Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Stardust ***
Director: Matthew Vaughn


Writer: Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn


Stars: Charlie Cox, Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert deNiro


Customs? I have a few things to declare ...

1. I love Neil Gaiman (on whose novella this film was based)

2. I hate Johnathan Ross (whose wife adapted the screenplay)

3. I find Claire Danes insipid and irritating. She possibly has the most annoying voice in cinema. She is very beautiful, but unfortunately that is as far as the interest goes for me...

4. When I heard Matthew Vaughn would be directing, I wept.

Now with that out of the way, on to the movie ...

The story revolves around Tristan, a village boy who wants to win the heart of Sienna Miller's Victoria, who is outrageously flirtatious and reasonably pretty, albeit a little too California beach blonde for England in the 1800s. One night while he is trying to tempt her into bed - sorry, holy matrimony - with a midnight picnic, they spot a star falling to the magical land beyond their village. He promises that he will venture forth to bring the star back for her, if she will marry him. When he finds the star, he finds that she is more than a lump of rock: she is in fact, Claire Danes, almost but not quite entirely not generating enough charisma for us to believe this proposition. But he is not the only one after the star, with Michelle Pfeiffer's seductive witch and various men-who-would-be-king also wanting to claim her powers for their own.

It's actually very good. It is hugely entertaining, funny, quirky and has a great plot (thanks Mr Gaiman). Cox is excellent as the starstruck (ha ha) Tristan, Danes has little to do beyond whinging prettily (can anyone believe she was once wistful Juliet, so full of potential and promise?) and there are enough jokes and twists to keep adults and little ones entertained. All instances of violence and sex (the novella contained rather a lot of both) are cleverly skirted over and, aside from one truly awful sequence where Danes tells the hamster-bound Tristan that she loves him (memo to Vaughn: LESS head movement = more sincerity) the direction is pretty inoffensive. It's a fairly faithful adaptation although in going from paper to celluloid some of the imaginative charm of the book has been lost. And while Robert deNiro's camp pirate draws on every homosexual stereotype you can imagine (cross-dressing, wrist-flicking, tea-drinking, mouse-fearing ... God help us) he does provide some of the best laughs in the film.

Please allow me to have a bit of a Ricky Gervais rant here. I know people love him. I know people think all he needs to do is walk onstage, utter a line (usually, "Are you havin a laff?") and the audience will be in hysterics. But this DOES NOT give you a licence to go straight from a successful BBC comedy into cameos in Hollywood films. He writes good comedy and he is amusing because he is a wheedly little man with a sweaty forehead and a nasty goatee, a high-pitched voice and an inflated sense of his own importance. Unfortunately these are not qualities for which he has to act, and I would go so far as to say that he cannot. He plays the same character in every film and show that he is in, and in this one, it just doesn't fit.

There now. Overall, a decent way to spend your Sunday afternoon and your $14. Just don't expect Sandman.

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