Pretensions had a 6 hour flight to Korea today and used the time to catch a couple of movies that she hadn’t got around to in the cinema. The first is already out on DVD and the second should be soon.  The first, El Orfanato or The Orphanage (in Spanish with English subtitles) was produced by Guillermo del Toro, the creator of last year’s surreal fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. Unlike that film, The Orphanage is a relatively straightforward but creepy ghost story.
Laura (Belen Rueda) has a happy childhood in an orphanage with a group of fellow orphans. She is adopted, leaves the orphanage and makes a life for herself. Much later she marries and moves back to the orphanage, intending to make it a home for disabled children. She adopts an HIV-positive child, Simon, and all seems well at first. However, she is unaware of sinister events at the orphanage that occurred while she was away; events that seem to have left a lingering trace in the very walls… When her adopted son vanishes, Laura embarks on a frantic search for him that will take her to the boundaries of the land of the dead and beyond. There is a lot to like about El Orfanato; it has a wonderful sense of tension that peaks in some genuinely disturbing moments. However, it suffers from too many ghost-story clichés; inevitably, everyone thinks the heroine is going crazy from bereavement and I think I’ve seen the auto-rotating roundabouts in the playground in several movies and TV shows now. However, the climax is wonderful as the bereaved mother realizes that she has inadvertently started the whole chain of events and several seemingly innocuous scenes suddenly tie together. What would you do if you realized that you accidentally killed your child? What would you give to bring him back? P’s second film choice was deliberately a lot more cheerful. Run, Fatboy, Run, is a  British-themed underdog story by Friends star David Schwimmer. The plot may seem rather tired but excellent acting by UK veteran comedian Simon Pegg as leading man, Dennis, and a strong supporting cast, really makes up for it. The movie begins with a terrified Dennis leaving his heavily-pregnant fiancé Libby (Thandie Newton) at the altar. Five years later, he is an overweight out-of-shape security guard for a woman’s lingerie store, reduced to (barely) chasing down cross-dressers making off with powder-blue bras. A born loser, Dennis visits his son by Libby on weekends, but manages to make a mess of that too, by getting arrested for trying to buy scalped tickets to a “Lord of the Rings” production off an undercover policeman. Unfortunately, Libby is now being wooed by a smart, smooth-talking, well-heeled American stockbroker, Wilt (Hank Azaria). Wilt is everything Dennis is not and fear of losing Libby prompts him to attempt the London Marathon in competition with Wilt. This may seem an impossible feat but Dennis’s cousin Gordon (who has bet heavily on Dennis completing the marathon) and his upstairs neighbour Mr Ghoshdashtidar(wh o thinks Dennis can be “a good man”) decide that they will be his coaches and the scenes that ensue of them flogging Dennis through the streets with makeshift paddles and beating pots and pans beside his bed are classic slapstick gags. Expect lots of pen** jokes too, and plenty of self-deprecating Brit humour. The ending is rather predictable (guess who wins Libby?) but the movie had me rooting for the underdog by the three-quarter mark, so I guess, rather like Dennis, the movie won me over with its sincerity, despite a lot of rough edges. Good fun and quite inspiring to keep going despite all odds.
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