The delightful new computer animated feature from director John Lasseter and his Toy Story team, A Bug's Life has more than a few narrative elements in common with the recently released, rival DreamWorks production, Antz. Both movies take place in an ant colony where an out-of-step ant bucks the system and comes to the rescue when the colony is threatened, and both feature a princess to whom the ant is attracted.
A Bug's Life is the much more adventurous and accomplished of the two movies, and it eschews such distractions as the often out-of-place Woody Allen humour which permeated Antz. Lasseter's film takes as its starting point Aesop's fable, The Ant And The Grasshopper, and subjects it to a witty, inventive spin.
The unlikely hero of A Bug's Life is Flik, who is voiced by Dave Foley from Kids In The Hall. Every summer he and his timid fellow ants are forced to hand over a large portion of their hard-earned harvest to the greedy grasshoppers led by the malevolent Hopper, gleefully voiced by Kevin Spacey.
Flik believes he has found a solution to their problems with the new grain-harvesting contraption he has invented - but it accidentally causes all the grain to be lost in water, leaving the colony empty-handed when Hopper calls to demand his food. Enraged, he orders the ants to amass double his usual portion before the end of the season.
In the great tradition of The Seven Samurai and its many re-workings (The Magnificent Seven, Battle Beyond The Stars, et al), Flik seeks out some tougher bugs to defend the ants against Hopper's gang. He travels to a city (in effect, a rubbish pile) where he encounters a disparate troupe of flea circus performers who have just been sacked by the ringmaster, P.T. Flea, and brings them back to his colony.
They include a praying mantis magician, a male ladybug, an intellectual stick insect, a caterpillar clown, twin Hungarian pill-bugs, and a black widow spider whose 12th husband has just died. The consequences are often uproariously funny as Flik and his would-be mercenaries stumble their way through preparations to save the colony from Hopper.
The action is infused with an impish sense of humour and an unforced charm, and much of it involves the misadventures which befall the colony's cute, freckle faced baby ant. As in Shakespeare In Love, there is some witty commentary on the vanity of actors, in the depiction of the circus performers as complete suckers for applause. The set-pieces, among them a thunderstorm, a hen's dogged pursuit of some ants and a crowd scene involving hundreds of ants, are brilliantly staged. The changing of the seasons is subtly captured in the gorgeous, richly textured imagery, and the movie's employment of the wide-screen format is arresting all the way from the opening scene. Happily, Randy Newman's jaunty score is not encumbered with songs, featuring just one which plays over the closing credits. And it's well worth staying with those credits, as they feature some very amusing spoofs on movie out-takes to cap what is an enchanting entertainment for audiences of all ages.
Hideous Kinky (15) Selected cinemas
Those purportedly halcyon hippie days of the early 1970s are revisited and exposed - unwittingly, I suspect - for the nonsense that they were in Gilles MacKinnon's lugubrious new movie, Hideous Kinky. It has been adapted for the screen by the director's brother, Billy MacKinnon, from Esther Freud's novel inspired by her childhood experiences of spending a year and a half in Morocco with her sister and their hippie mother.
In the movie, Kate Winslet plays the mother, Julia, who takes her daughters, eight-year-old Bea (Bella Riza) and Lucy (Carrie Mullan), who is six, to Marrakech. Julia wants to get away from the misery of a one-room London flat after her break-up with the children's father - and like so many people of her generation, she is fashionably in search of knowledge and enlightenment, trying to "find herself" in Sufism.
Deluding herself that child support will arrive any day in the post, the penniless Julia scrapes a living by making dolls and selling them on the streets. When her daughters are feeling homesick on Christmas Eve, she tells them that London is "cold and sad". When Bea, who is altogether more sensible than the irresponsible Julia, worries about missing school, Julia tells her that "nobody has to do anything".
Not a great deal happens in this turgid yarn beyond some travelling around after Julia becomes involved with a street performer (Said Taghmaoui from La Haine). Winslet struggles bravely with a dull, underwritten character, while the inexperienced youngsters, Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan, manage to breathe some life into the flaccid scenario of this extended travelogue. The Irish actress Michelle Fairley turns up briefly as an orphanage manager.
Hideous Kinky registers as disappointing after Gilles MacKinnon's previous (and best) film, his riveting treatment of a far superior literary adaptation in Regeneration. The title of Hideous Kinky comes from one of the word games played by the little girls, and as the movie unwound tortuously I idled away the time devising alternatives: Out Of It In Africa, Morocco And Its Brothers, Marrakech Excess, Sufi's Choice.
Dreadful, I know, but when a movie is so utterly un-involving one has to find some way of passing the time.
The Philadelphia Story (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
George Cukor's sparkling 1940 screwball comedy The Philadelphia Story gets a welcome reissue in a new print for a week from today. It's based on Philip Barry's hit Broadway play of the same name, which was written for Katharine Hepburn and which later served as the basis for the stage and screen musical High Society.
In The Philadelphia Story the incomparable Hepburn plays the priggish, wealthy socialite, Tracy Lord, who is about to marry for the second time when her plans are disrupted by the unexpected arrival of her blunt-spoken ex-husband (Cary Grant), and of a reporter (James Stewart) and a photographer (Ruth Hussey) from Spy magazine. Stewart won the best actor Oscar for his deadpan performance, while Donald Ogden Stewart's scintillating screen adaptation of Barry's play took another. Directed by Cukor with a deceptive lightness of touch, this delightful comedy features the leading players all on fine form and surrounds them with an impeccable supporting cast.
