Review: The Fox And The Child (2/5); Make It Happen (1/5)

The Fox and the Child
(Luc Jacquet):
Bertille Noël-Bruneau, Kate Winslet. Running time: 92 minutes.

From the Antarctic to nature on your doorstep, French filmmaker Luc Jacquet follows up March of the Penguins with this fusion of nature documentary and children’s fairy-tale. Half of it works. It’s the story of a 10-year-old French girl, with cute freckles and two red buns in her hair, who doggedly pursues the friendship of a vixen through the seasons. The natural footage is astonishing: filmed in the French region of the Retord Plateau near Ain in southeast France, it has a painterly Alpine beauty. Hedgehogs, otters, ravens, even a wild bear makes a cameo. Less wondrous is the way Jacquet insists on gluing a narrative onto his footage. He uses creative editing to fashion a story in which the girl learns that, with nature, you can look adoringly, but cannot touch. But it’s syrupy and stretched out and I started to nod off; Kate Winslet’s occasional narration could do with some perk. Ninety-two minutes was too long for me. How will young children manage?

Make It Happen
(Darren Grant):
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tessa Thompson, Julissa Bermudez, Riley Smith.
Running time: 90 minutes.

Lauryn (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a small-town dancer, hopes to earn a shot at the big time in the Chicago School of Dance. Her mother, a dancer, is dead; her brother, a mechanic, is dead against it: what an impracticable dream! She should work instead at his garage. But she does the audition anyway, fails, lies to her brother and ends up working in an upmarket bordello in the big, dangerous city. Eventually, her long legs scissor the opposition, but they fail to cut the cliches out of this dance-by-numbers routine. Grindhouse star Winstead has a bright, young face. But she wears her hood up a lot, persumably to disguise the body doubles. Lauryn might have been a character worth shouting for. But what’s the point? Her second audition has the certainty of gravity. Director Darren Grant doesn’t worry about such shallow predictability and invests his energies into the glitzy dance numbers.