I watched two of my lovefilm.com DVDs this evening which coincidentally both starred Ewan McGregor. First up I watched
Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith and then Tim Burton's
Big Fish and the films showed McGregor at his worst and best in that order. He is a fine actor, but in Star Wars he is stilting and looks embarrassed (and should do really). The scripts were never the strong point of the Star Wars franchise and the effects in this installment are generally the best ever, but that's not really enough. We get to see how Darth Vader got his funny black hat and there is certainly more to entertain that in episode I which is neatly parodied by the Simpsons (amongst others) for it's dull insistence on long meetings about tax laws and so on, but even so I couldn't really get too excited by it. People (probably men) of my generation have fond memories of the first three films, which were undoubtedly better for their simplicity, but were doubtless equally shoddy and poorly constructed. They got in there first and we were just kids, so maybe kids today would like the new Star Wars films, but I doubt they could be as excited. The main plus point for III is that Jar-Jar Binks is relegated to the role of "mourner at funeral". Having said that I don't think I saw the second installment, so maybe he wasn't in that much either, though I kind of hope he was and that he was anally gang-raped by a tribe of Ewoks - who were in turn theh gang raped by a battalion of Storm Troopers.
Big Fish was a lot more enjoyable and McGregor (perhaps liberated by the fact that he doesn't have to attempt an Alec Guinness impression) was charming and magnetic (not literally, though that would have been a nice touch. I might remake the film exactly the same, except that whenever McGregor is near metal it flies towards him - or if the piece of metal is big he flies towards it). It's a diverting story of the blurred line between fantasy and reality and whether life is better or worse with a bit of imagination thrown in (the film concludes that fantasy makes life better, but you might not agree), but it's also about that disjointed relationship between fathers and sons which always seems to make me a little bit teary (not so much when it's Luke and Darth Vader though. George Lucas just doesn't really have it on this level). And it's Tim Burton, so it looks amazing and he doesn't need to fill it full of spaceships exploding or people running down corridors to engage his audience. It's weird how subtlety can be much more engaging and a bit of heightened colour can grab you more than a CGI robot being shot and catching alight. Bizarrely this might indicate that reality is probably more engaging than fantasy, but I think it just means that reality is more engaging than rubbish fantasy. Tim Burton's imagination is rich and interesting and I found myself pondering how much he has already achieved in his career, as against George Lucas who has spent his life making these amazing, outwardly impressive blockbusters that ultimately have only the shadow of a soul to them. He has made more money than practically anyone else in the world of course and yet has devoted most of his time to this one idea and it's an idea that the more it's played out the hollower it looks.
And maybe Burton ploughs the same furrow a little, but man does he spend some time coming up with some interesting and original ploughs to do it with.
And there's Ewan McGregor, an actor called upon to play a role, who can appear in both projects, though it says a lot for him that he looks less comfortable in Star Wars. You know maybe if he was a better actor he could pull off both parts successfully, but it says a lot for him as a person that he can't.
