Susan Hated Literature

Dir & Writ: Kevin Munroe
Comic characters created by Peter Laird & Kevin Eastman

• Mitchell Whitfield - Donatello (voice)
• James Arnold Taylor - Leonardo (voice)
• Mikey Kelley - Michelangelo (voice)
• Nolan North - Raphael
• Chris Evans - Casey Jones (voice)
• Sarah Michelle Gellar - April O’Neil (voice)
• Mako - Master Splinter (voice)
• Patrick Stewart - Max Winters (voice)
• Laurence Fishburne - Narrator (voice)
• Ziyi Zhang - Karai (voice)

Come on now, who doesn’t love the “heroes in a half-shell”? The main reason I went to see this was that is was on at the right time, and of course the nostalgia reason. Plus I haven’t been to see an animated film in a while. And this looks fantastic. Visually it is really great.

The plot, characters, and dialogue are less impressive, but still make for a fun trip to the cinema. We don’t get any origin story, just a voice over to bring us up to date on what is going on with the turtles. Leonardo is off in the jungles of South America, supposedly learning to be a leader, or at least that was the reason Splinter sent him off. Luckily enough April is poking around, looking for some statue, when she finds him and tells him that things aren’t going to well without him.

Don’t worry, he eventually makes a return to the sewers, and then discovers that the statue April brought back has come to life. Or back to life. See, 3,000 years ago there was this… ah, you don’t really want to know the plot do you? It’s the turtles, how involved could it possibly be?

Everything that fans remember is there; Splinter being all wise and kick-ass, Michelangelo stuffing his face with pizza, Donatello working with techy-type things and the constant conflict between Leo and Raphael^[1] So there is plenty to keep your attention, and it is exactly what it should be. A fun, entertaining film.

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Dir: Neil Burger
Writ: Neil Burger based on short story Eisenheim the Illusionist by Steven Millhauser

• Edward Norton - Eisenheim
• Paul Giamatti - Inspector Uhl
• Jessica Biel - Sophie
• Rufus Sewell - Crown Prince Leopold

In Austria at the turn of the 20th century a young carpenter’s son falls in love with a girl from the local nobility. Obviously her family are not impressed by this and do their best to separate the pair, and after much drama they succeed. The young boy is Eisenheim, aka Eduard Abramovich, and at the very beginning of this film we see him on stage in Vienna. As he begins his act he is promptly arrested by Inspector Uhl. Uhl then heads off to debrief the Crown Prince Leopold, and as he does we get to see all the back story too.

I loved the look of this film. Visually it worked really really well. Such a pity then that the rest of the film fell short. I never got a sense of Eisenheim as a character. Yes, we know that he loves Sophie, who by now is unofficially engaged to the Leopold, but as for the rest of his character? Nothing. Sophie is slightly more understandable. She has grown up knowing that eventually she’ll have to marry for the good of her family, but yet was never able to forget her teenage love. Leopold is another character fairly lacking in development. He’s the badguy. And that is about it. Inspector Uhl is probably the most rounded of the main characters, and he is played superbly by Giamatti.

If I’m going to be brutally honest I was a little bored by this film. Possibly because I had a fair idea of what was going to happen all along. Show Spoilers ▼

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