In another life, I was a film reviewer. I started when I was at university, writing for the Anglia Ruskin student newspaper. That was fun and helped me find my voice. Then I worked for the
Cambridge Film Festival; I did some reviews and interviewed the most important film director in Albania (at the time, maybe still) for the festival daily:
Kujtim Çashku. That's a story in itself as the venue changed right at the last minute and I ended up interviewing him, along with his wife, his protégé and his wife in the Arts Picturehouse bar! I also got to see
Pirates of the Caribbean 2 all by myself in one of the screens, which was brilliant but weird. I wrote reviews for an independent film reviewer's website, for
Local Secrets and via my
Flixster account. You can still read my Local Secrets reviews as they're still on the website. I have gathered them together via
MultiURL. Finally I reviewed on a radio show: 209radio which became Cambridge 105; the
Bums on Seats team is still going strong, headed up by Toby Miller who occasionally hosts the film quiz at
Cambridge Arts Picturehouse; it's on every first Monday of the month.
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| Miss Potter review |
As much as I love films, reviewing them made me lose the enjoyment of watching them and having to go to the cinema to see films I didn't necessarily want to see started to grate. Plus I always took it personally when people didn't like my reviews and reviewers have more power than they know: the power to influence whether someone goes to see a film or not. People can forget that film critics are people with opinions and that's all a review is, one person's opinion. That's why I try to include facts in my reviews, to make my writing less subjective, like with the
Miss Potter one above. I think the final straw was
Superhero Movie. I no longer go to the cinema unless it's for a film I really want to see, which is only a few times each year, rather than at least 3 times a month. I still blame Bums on Seats for getting me into
Twilight, though reading the books, practically devouring them in one sitting, made me disgusted with it. But I learned a lot reviewing, especially on the radio show, and my life is more insular now as I'm not seeing films I might otherwise have passed by; the films I watch are much less broad now. The reviewing did wonders for my confidence, my writing and for my world view.
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| My fictional library website |
My film geekery lead me to take film studies modules at university; I wrote a piece on the trend for making sequels that is as true today as it was when I wrote it. I created a website for my Librarianship degree for a fictional geeky library. It's still up and running! I called it the
Abrams' Library after the creator of my favourite TV series
Alias, who's done rather well for himself since and proved his geek credentials by directing both the new
Star Trek films and the new
Star Wars. And my
Pinterest page is pretty much taken up by my love of films, TV and books.
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| My Pinterest page |
So it takes a special film to make me want to review it, a film that really means something to me.
Jersey Boys was the first in many years and
Inside Out is the next film and surely won't be the last.
I must admit, I'm an out and out Disney fan and by extension a Pixar fan. I grew up with Disney; I have only just finished converting my Disney VHS collection to DVD, having received a Disney film each Christmas as a kid from one of my aunties. However this is going to be an objective review, not biased by sentiment. However Disney and Pixar have always been at the top of the animation game, really only rivalled by Studio Ghibli in terms of quality and quantity. Their output has relatively recently veered away from the princesses and fairytales,
Brave being a notable exception but Merida is not your typical Disney princess.
Toy Story may have started it all, through talking animals, monsters, superheroes and cars. However it was with the space saga
Wall-E, a tale of two robots and with an environmental lesson as its theme, that the animation studio started to do something different. It continued with the left of field
Up with an old man as its central character. But even by these standards,
Inside Out is different.
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| The Numskulls. Credit: The Beano |
When I first heard about it, I was intrigued. I loved the idea of a film which personified emotions and showed the workings of the mind. The premise of human-like creatures controlling us inside our bodies reminded me of The Numskulls, comic characters that feature in
The Beano. But where The Numskulls control us physically,
Inside Out concentrates on how emotions control us and how the mind works. So even if they did take The Numskulls as inspiration, though The Numskulls writers have said it bares a mere passing resemblance and suggested so in a special cartoon (shown above), they have done something completely different with the idea.
Inside Out may be a kid's film and a Disney Pixar one at that, but there is so much going on, so many references and you can take it on so many levels, I could write an essay on this film. I expect university students will write theses on it in years to come. But I won't, I just want to say why it made such an impression on me. And now it's out on DVD and I've seen it for a second time, I thought it was the right moment.
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| Inside Out |
As with all Disney and Pixar films,
Inside Out is for people of all ages, from the youngest, to the eldest. Everyone will see something different in it. But a child could watch it year on year and get something new out of it as they get older; it shows how we change as we grow up. I hope they don't do a sequel with Riley as a teenager, though the short that's on the DVD is great.
The film has a very slight plot and is essentially about how moving house affects a young girl: Riley.
Inside Out shows how the five main emotions that rule her head determine her actions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. When Joy and Sadness are accidentally ejected from Riley's control room along with the core memories that define her personality, they go on a journey through her mind to return to save Riley from being overtaken by her fear, anger and disgust.
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| Imagination Land |
For children, a lot of the film will go over their heads, but they'll love the vibrant colours, Bing Bong and the other characters. For older kids though, it will help them understand how emotions work, control you and how they act together. It helped me and I've done a lot of self-analysis over the years!
Inside Out has been adopted by mental health experts, sufferers and charities as a way to explain mental illness.
It has helped children to understand their mental problems and parents to explain to their children theirs. This is a brilliant thing.
The film was created as a way for the writers to explore the changes their children were going through to become teenagers. I think it was such a hit because Americans loved it as they're used to therapy, for our less self-analytical nation it has impact, but in a more subtle way.
Inside Out is really inventive and detailed, showing you the train of thought, imagination, long-term memory and even abstract thought, excelling at showing you how memories can change, how by remembering things later in life it can colour the memory, particularly with sadness; nostalgia literally means homecoming pain or ache. Memories are really what this film is all about. What happens to our memories as we get older. The story of Bing Bong, the childhood imaginary friend is heartbreaking.
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| Bing Bong |
I think it hit me hard thanks to my years of anxiety and I wish they had showed less of Joy and Sadness and more of the others, especially Fear. The only other way they could have improved it is by doing more of what they showed during the credits and during the stand-out scene at the dinner table, inside others' heads and not just Riley's. But the bittersweet ending is wonderful.
Basically, I urge everyone to see it and you'll probably get something different out of it to me!
