Results tagged “billnighy”

A steaming hot pile of our favorite things from around the internets. As we did in our news post, let's get all the holiday-related stuff out of the way first: just in time for Thanksgiving, Cinematical finally announced the winners of their Halloween costume contest (definitely not our favorites, but we never got around to voting, so we guess it's our own fault). They also have a list of Seven Movie Characters They'd Hate to...

Normally we wouldn't be particularly interested in a kids' cartoon movie about a sheltered pet rat getting flushed down the toilet only to land in the middle of a whole city of rats, and a dangerous adventure he never could have imagined. But this movie was made by Aardman Animations, and we love Aardman Animations. These are the guys responsible for the classic stop-motion, clay-animated "Wallace & Gromit" shorts, as well as Chicken Run, and the recent Wallace & Gromit movie. They have a wonderful visual style and sense of humor, and even though Flushed Away is done using computer animation instead of the classic clay, both their style and humor come through effortlessly intact. Sometimes the characters even seem to be made of some magical, digital clay.

Fernando Meirelles' new film, The Constant Gardener, is about watching and being watched. The previews may fool you into thinking it's a movie about scandals involving the pharmaceutical industry in Kenya, or about a multinational murder mystery, or a love affair starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, or the exploitation of African poverty by a collusion of powerful government and corporate forces. And Meirelles, working from a screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, adapted from a John le Carré novel, turns his attention to each of these plot threads. But in the end, Gardener remains always a study on who gets to watch, whom is watched, and what happens when someone tries to escape, or even reverse, the terms of their surveillance. It is always about watching.