Three Thousand Years of Longing

The Djinn and Alithea

The bomb of 2022 is what industry somebodies are calling Three Thousand Years of Longing. True, it didn’t do very good box office. It did terrible box office in fact. But streaming will probably claw back some of the deficit, where it’ll almost certainly be watched several times by quite a number of people. It’s that sort of film. It’s a compendium affair, always a tough sell, with no explicit throughline, the story of a narratologist (a person who studies stories to reveal truths about humanity) who finds a bottle in a bazaar while at an academic conference in Istanbul and discovers that it contains a genie, or djinn as they now tend … Read more

Happy Feet

Mumble the penguin leaps for joy in Happy Feet

A CGI animation featuring penguins which comes along in the wake of March of the Penguins, so it’s probably pushing at an open door. And unlike a lot of animated films about animals, this one sets its stall out really quickly. Emperor penguins, it seems, all have a special song that they use in courtship. Except for one, the hero of our fable, called Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood), who has “happy feet” instead – he’s got the sort of dance moves you might expect from Sammy Davis Jr. His mum thinks it’s cute, his dad thinks it’s suspect whereas the stern community Elder, Noah (voice: Hugo Weaving), takes the view that it’s Mumble’s … Read more