I could tell you about the deep emotional significance Lilo and Stitch holds for me, but it wouldn't be true. I finished watching it for the first time about half an hour ago, and Disney provenance notwithstanding, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I loved the warmth and anger of it, the messy family dynamics and its unwillingness to condemn any of the main players as evil or irredeemable. Most of all, though, I loved the two heroines, confused, wounded Lilo and her desperate sister Nani, trying to hold it together in the face of a family tragedy but only occasionally managing to get things completely right. It was great, too, to see female characters with realistically-proportioned bodies rather than the usual Disney jobs with waists narrower than their necks. All in all, it was a fantastic piece of animation that richly deserves any and all praise it receives.
Which, I'm pleased to say, makes it the second thoroughly enjoyable film I've seen this weekend. On Friday I finally succumbed to peer pressure and took an afternoon's holiday to go watch Captain America: Civil War, despite having been dreading it for the better part of a year. It's not that I'm saying that The Winter Soldier, the second instalment of the Captain America saga was awful - far from it. It was just humourless and emotionless and generally took itself far too seriously, and made for a miserable couple of hours at the cinema when I saw it the other year. I hadn't been in any great hurry to see more of the same, but then reviewers started talking about its demented likeability and then a friend started putting the thumbscrews on and I really, really fancied walking out of work at lunchtime for a long weekend...
Was it a good film? Not sure. I can't think of anything worse to say about it than that it was a bit on the long side, but then, it was hard for my Inner Critic to hear anything over the deafening squealing of my Inner Fangirl (It's VISION! And he's in MENSWEAR!). People have mentioned the presence of a bunch of superfluous characters, but I'm a sucker for huge ensemble casts, and besides, Tom Holland made for the most perfect Spider-Man I could ever have imagined and probably got more full-on laughs out of me than any other character. There are a lot of laughs, by the way, and tons more chuckles, so by the time it goes all serious in the final act it's abundantly clear that each and every Avenger still adores each and every other Avenger, with the possible exception of Jeremy Renner's defiantly grouchy Hawkeye.
Tell me it's a mess and I'd probably agree, but dammit, can you think of anything truly enjoyable in life that isn't at least a bit messy? Admit it - you can't, can you?
My rating:
Inner Critic: ***
Inner Fangirl: ***************************** (plus about a million more)
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