VCI’s deal with the Rank Collection has resulted in many British classics hitting DVD recently, and here are two examples of WWII-era escapism from major directors.

The 1939 programmer The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is an early assignment for Thorold Dickinson, who promptly made the excellent first version of Gaslight and later one of the most voluptuously visual British films of the 1940s, The Queen of Spades. It’s shot by Desmond Dickinson (no relation), who went on to such British classics as the Laurence Olivier Hamlet, The Rocking Horse Winner and The Importance of Being Earnest. So I’ve long wished to see this little whodunit, and now here it is in an amazingly crystalline print.

Let us compare and contrast two examples of stop-motion separated by a quarter century. The new recruit is The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a British production from Aardman Productions (universally and sensibly described as the Wallace & Gromit people). This effort isn’t from guru Nick Park, however, but director Peter Lord and writer Gideon Defoe (a likely moniker), based on the latter’s archly bonkers juvenile novel, although the book didn’t assign the role to Queen Victoria seen in this movie.

The wacky, lovable, misfit pirates, led by a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-ish Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant), meet timid yet scheming Charles Darwin (David Tennant) and, in an absurd ploy to secure the award for Pirate of the Year, go up against the iron fist of Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton). It’s cute, clever, whimsical, British, packed with eye-filling detail, and loud. I stress the last point, wondering if it’s a British thing to mix everything loudly except the dialogue, so that you have to turn it up to ear-splitting proportions. Maybe it’s just me.

It’s hard enough for a movie to successfully juggle one narrative, let alone many. Yet The Words, the latest from CBS Films, wants to posit it’s romantic dramatic within three individual storylines, each one supposedly providing insight into the human condition and the characters playing out these particular desperate lives. One plot has a high profile author (Dennis Quaid) reading from his latest bestseller, and catching the eye of an inquisitive admirer (Olivia Wilde). The other two are within the premise, tales revolving around the book’s protagonist, a wannabe writer (Bradley Cooper) who wants more than anything to be famous. After his honeymoon in Paris, he discovers an old manuscript in an ancient valise, and without blinking, republishes it as his own. Naturally, the original scribe (Jeremy Irons) comes calling, requiring he know the whole story before claiming the copy as his own.

Sounds simple enough, right? After all, Quaid reads something, explains it a bit more to Wilde, and then we get Cooper and his wife (Zoe Saldana) struggling while he tries to make good. Once Irons arrives, he offers up the “inspiration” for the faded typed pages - an ex-GI living in France after the War, wooing and then marrying a the girl of his dreams, and the tragedy that surrounds the birth of their child. Yet for some reason, the constant shifts in perspective, the flashbacking and flash-forwarding, cause confusion, and then concern. Initially, we assume Quaid is telling us something “true,” that is, a slice of life that either influenced him, or actually occurred to him. But then things get cloudy, especially once Irons walks in. Granted, he’s nothing more than a catalyst, a cog to move the story machine from one end to another, but as Quaid says in the end, “Maybe he’s just made up. Maybe he’s just fiction, like the book.”

Alternative title: The Jules in the Ground

POSITIVES:
* Big-budget “A” movie adaptation with some genuinely thrilling moments.
* Lavish sets, good effects, fun monsters, and decent performances.
* Once things get rolling along, there’s one episode after another.
* Gertrude the duck.
* Fun climactic scene.

NEGATIVES:
* Slow start.
* Lame songs and Scottish (really?) accents.
* Gender-based “humor” gets grating fast and goes on too long.

So far, it’s been a pretty lackluster year. The highs are so high, and the lows so bottomless, that the middling, mediocre center has been particularly problematic. Imagine eating a three course meal, where the dessert was fantastic, the appetizer awful, and the main course merely serviceable, and you get the idea. Naturally, this makes rummaging through the wreckage of any celluloid season that much more maddening. On one hand, the pros stand out significantly. So do the cons. But how do you handle those in the middle. Does something like ParaNorman, perhaps the best family film of the year, earn a place, merely because it’s better than the rest of the kid flick claptrap out there? Does a long simmering horror show like [REC]3 deserve acknowledgment, even though it’s been released around the world for months?

It’s always hard, but we’ll give it a shot anyway. Granted, before we go forward, it’s important to state that we couldn’t see everything the Cineplex had to offer. We skipped a couple anklebiter epics—Madagascar 3, Ice Age 4—since, in our opinion, they are remnants of franchises well past their prime. We skipped other examples of the genre as well as (The Odd Life of Timothy Green, The Oogieloves) basically on a lack of interest. On the other hand, there are many honorable mentions to take into consideration, such as Pixar’s pleasant Brave, as well as some few would champion (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and That’s My Boy, anyone???) as well as the usual compendium of outright mediocrity. So, when 2012 is written, these will be the films we think people will remember, both in a very good and a very bad way… and here’s hoping the rest of the year can save us from such seesaw aesthetics.