The internet recently freaked out, as the internet is wont to do, over the news that US blockbuster machine JJ Abrams is developing a live-action remake of anime teen fantasia Your Name (Anime Ltd, 12) – at last out on Blu-ray and DVD after a year-long wait. You can understand both the defensiveness of fans of the original and the covetousness of Abrams. Makoto Shinkai’s whirling, way-out body-swap romance takes the high-concept premise of a Hollywood exec’s dreams into far dizzier, less disciplined realms of the subconscious. It’s hard to imagine any big studio-vetted remake meeting its irresistible invention even halfway.
Initially, it’s all romping, gender-curious high jinks, as rural schoolgirl Mitsuha and urban male teenager Taki magically switch vessels, but all hell (not to mention the heavens) breaks loose in a second half that recklessly bends time, space and the environment, without drowning the film’s gentle, coming-of-age concerns. You can see here where Abrams’s multimillion-dollar digital effects will kick in, but there’s no guarantee Shinkai’s airborne poetry will make the transition. Discover it while it’s still in uninhibited, drawn form. Hell, try it out on your more adventurous kids, who deserve bigger cartoon ideas than those slopped up by Despicable Me 3 (Universal, U), another predictably bouncy runaround in bright butter-yellow.
There are more wild ideas – not animated this time, though mightily exuberant – in João Pedro Rodrigues’s queer brain-swirler The Ornithologist (Matchbox, 15), a loose-limbed interpretation of the legend of St Anthony of Padua that remains pleasurable even (perhaps especially) when it’s frankly inexplicable. It follows the wayward, erotically charged trail of dreamy twitcher Fernando after he goes off course in remote rural Portugal. His ensuing misadventures should infuriate stern Catholics and tickle just about everyone else.
I wish I’d been left tipsier by Whisky Galore! (Arrow, PG), a wholly unneeded remake of the sprightly Ealing classic that, for all its community-theatre enthusiasm, could use a bit more soda. I didn’t laugh much at the manic antics of Bitch (Studiocanal, 15) either, though that’s by design. Marianna Palka’s spitting-acid feminist farce, in which a put-upon housewife is driven to literally barking madness by her lousy husband, deals in the kind of black comedy that catches in your throat.
The rerelease of the week, meanwhile, is a big, brawny new packaging of Sorcerer (Entertainment One, 15), William Friedkin’s once-dismissed, now-exalted 1977 blend of jungle-crunching action and existential road-movie meditation. It still sparks, as does its more shadowy, sinewy 1953 French inspiration The Wages of Fear (BFI, 12), cannily also given a smart reissue.
Another week, another notable doc premiering on Netflix. Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold (Netflix, 12) doesn’t portray the eponymous American writer with anything like her own lemon-tinged shrewdness, instead surprising with its breezy affection. Well, not that surprising: director Griffin Dunne is Didion’s nephew, so what this life study lacks in distanced scrutiny, it gains in interior knowledge. Didion gives as much as she wants to give, and Dunne, well, plays it as it lies. The film scoops up the smaller details of a life and legacy, letting the bigger picture emerge warmly, if not completely, from them.
