angelophile | Dec. 23rd, 2007

Uneventful day - I've been blitzing my flat, emptyung cupboards that haven't been touched in months, dropping off unwanted videos at a charity shop, generally making a complete mess with the end to tidying. Caught up with all my present wrapping, whicch literally took hours. Sat and watched The Italian Job and The Frighteners while I was doing so and then Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

Which was good and certainly had its moments, but The Princess Bride's claim as the greatest modern fairy tale is still intact. Stardust rated below Labyrinth, just lacking the sharpness of humor which made The Princess Bride and Labyrinth such great romps.

There's certainly plenty to enjoy, though - ghosts, pirates, magical stars, handsome (if murderous) princes, fair maidens, witches and unicorns. The highlights were an original and invntive swordfight at the end, the climax to any good fairy tale, some fun bait and switch (Rupert Everett homes into view like a shark, all sleeze and ambition, playing his villainous prince role up to the hilt and immediately you think you've met the villain of the piece. Things don't work out quite the way you might expect.)

It's also a delight to see a whole cast of minor British character actors strutting their stuff alongside cameos from the great Peter O'Toole and US stalwarts Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro as well as Claire Daines as the love interest.

Sadly her character is one of the flaws. Though it's her place in the story to be the maiden in distress, did they need to make her uite so passive? There's some nice verbal sparring at the beginning with the male lead, but as soon as the love story rears its head suddenly its simpering submissiveness and a desire to learn new skills such as dancing and looking pretty in a dress while the young hero hones more practical skills.

DeNiro's character is a bit of a mixed bag too. He turns in a likable performance but I'm in the minority of those who don't particularly rate him as an actor and the comic potential of his dual personaity isn't really achieved as he's not particularly convincing in either part. However, it's a lovely role and provides plenty of laughs.

Ricky Gervais, sadly, doesn't, and when he appears it took me out of the movie entirely because he seemed out of place and simply repeating the only role he knows how to play - The Office's David Brent, but in a funny hat. He's not a character actor in the traditional sense and it showed.

Likewise, would it have been too much trouble to get older actresses to play alongside Pfieffer's "aged" crone? Seeing all three actresses artifically aged wasn't convincing and having thirty-something actresses playing much older characters looked faintly ridiculous, frankly.

Other complaints aside (the story was packed with magic but seemed a little aimless in places, boiling down to "the characters go there and everyone else follows"), there's plenty to enjoy. Some knowing performances, even in minor roles, a nice line at comedy (especially the peanut gallery of ghostly princes) and a strong moral love story (issues with borderline sexist pigeonholing aside), made it a good fun movie to kill an afternoon.

For me the biggest chuckle was Mark Williams as a goat, though.