Whatever Works

Astro Boy:

Farrrrk you David Bowers. Piss on my family photo album if you wish. Run over my very first bike; you'll get no tears from me. But leave Astro Boy the hell alone!

This woeful, ultra-American reworking of the classic Japanese cartoon series completely misses the point. It takes the moral complexity and emotion of the original and remakes it as a boring, convoluted, characterless shell. This is mainly due to a script that should never have made it past the first draft stage.

Instead of taking storylines from the series, or even something closely approximating them, writer/director David Bowers has given us a story focussed round two spacey little balls of light - one made of pure, hippy, positive energy and one pure negative. What. The. Shit? Everything's then peppered with a bunch of ridiculous plot points that would give a three year old pause, let alone us twenty-somethings who grew up loving this stuff. Case in point, Toby (the human boy Astro is made to replace) is killed by a weapon's blast that's strong enough to completely vaporise him - yet somehow his little red hat and a single hair survive. That's right, flesh and bone don't leave so much as a pile of ash but somehow woven cotton has the resilience of a lead-encased cockroach.

The cinematic abominations continue ceaselessly from here. Creator Osamu Tezuka must be spinning in his damn grave.

The only thing left is for Bowers to complete his retroactive child abuse and remake Monkey Magic with Paris Hilton as Tripitaka or something. Bastard!

NO STARS FOR YOU!

Genova:

When mother and wife Marianne (Hope Davis) dies in a car crash, widower Colin Friels takes his two daughters Kelly (Willa Holland) and Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) to Genova, Italy. This ancient city becomes the backdrop for all of their attempts to deal with this grief.

Genova is one of those films that doesn't impress, nor disappoint; it just, kind of, is. Conflict and hardship are constantly being built up by director Michael Winterbottom, only to be defused moments later. As such there is a continual sense of ill-ease and creepiness throughout. This is at its most heightened when younger daughter Mary starts seeing her mother's ghost. But then it kind of flatlines.

Everything is well constructed and very honest. The performances and characters are near perfect and the city is shot beautifully but it all comes to naught. There's just not enough story for it to work. Events occur with little fanfare or interest, then fade into obscurity. We know these people quite well when the credits roll and the elements are there to make things interesting but it feels like Winterbottom is making a point of not following through.

This is not the sort of film that will encourage passionate responses - whether positive or negative. In the end it's all fluffer and no money shot.