Film Round-Up: Clifford The Big Red Dog, Finch and Last Night in Soho
Here we go!
Clifford The Big Red Dog
Emily’s new dog Clifford ends up becoming incredibly large, attracting interest from an evil corporation. You’ve seen this film. You may not know it, but you have. It’s the tale of a lonely girl that gets a new magical friend and she needs to protect it from a dastardly evil corporation as they need it for vague evil things. Well actually no, they want the dog as they want to work out what made it so massive so they can possibly use that knowledge to make other animals large which might help with world hunger, but let’s not address that because then we couldn’t really back Emily keep the cute dog away from them. But back on point, this is a standard kids film where everything happens as expected in a kidsy way. Basically, you will be bored by it. But your kids will probably enjoy it as they don’t know the clichés yet. So chuck it on to keep the kids quiet while you do some other jobs in the house.
Finch
Tom Hanks builds a robot to help him get through the apocalypse. We’ve had a lot of these movies where a man gets a robot friend. They all rely on the personality of the robot and whether it can feel human enough to care about but roboty enough for it to still obviously be a robot. That’s why Short Circuit is seen as a classic and Chappie has been completely forgotten. And thankfully, the robot here is great. Called Geoff, which does remind me of the electric car that Top Gear made once, Geoff is like a very nice child who just wants to help even if his help is often not the best. It’s very hard not to be charmed by him and you do feel very bad when Tom Hanks tells him off for doing something wrong. The story is pretty standard, Hanks needs to travel to a new place in order to survive but that has its dangers plus he’s ill, but it’s effective and does what it needs to do to be emotionally resonant. This not the most original film and the pace sags in places but it is very likable and I enjoyed it for that.
Last Night in Soho
Eloise moves to London to become a fashion designer but starts seeing a vision of a budding 1960s superstar and her dark attempts of getting fame. It’s always good to get a new Edgar Wright film especially as he moves away from the Cornetto trilogy and this is Wright showing how much he loves giallo films. Giallo films are Italian slasher films which had their peak in the 1970. Typically they had a sweet looking young woman as their lead who would be put under an incredibly psychological terror plus lots of blood. So much blood. But what I love about this is that even though it draws iconic imagery from that genre and is so obviously inspired by them, it uses said imagery to create something new. The time switching is incredibly well done and you see a lot of old Wright tricks, as well as some new ones, and it leads to a different type of horror film what you might be used to. It all leads to a great closing climax which sees the best from the late Diana Rigg, who definitely went out on a high note with this movie.
