Nowhere Boy

Bleedin’ hell, The Beatles are just about everywhere these days, aren’t they? From repackaged, remastered remixes of their already digitally remastered but still somehow not quite remastered enough albums, to video games that let you don a plastic pudding bowl haircut (if only) and wield a plastic Rickenbacker/Gretsch/Hofner/Ludwig drumkit, and pretend to play some pandiatonic clusters while hoping to pass the audition, it might as well be 1962 – 1970 again.

As a Beatles fan since, oooooo, ages ago, I can’t say I really mind, because it’s refreshing to hear a “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” come blasting from your radio where moments before there was a “Puh-puh-puh pokerface.” But films about the Fab Four such as this latest offering from director Sam Taylor Wood have typically failed to raise my interest, as they never seemed to capture the spark present either in their music or in the films they themselves made.

Avatar (3D)

So here it is. Allegedly some ten years in the making and with an estimated budget somewhere in the region of the GDP of several small European nations combined, it’s James Cameron’s Avatar. They say it’ll revolutionise cinema. They say it’s a whole new way of doing things, with advanced technology used to both capture and display the action in a way never before seen or contemplated. The tag-line might as well have been “It’ll blow your freakin’ mind,” since that’s been the general thrust of the marketing push behind it.

There’s a lot riding on Avatar‘s box office take. Cameron’s career, the existence of 20th Century Fox (probably; $300 million is a lot of moolah), the very way in which big mainstream blockbuster movies get made in future. So it’s both something of a relief but also vaguely disappointing that Avatar has turned out to be quite good, actually.

Where The Wild Things Are

I suppose technically this is a children’s/family movie, given the source material and the big, hairy, friendly monsters. That said, it’s not exactly a typical family movie, since it’s directed by Spike Jonze and scored (partly) by Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. So if you happen to have an indie hipster kid to whom such things will likely appeal (and who isn’t going to feel too cheated by the fact that the version of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” used in the trailer isn’t in the movie itself), this could be just the movie for them. And you.