie was released initially as The Game of Their Lives  but when Disney released this on home video, they changed the title to The Miracle Match, possibly to distance themselves from the disastrous theatrical box office numbers. American soccer continues to be in its adolescent stages, but the American sports movie certainly has a bit more maturity to it. Ultimate underdog movies like this have been done before, in Miracle and Hoosiers (which Anspaugh also directed). One of the problems I have with a sports movie like this is that you have to get invested in the players and their off-field dramas in order to gain that rooting interest. Sadly, that never happens here. These are a bunch of cardboard cutout character types that are so blandly played that you can barely tell one from the other. Butler and Bentley gamely try their best, but they are ultimately submarined by a sub-par script. For example, the man who coaches the team, Bill Jeffrey, comes off as someone who essentially just shows up at the games. He has no insight into the game that we’re privvy to, and never seems to make any decisions regarding the team – the players do that. 

Just as bad, the soccer sequences are uniformly bad. It’s obvious the actors can’t play the game very well, and the Bend It Like Beckham sequences – which are performed by adolescent girls – come off far more realistically. While Anspaugh captures the era nicely, in the end, this is an emotionless movie that does not do well by a group of men who deserve better for one of the crowning achievements in all of sports history.

WHY RENT THIS: Captures a little known moment in U.S. Soccer history. Bentley and Butler do fine jobs in their roles.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Lack of character depth and the feeling of “Haven’t we seen this before” pervades the entire film. Soccer sequences are atrocious.

FAMILY VALUES: Some mild language and thematic issues.

TRIVIAL PURSUITS: In the scene of Gino and Janet’s wedding reception, the guests are played by members of the St. Louis contingent of the team, their children and grandchildren.

NOTABLE DVD FEATURES: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $388,998 on a $20m production budget; the film was a major flop.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

TOMORROW: Unknown

Flushed Away

Roddy St. James wanted a couple of slugs with dinner, but this isn't what he had in mind.

(2006) Animated Feature (DreamWorks) Starring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellan, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis, Shane Richie, Kathy Burke, David Suchet, Miriam Margolyes, Rachel Rawlinson, Susan Duerden, Miles Richardson.  Directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell

It is no secret that a life of privilege and ease and a life of work and stress are as worlds apart as can be. Night and day doesn’t even begin to describe it. We all aspire to be in the penthouse, but generally most of us have to settle for scraps floating around in the basement.

Nowhere is this allegory more succinct than in Flushed Away. In this animated feature, a pet mouse named Roddy St. James (Jackman) lives in pampered gentility in the fashionable Kensington district of London. His home is a magnificent, plush cage with all the amenities a rodent could aspire to. Better still, when the human inhabitants leave the house, as they do frequently, Roddy gets free run of the house. Being a refined and sophisticated mouse, he looks for the right outfit for the right occasion, be it volleyball at the beach or fine dining. He has a wardrobe – well, it belongs to the dolls but it fits him nicely – and prefers the studied elegance of a tux to just about anything else in his closet.

With England gripped by World Cup fever – the finals are just a few days away, and the plucky Brits are taking on the Germans – Roddy finds there is one thing that he doesn’t have in this existence of plenty – company. He is a pampered pet, but a pet nonetheless and it is a cage where he sleeps, no matter how gilded the environment.

That all changes when the plumbing backs up a bit and out jumps Sid (Richie) from the depths below. He is a sewer rat with a cockney accent and a foul leather jacket. Sid takes one look at the new digs and decides he wants to stay permanently. Roddy is aghast at the concept, but plots to get rid of the unwelcome guest. He escorts Sid to the bathroom and offers him a nice Jacuzzi bath. Sid, being a worldly rat, is not fooled by Roddy’s weak scheme. Instead, he gives Roddy a nice push into the “Jacuzzi” and pulls the lever to activate the bubbles. Of course, Roddy is flushed down the toilet.

He winds up in the sewers, far from his beloved home. Everything is strange and unfamiliar, especially the slugs who are everywhere, squealing in high-pitched terror. Then, Roddy finds himself in a city…a copy of London made out of garbage and debris, inhabited by rats. It is a wondrous place, with peg-legged salts (whose wooden legs are made of pencil stubs) selling fish and chips…well, fish…well, it looks a lot like fish…from the harbor side. Roddy wants nothing to do with all of this, however. Like Dorothy before him, he just wants to go home.

The only ship captain brave enough to travel the dangerous waters of the sewers to the world above is a lady named Rita (Winslet), captain of the “Jammy Dodger.” She is plucky and brave, but suspicious. Seems there’s a nefarious criminal after her – one Toad (McKellan). She has something of his – well, it was hers before it was his but that’s not the way he sees it – a ruby. Roddy arrives just as a couple of his nastier henchmen – Whitey (Nighy), an ex-lab rat, and Spike (Serkis), a street-smart hooligan – come to retrieve the Toad’s property.

They wind up capturing the pair, especially since Roddy, who doesn’t care how he gets home as long as someone gets him there, sells Rita down the river. However, when Toad (as most criminal masterminds will) decides to deep-freeze them both, Rita rescues the both of them, taking a critical item that Toad wants even more than the Ruby (which is just glass, by the way) since it is central to his plans of taking over.

Once Spike, Whitey and their fellow henchmen are unsuccessful at recapturing the pair, the disgusted Toad calls in the big guns; the French super-criminal Le Frog (Reno) and his group of miming, prone-to-surrender French Frogs. In the meantime, Roddy meets Rita’s family and begins to realize just what he is missing. Still, he has to get back home and promises Rita real jewels to get him there. She may not trust him, but she is loyal to a fault, particularly when a bargain has been struck. Still, with the villainous amphibians on their trail, can they make it to the penthouse once again?

Aardman Studios, the creators of Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit are responsible for this. It is their first foray into computer generated animation – they are known for their stop motion animation, which doesn’t work very well with water, which much of this movie is set on or near. They brought in veterans of Shrek to help them, and so this has the look and feel of an Aardman film without the thumbprints – although the software written for the movie actually digitally inserts imperfections into the characters to make it look more like a traditional Aardman movie.

Like most Aardman movies, Flushed Away skewers British life and frailties (although they go after other nationalities, with the ugly American tourists and the supercilious French) and carries a tremendous amount of in-jokes. For example, when Roddy is going through his wardrobe, he finds a yellow spandex outfit that looks suspiciously like what Wolverine wears in the comics (Jackman, of course, plays Wolverine in the X-Men series). A cockroach is seen reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Roddy encounters a Nemo-like clownfish in the sewers.

The real attraction here are the slugs. Although at first it looks like they’re going to be a one-joke occurrence, they settle into a role as a kind of Greek chorus, singing popular songs to emphasize various points during the movie. They never fail to amuse; in fact, every time they came onscreen, I wound up laughing, many times out loud. They’re by far the best part of the movie, not unlike Scrat the Squirrel in Ice Age. If the movie does well, don’t be surprised if we see a lot more of the slugs over the next couple of years.

The movie is well-cast, with Jackman bringing a kind of dorky charm that he displays from time to time onscreen (see Kate and Leopold). His chemistry with Winslet is surprisingly good, and Reno has a great time lampooning a character he played in Leon: The Professional. The problem I have here is a minor quibble; the story is a bit unnecessarily complex. They have this whole subplot with the ruby and then cast it aside very abruptly when Toad sets his eyes on something else. That left the ruby kind of superfluous; they’d have been better off without it and just have Toad go for the thing he really wants from the get go, instead of having to contrive for Rita to steal it. I guess they must have needed to pad the running time a bit.

Still in all, this is real entertaining for kids and their parents alike. The slugs are some of the funniest characters this year, and to my mind this is right up there with Cars and The Ant Bully as the best kids movie of the year. Considering this is an Aardman production, that’s not surprising at all.

WHY RENT THIS: Like all Aardman productions, this is big time quality all the way, and plenty funny for both kids and adults. The slugs are hysterical.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Some of the British in-jokes may not necessarily play well outside of the U.K.

FAMILY VALUES: Some of the humor is a bit crude and a few bad words, but otherwise suitable for most kids and certainly all teens.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Robert DeNiro and William Shatner were also considered for the part that eventually went to Andy Serkis.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There are a couple of extra slug songs. There is also a pipes maze in a fair-to-middlin’ kids section.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $178.1M on a production budget of $149M. The movie lost money.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

TOMORROW: Ninja Assassin