And now here's the movies I actually enjoyed and can confidently pass on as my picks for April if you find yourself at a loose end for a couple or three hours:
On the topic of Biographies, a much better example of one is, IMO, First of the Few AKA
Spitfire (1942), a movie about the guy who designed the Spitfire aeroplane, the most famous plane of the Second World War. It was made during the war so, unfortunately, it has taken some liberties with the truth, which is the main reason it's only got a 7.1 on IMDB, but other than that it's a very watchable movie that is surprisingly entertaining for a story about an engineer. If you like the history of flight as a general topic I would call it a must-watch, particularly as it covers all the inter-war international flying competitions where bi-planes were gradually replaced with monoplanes.
Another attractive novelty of the movie is that it is directed by and starring Leslie Howard. Howard was one of the biggest names of 1930s Hollywood, the George Clooney of the 30s. He was such as the Scarlet Pimpernel amongst many iconic roles which led to him being one of the big names headlining on the poster for Gone With The Wind, the most popular movie ever made. He could do anything he wanted to in the world of movies. Ironically, he was flying in a plane in 1943 when the Germans shot the plane down. He was suddenly dead at the age of 50, in his prime. Imagine if you picked up the paper tomorrow and read that Clooney had been killed in a plane crash. This movie stands as a testament to the potential that was lost and as a metaphore for the loss of talent that war can bring. I'd give it 8/10.
If you've got kids or just want to watch something really, really light, like, the polar opposite of modern dark/extreme norms, then I've also seen and quite enjoyed two of the tamest movies I've ever seen:
Swallows and Amazons (1974) and
The Wishing Tree (1999), both of which are so light on adult themes that small children might even complain about the lack of peril or strong language.
Now… neither of these movies are great, as in they are not masterpieces of art, what they are are just glimpses into the sensibilities of the past, movies that would have trouble even being conceived of today. Swallows is about a group of very young kids that go and live and adventure on an island in the middle of a river, completely unsupervised by adults, for days on end. And nothing bad happens to them. They can cope just fine. Just this concept on its own makes it a nostalgia gem. Likely quite hackneyed in its day, it now comes across as so original it's like a breath of fresh air on the first spring day after a long and hostile winter.
The Wishing Tree is like The Green Mile but for kids. A pair of very young kids meet a 'magic man' in the woods, and he's… not… got evil intentions for them. Perhaps the female lawyer fresh in for her adopted mother's funeral can help persuade the deep south American locals that the strange ex-criminal big black man in the woods who's 'playing' with their kids is actually the good guy… a very heart warming movie in the old fashioned corny sense of film-making. Heck, there's even scenes where people eat corns off the cob. I'd give them both 7.5/10, but mostly for reasons that weren't intended at their time of release.
A couple of 3+ hourers now, both TV movies (separated into a micro-mini-series):
The Odyssey (1997) is a pretty darn good adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. If you like ancient Greek myth and legend, tales of monsters, gods and sirens interweaving a potentially tragic love story, then look no further, this movie has it all. From the Trojan Horse to battling the Cyclops and from drunken bad guys to witches that can turn you into a pig or a monkey, poor Odysseus gets banished to a life forever sailing the ocean as punishment for defying the Gods (well, just Poseidon to be precise, the other gods seem to like him). The effects aren't so bad and quite impressive in places, the acting isn't so bad and quite impressive in places, but, most of all, it really feels like a movie about ancient Greece, it just oozes that sense of magic and wonder while always feeling like something altogether Greek.
I say this because I also saw
Alexander (2004) Director's Cut, which is supposed to be a big improvement on the awful original. I'm not entirely sure why this movie is hated so much. I could get used to the Irish accents and I could get used to the gay undertones, I even grew to like Colin Farrell in the lead role. The main problem with it is that it just doesn't feel very Greeky. It could be Braveheart, it could be Roman, it could be Game of Thrones, it just comes across as any random movie about a historical general. I got no real sense of the Greek, something The Odyssey has in spades…
From the same production team as Odyssey comes
Merlin (1998), the story of King Arthur but entirely from the perspective of his wizard Merlin. It's more like a biography of Merlin than a story about King Arthur though as we see all the big events in Merlin's life, from birth to final resting place, conjecturing that the King Arthur story is a result of Merlin's war with the misguided God/witch Mab (who created Merlin in the first place to restore the power of the Old Gods). Like The Odyssey, its special effects are sometimes really good, as is the acting, but not always, but the most important factor is that the world maintains itself in a fully immersive sense of the times it is set. This movie oozes the Dark Ages of Northern Europe and delivers both magic and reality in equal measure without ever coming across as cheap, either in look or narrative impetus. A must-watch for any fan of fantasy magic. My only complaint was that Sam Neil doesn't look very 'wizardy', not because of bad costuming but just because Sam Neil himself doesn't look very wizardy. If only they'd got Ian McKellan… but maybe this is because I saw LoTR first…
In 2000 there was a movie called
Merlin: The Return which, obviously, sounds like a sequel. It's not. It's a gobshiteingly bad movie made by the previously (March's picks) mentioned Paul Matthews. It has nothing to do with the 1997 movie and is unwatchably bad on practically every front.
Both Merlin and Odyssey were 8/10s for me, possibly 8.5s.