Saturday 24 October 2009

"The Fantastic Mr Fox"

I took the lad to see this film today, at his request.

Ho hum. I didn't like the book and the film had a few funny moments but all in all the story was a bit repetitive - Fox has a cunning plan, he thinks he's got away with it but it then goes wrong, landing him in a bigger mess. He has another cunning plan, gets in an even bigger mess etc etc.

What I liked was the liberal use of the word "cuss" as a catch-all swearword (that I'm sure wasn't in the book), particularly when he describes a singularly dire situation as a "clustercuss". Oh, and the meanest of the three farmers smoked cigarettes, with real puffs of smoke etc.

The choice of music was weird as well. In the scene where the three farmers hire three huge diggers to uproot the tree, the background music is "Street Fighting Man" (a great song, don't get me wrong) where really it should have been "Gimme Shelter".

5 comments:

Jeff Taylor said...

"the story was a bit repetitive - Fox has a cunning plan, he thinks he's got away with it but it then goes wrong, landing him in a bigger mess. He has another cunning plan, gets in an even bigger mess etc etc."

Sounds more like a succession of government policies to me.

Witterings from Witney said...

Jeff Taylor's comment makes me think that when Matthew Parris wrote "a gnat of a man leading no more than a rag-tag party with no more than a dishcloth of a manifesto," he was in fact talking about Gordon Brown.

banned said...

Let me hazard a guess that the bad-guy smoking farmer also had an English accent ? It seems to be the usual shortcut/bookmark to enable lazy American filmgoers to identify who to boo at.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JT, true.

WFW, who did MP think he was writing about?

Banned, all three farmers had English accents IIRC. Big surprise, eh?

James Higham said...

Remind me to miss it.