Local Hero, Fateless, & Flushed Away

Local Hero is a little film about a big oil company wanting to buy a little Scottish fishing village to put up an oil refinery. It's fitfully funny, but it's more of a character study of the oil company representative falling under the spell of the town. There is nothing at all wrong with the film, and that's actually a charm. Everything it sets out to do it does. Sure, some of the special effects were obvious, but it's a fairly low budget, early 80s film. The village does seem like quite the place to live in, if you want everyone to know your business.

Fateless is, apparently, the most expensive Hungarian film of all time, about a 14 year old going through the Holocaust. So now you know why I watched it. Because, as a Jew, I have to watch and cry at everything Holocaust related. I failed in this case. No crying. In fact, I got quite a bit annoyed. What a whiny bitch, and how the hell could he just not listen to people who know better? And, at the end, when he says there were happy times in the concentration camps, I was wondering just where the hell those were? I do not recall anything happy happening in camp, unless you count horrible knee abscesses, lice, beatings, not enough food, and hard work. Seriously, I would have liked it more if it had shown these "happy" times. Otherwise, it was a standard long tale of survival against the odds. Just like every other Holocaust film ever made, except for the crap ones like Life Is Beautiful. I will never forgive the Academy for that. Well, there are a lot of things that the Academy has gotten wrong over the years, but giving two Oscars to Roberto Benigni is unconscionable. As is having Daniel Craig play an American soldier. What the hell, Hungary?

Flushed Away is the first CGI Aardman Animations film, and as such, it works well, and is occasionally funny, but it suffers immensely from not having nearly the heart and humor of the other Aardman films. The water and fur wasn't that good, and the mice also didn't have enough hair. Also, there was far too much scoring for a soccer match. Those brief bits of soccer on screen bothered me far more than they should have, especially since it was just about making fun of it. The pop-culture references were also only occasionally clever, something that makes the film dated even as it should have been better. Shame.