Film reviews: Pinocchio, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, Lynch/Oz

****

The film industry is one big game of keeping up with the Joneses. They’ve got a Cinematic Universe, so you’ve got to have one. They’ve started a streaming service, so you start one. They make a Pinocchio, you make a Pinocchio.

This is the third version of Carlo Collodi’s puppet boy tale to reach these shores in two years. First, there was a dark, almost adult-aimed Italian version. Then there was a Tom Hanks Disney one, and now, from Netflix, a beautifully crafted piece of stop motion animation.

While it struggles to reconcile its darker themes with the need to please the kiddies, it’s almost certainly the pick of the three.

Although he has made far more flops than hits, Del Toro’s name is still a selling point with fans. He shares the directing credit, but this is his baby and he's involved in all aspects of the production, down to helping to write the songs. (Yes, I’m afraid there are songs.)

His take is to set the story in Fascist Italy. Del Toro likes nothing better than setting a fairytale against a nice fascist backdrop, and here Mussolini and his black shirts are filling the role taken by Franco’s Nationalists in Pan’s Labyrinth.

I’ve often taken issue with the idea of Del Toro being a visionary director, but there are some striking designs here, beautifully realised. There is though an intrinsic problem with a film about a wooden boy trying to be a real one in a film where every other character looks like a puppet brought to life.

The film has a split personality. Visually, it’s Italian, but almost all the voices are very English, jarringly so. Gregory Mann’s Pinocchio sounds like he could be dispatched to Narnia, while McGregor plays Jimminy Cricket with his best R.P. Wan Kenobi accent, more hoity toity than tutti frutti. Listen to him telling someone to “bugger off.”

Considerable liberties have been taken with the plot in order to push the themes of mortality and loss. Geppetto (Bradley) is shown having a son who dies as a boy in the bombing of a church during WW1, and there are some tremendous scenes in a tortoise-run afterlife, where Pinocchio goes every time he is killed.

Balancing out the darkness are the songs and humour and overall I'd say that the twin sides of the vision reach an acceptable accommodation.

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro and Mark Gustafson. Starring Gregory Mann, David Bradley, Ewan McGregor, Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett and Christoph Waltz. In selected cinemas from November 24 then streaming on Netflix from December 9. Running time: 114 mins.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Image: US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Three Minutes: A Lengthening (12A)

***

The three minutes (and 53 seconds) are a home movie of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, a Polish village near the Ukrainian border, shot in 1938 by visiting American businessman, David Kurtz, who was making a tour of Europe with his wife and three friends.

On Thurs August 4, they visited the place his family had emigrated from and shot Kodachrome footage, some in black and white, some colour, of around 150 of the villagers. Less than a hundred of Nasielsk’s 4,000 Jewish inhabitants would survive the Holocaust.

The Lengthening is the hour (just over) Stigter's film spends exploring the images, trying to identify the people, draw out meaning and exploring their fates. The poignancy of this footage is a given, but you may wonder whether some of Stiger’s strategies - running the film in reverse, isolating individual faces - really add much to our understanding.

I would, very respectfully, take issue with the assertion that the Holocaust is what makes Kurtz’s film poignant. Any footage of people from the past has a desperate sadness. Time is the defining factor and its passing is the obscenity that gives it meaning.

Directed by Bianca Stigter. Featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Glenn Kurtz, Moszek Tuchendler. Partly subtitled. In Cinemas or Curzon Home Cinema. Running time: 69 mins.

Lynch/Oz (Image: Jean-Christian Bourcart-Lynch)

Lynch/ Oz (15)

**

A teenager with taped-down breasts dressed up like a little girl, being taken into the woods by strange men to see something magical – no wonder a mainstream family film as bizarre as The Wizard of Oz is a major influence for David Lynch.

Here, seven unseen writers and filmmakers present six analyses (Benson and Moorhead are a directorial team) of how Lynch’s art has been influenced by the 1939 classic. These are illustrated by a barrage of clips, often in split screen contrasting a Wiz scene with a Lynch one.

Kusama claims Oz is a foundational text for Lynch, like the bible. Lowery suggests the contrast between its troubled off-screen backstory and its innocent onscreen fantasy is the basis of Lynch’s vision of tarnished America.

They all agree that Oz is a holy script that almost all American filmmaking is guided by, which is quite depressing. The overriding notion you get from this is that the purpose of filmmaking is primarily the recreation of clips from films you saw as a kid. As such it’s a little rich for these other, lesser, filmmakers, to explore how a genuinely original filmmaker nicks ideas from an eighty-year-old film.

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. Featuring Amy Nicholson, Rodney Ascher, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead and David Lowery. Running time: 109 mins.