Film reviews: Pixels; Oddball; Blinky Bill the movie

With the school holidays either looming or underway across the country, these are the film reviews you need to read.

Inky, Blinky, Clyde and Pinky (the ‘ghost’ cars) take on Pac-Man in Pixels.

With the school holidays just started or looming, depending on which state you are in (don’t say frazzled), it’s a good time to check out three films aimed at the family market. While none scales the heights of the best recent children’s movies — The Boxtrolls being a standout — each does the essential work of providing parents/grandparents/nannies (and not to forget mannies) with a couple of hours of low-maintenance little person entertainment.

The cuddly Australian offerings Oddball and Blinky Bill are suitable for preschoolers, while the American action-comedy Pixels, starring Adam Sandler, is more for the 10-plus age group. It’s also quite fun if you lived through the 1980s — though be prepared to explain some mind-boggling concepts to your younger companions. Hall & Oates, for example.

Pixels opens in 1982 with 13-year-old friends Sam Brenner and Will Cooper hanging out at the local video game arcade. Anyone who grew up in the pre-personal-screen age will know the milieu and the games: Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede, Donkey Kong. Sam is a whiz and Will encourages him to enter the world championships (hosted by Dan Aykroyd, one of several star cameos that also include Serena Williams and Martha Stewart).

STORY: The on-screen revival of Blinky Bill

Here the boys, who know they are nerds, befriend the even nerdier Ludlow Lamonsoff, a kid (and later man) obsessed with conspiracy theories — “I’ve seen the unedited Zapruder film. JFK shot first’’ — and in love with a video game character (who, to be fair, is a knockout).

The championship ends in a showdown between Sam and the trash-talking Eddie “The Fireblaster’’ Plant (a vaudevillian Peter Dinklage, best known as the dwarf Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones). With NASA’s assistance, a time capsule containing a video cassette of the competition is launched into space, which turns out to be a mistake.

Director Chris Columbus establishes these characters and the video game world with admirable economy and then moves to the present day, where things are about to get interesting. In a clever scene we see the adult Sam and Will talking over beers in a bar. It’s the usual stuff: wives, ex-wives, women in general. But when TV news comes on, we realise Will (Kevin James) is president of the United States.

He’s a bit of a laughing stock, however, with even his Secret Service detail sniggering not quite behind his back. Sam makes a living installing home entertainment equipment, which is how he meets Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan), who happens to be a weapons specialist with the US military.

Everything changes when aliens destroy a US Air Force base in Guam, using a Galaga-like attack formation. It transpires they received that video cassette and considered it a declaration of war. They are sending three video game-themed battle missions to Earth — a giant, belligerent Pac-Man, for example — and if the humans lose, the planet will be obliterated.

The aliens transmit these messages — breaking into news broadcasts and so on — via famous 1980s faces such as Ronald Reagan, Madonna, the stars of Fantasy Island and the aforementioned Hall & Oates, all of which went over my 10-year-old’s head but made me laugh (and he enjoyed the film a lot).

With conventional arms useless, the president orders, “Let the nerds take over”, and Sam, Ludlow (Josh Gad) and Eddie (once he is sprung from jail) form a Ghostbusters-like unit to save the world. There are some very funny interactions with the top brass, with Brian Cox and Sean Bean in good form as a blimpish admiral (“Let’s blow up Google!”) and a hard-man British soldier respectively.

Columbus’s children’s movies include Home Alone and its sequel and a couple of the Harry Potters, while he’s also made adult comedies such as Mrs Doubtfire. Pixels, a film with a sense of mischief about it, does more than enough to keep both camps satisfied.

Oddball, the feature debut of television director Stuart McDonald, is a far more down-to-earth affair, based on the true story of Alan “Swampy’’ Marsh, a Victorian chook farmer who, with canine assistance, came to the rescue of a penguin colony on an island off Warrnambool.

Comedian and actor Shane Jacobson plays Swampy with blithe indifference to WC Field’s dictum about working with children or animals. He acts with dogs, penguins, chickens, soft toy animals and, of course, children. And he’s fun to watch in a gruff-jovial, overall-clad, bearded, plain-speaking, fair dinkum way. When his dog farts, he peels off a line that reminded me of Tony Abbott: “That’d make an onion cry.’’

But the star of the show is the dog, Oddball (real name Kai). He’s a maremma, a hefty Italian breed traditionally used in that country to protect livestock from wolves. In Warrnambool, the threat is smaller but no less cunning: foxes. When the local foxes notice humans can walk to the island at low tide, they decide to follow suit, with catastrophic results for the penguins, who until this point had brought a “special magic” — and tourism dollars — to the town.

This is terrible news for Swampy’s daughter Emily (Sara Snook, soon to be seen in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker), who is a wildlife officer in charge of the penguin sanctuary. If the penguin population falls below 10, she will lose council funding, the sanctuary will close and the island will “just be a rock”. Even more upset by this prospect is Emily’s young daughter Olivia (an engaging Coco Jack Gillies), who joins forces with her grandfather and Oddball to protect the penguins by unconventional means.

Complicating matters is an American tourism expert, Bradley Slater (Alan Tudyk), who has a romantic interest in Emily and — conflict-of-interest alert — grand plans for the town that do not necessarily include penguins. Further complicating matters is the fact Oddball is a shambolic beast who knocks over things, such as the mayor’s expensive bicycle, which results in him being sentenced to home detention. Clearly, subterfuge will be required.

Oddball isn’t the slickest piece of filmmaking, with lots of obvious studio scenes (though the shots of the Victorian coast are naturally spectacular), but it has a big heart and that counts for a lot.

Blinky Billthe Movie, directed by Deane Taylor and based on the stories by New Zealand writer Dorothy Wall, is a fast-paced and funny anthromophoric romp — all the animated animals are agreeably human — that will delight the young ones and have their minders chuckling at one-liners such as “reptile dysfunction’’ and at the political commentary.

It is elevated by a superb voice cast: Ryan Kwanten as Blinky, Richard Roxburgh as his adventurer dad, Deborah Mailman as his non-nonsense mum, Barry Humphries as an eccentric wombat, David Wenham as a manic frill-necked lizard, Toni Collette as two ditzy emu sisters and, best of all the villains, Barry Otto as a megalomaniacal goanna and British actor Rufus Sewell (whose father was an Australian animator) as a feral British shorthair cat.

The story is simple and engaging: Blinky’s dad Bill has been missing in action for a year, having not returned from one of his daring missions into the great desert to help lost or wounded animals. Bold Blinky sets out to find him, picking up companions along the way: Jacko the lizard and a zoo-raised koala named Nutsy (Robin McLeavy). The cat, Sir Claude, tracks them with murderous intent, and there are other perils, natural and human-made.

Back home in Greenpatch, the power-mad goanna, Wilberforce Cranklepot, has declared himself king and closed the borders to keep out the “foreign menace”. Sound familiar? It all adds up to a lot of fun for young and old.

Pixels (PG)

3 stars

National release

Oddball (G)

2.5 stars

National release

Blinky Bill the Movie (G)

3 stars

National release