Magic in the moonlight (Colin Firth)

(Amazon UK link)

From time to time, Amazon recommends films to me, based on prior purchases. One of them which looked interesting a year or so back was the 2014 film  ‘Magic in the moonlight’, which stars Colin Firth. I put it on my wishlist, and had forgotten about it when I was given the blu-ray version for my recent birthday.

Colin Firth is best known for his Mr Darcy in the BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ film; he also seems to appear fairly often as a somewhat self-deprecating, slightly clumsy Englishman. So it was quite refreshing - and surprising - to see him as Wei Ling Soo, a suave, talented conjurer who stuns an audience in 1928 with his oriental routine. The film opens with him dressed as a tall Chinese magician, and we see, as his audience does, an elephant that disappears, and his finale when he vanishes from a box and reappears on a swivel chair.

He then shows himself as a rather big-headed and very irritable man called Stanley. He begins to remove his costume, criticises his assistants, and refuses to sign autographs or appear in photos with his fans. He knows he’s popular, he knows he’s brilliant, and he doesn’t care who he upsets.

The doctor, the widow and the wardrobe (Matt Smith)

(Amazon UK link)

Most of the Doctor Who series start with a Christmas special. It's usually broadcast as a kind of starter to the series, sometimes a month or more before the rest of the series gets going. In general, they don’t have much to do with the rest of the series; they also tend to be a bit longer (perhaps an hour rather than forty minutes). And usually they’re included in the DVD sets. 

However, series seven does not include the 2011 Christmas special - I don’t know why. When we realised this, the first time we were viewing the ‘new’ Doctor Who DVDs, I ordered it specially. And I am extremely glad that I did. We first watched it in January 2014, and loved it. 

It doesn’t add anything much to the ongoing story arcs, but it’s my absolute favourite Christmas special. We watched it as a standalone with one of our sons in December 2021, but I was eager to see it again after we finished watching series six at the end of March.

Dad's Army series five

(Amazon UK link)

We finished the fourth series of Dad’s Army in February, and were still enjoying it. We had one more DVD series, so decided to embark on series five. This TV sitcom was mainly broadcast in the 1970s and features a mixed group of volunteers in the 'home guard' during World War II. 

The first episode is mostly set in a bunker which has been hit by a bomb in an air raid. Unfortunately, Private Walker (James Beck) and Private Godfrey (Arnold Ridley) have been on duty there, and are trapped in a small room by fallen debris. Godfrey, moreover, is fast asleep and seems to be unwell…

So Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) and his troops hurry to the rescue, along with ARP Hodges (Bill Pertwee), who insists - at first - that it’s his responsibility, not that of the home guard. When they discover what the problem is, and that it will be quite dangerous to move the rubble, he wants to back out… it’s a potentially stressful situation, made worse by a burst water pipe, but as ever there’s plenty of humour. 

Batteries not included (Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s eighteen years since we watched the DVD of the 1987 film ‘Batteries not included’. I had not remembered much about it, other than that it started rather gloomily, then delved into slightly weird science fiction. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, which is probably why we acquired it in the first place.

The opening scenes are, indeed, decidedly depressing, even disturbing in places. We see building sites in part of New York, where homes have been demolished, with a lot of action. And we see the tenants of a crumbling apartment block, who are being given notice to quit - with a financial offer - but who have nowhere else to go. 

There’s a young, pregnant woman called Marisa (Elizabeth Peña) who hopes her boyfriend will come back. There’s a struggling artist called Mason (Dennis Boutsikaris) whose girlfriend becomes fed up with him, and leaves. There’s a former champion boxer called Harry (Frank McRae) who is quite lonely, and there’s an elderly couple, Frank (Hume Cronyn) and Faye (Jessica Tandy) who are perhaps the most poignant of all. They run a diner on the ground floor of the building, and it’s reasonably popular. But Faye clearly has a form of early dementia, and gets easily confused. She has some friends who also live in the building, who help to look after her. But after some deliberation, they decide to take the offered money and move elsewhere. 

Doctor Who series 6 (Matt Smith)

(Amazon UK link)

We finished watching Doctor Who series 5 at the end of last year. We had become familiar with Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, and with Amy Pond, portrayed by Karen Gillen, as his companion. At the end of the fifth series, Amy married Rory (Arthur Darvill), and both had decided to keep travelling with the Doctor. 

Series 6 opens with a Christmas special entitled ‘A Christmas carol’. It was a good one to see towards the end of the Christmas period; it was first broadcast on Christmas Day 2010. We first saw it in September 2013 and had entirely forgotten the story. It features a very Scrooge-like character, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Gambon, who refuses to allow a spaceship to arrive. Rory and Amy are in it, on their honeymoon, and send out an SOS to the Doctor. 

The writing is clever, with more than a nod to Dickens; and we liked the resulting softening of the character. There are several Christmas carols featured in the background, too, and some amazing singing. It’s all very well done, we thought, with some tension and mildly scary effects - but overall, an excellent Christmas special. It’s an hour long, and then there’s an ‘extra’ on the same DVD, a Doctor Who ‘confidential’, which gives a lot of background to the episode. There are also a couple of brief ‘extra’ episodes filmed for Comic Relief. 

Little women (Winona Ryder)

(Amazon UK link)

We have two DVDs with films based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel ‘Little Women’. We watched the 2019 version - updated for a modern audience - in 2020, and I liked it much more than I had expected to. But it was over twenty years since we watched the 1994 version which is rather closer to the original. So we decided to see it again. I am very familiar with the story, my husband much less so as he has never read the books.

On the whole, this is quite true to the original, although inevitably a lot has been cut out. The four March sisters are realistically portrayed: Trini Alvarado is the responsible Meg, and Winona Ryder is the impetuous Jo, who never quite manages to look tidy, and who spends most of her time writing. I thought Beth (Claire Danes) was the least believable of the four; but a lot of her story is removed from the film. Kirsten Dunst is an excellent young Amy; she’s the only sister who has a different actress (Samantha Mathis) playing her as an adult. But then Meg and Jo were older teenagers anyway at the start of the story.

Nim's Island (Abigail Breslin)

(Amazon UK link)

We’ve picked up a lot of DVDs over the years, many of them second-hand. Since we have regularly had young friends coming to watch a DVD, we made sure that there was a good collection with U rating for them to select from when they were small. There were some which we were familiar with, of course; I bought quite a few children’s classics when our own sons were younger. But others were completely new to us. 

Recently I thought it would be a good idea for us to watch some of them - not the 3d animated ones which I dislike intently, but the ones with real people. Last night we decided to watch ‘Nim’s Island’.  I had no idea what it was about, but I know our young friends quite liked it a few years ago. 

The star of this film is Abigail Breslin, who is perfectly cast as 11-year-old Nim. She narrates the start of the story, illustrated with cartoons, showing how her mother was eaten by a whale when Nim was three. So she lives with her father, Jack (Gerard Butler). They went around the world a couple of times on his boat, as he’s a marine scientist, always looking for new forms of microscopic life.  And now they have settled on a tiny island which doesn’t have any other human inhabitants.