Gordon the Frog

Gordon Gershwin was a frog. He was a sly one, hanging around lilypads waiting for princesses. Many a young royal with a head full of fairytales would come by his pond to chance her luck by kissing him. (The birthrate amongst royalty was generally low, and there were always less princes than princesses in the land.) Being an unenchanted frog he never became anything other than mildly smug. The women would walk away wiping their mouths and cursing their foul luck to pick a frog who wasn't a handsome prince cursed for his vanity or some such thing. (Not many paused to think that the curse might suit the crime, and that they'd be better off not bothering with a prince who had been so terrible as to be cursed in the first place.)

Sometimes they would come back and kiss him again, frogs generally being indistinguishable from one another. Still they would be disappointed, but Gordon would smile his secret froggy smile and just enjoy the attention. But one day a pretty French maiden came along and kissed Gordon. Her disappointment at not discovering her prince was shortlived as she discovered she didn't mind the taste. She cooked up Gordon and ate him for lunch. Such are the perils of toying with royal affections.

Bruno the Scientist

Bruno was a scientist. Gariette was his beautiful assistant. Together in their basement laboratory they worked to create artificial life. Through countless failed experiments they persevered, trying new chemical combinations, combining and recombining DNA strands. Dozens of misfigured abortions of humanity were created and destroyed. Pain and suffering were the products of their quest to bypass nature. Then one day something went right and overnight Ralph came into the world. A fully formed man born without parents.

Bruno was sure that parents were the cause of all suffering and pain in the world. Possibly because his mother had been a midget dancer who moonlighted as an assassin for the KGB and as such was often absent from the home. His father knew nothing of her double life, so assumed she didn't love him and drank himself into stupors most every day. Bruno grew up with no parental involvement in his life, and having concluded that he was the sanest person he knew, he wanted to bring that joy to others. But since kidnapping babies wasn't legal, he hired Gariette to join him in a quest for the perfect human. Someone just like him.

Having made the perfect human, Bruno spent all his time tutoring Ralph in scientific methods and theories so that he could take over his work and further refine the process that brought him life. Gariette soon became jealous of the attention lavished on Ralph. She was the assistant. If Bruno didn't need assisting, what was she meant to do? It wasn't long before they were having loud fights all over the laboratory. Ralph just watched, puzzled by the loud noises that made no sense to him.

Walter, the nosy next door neighbour, would hear these fights and think that Gariette was being abused. He was a snoopy kind of a chap, with his telescope focused on any open window hoping for a glimpse of Gariette. When the fights began, he decided she needed rescuing. Arming himself with a crowbar he crossed over late in the night and forced open the door to their house. He stalked through the hallways until he found Gariette. He told her he knew all about Bruno and his violent ways, that he wanted to take her away from all that. Gariette said she was thankful, but first she needed to get something from the basement. She led Walter into the laboratory then shot him full of sedatives and put him into a large tank.

Bruno had never revealed all the secrets of new life to Gariette, but she had learned enough to know how to change life. She took Walter's body and transformed him into a woman. The next morning, Ralph discovered that a woman had been created for him. Bored by a life of seeking intellectual perfection, he ran away with the strange and confused woman named Wilhelmina. When Bruno woke up to discover Ralph gone he was inconsolable. At least until Gariette consoled him. Then everything was back to the way it was, and they began anew their quest for perfection.

Children of Men

An excellent meditation on hope in a hopeless world, wrapped in an atypical science fiction action film. Read the review here.

Little Miss Sunshine

Funny and wrong, but sometimes you can feel it trying to be funny and wrong. It's not effortless, but it's a great ride all the same. Read the review here.

Wallace the Miner

Wallace was a miner. One day while digging he discovered a cavern filled with jewels. He realised this was the fabled hiding place of Red Reginald the Socialist Buccaneer. Fortunately Red Reginald wasn't around, he was apparently busy engaged in the forcible redistribution of wealth to the proletariat. So Wallace took the opportunity to help himself to a small part of the wealth surrounding him. He then carefully blocked up the entrance to the cave and continued on digging his merry way.

He continued to work as a miner, because he enjoyed his job. But the jewels meant he could afford decent tools and hire other men to work with him. Eventually others discovered the cave as well and helped themselves to the booty. Red Reginald was kind of stuck once he found out that he was being robbed, because as a good revolutionary he had to admit that property was theft and thus people could not steal from him because otherwise he would be a thief too. The rouge rogue was trapped inside his own head and imploded in a feedback loop of inescapable human nature.

So eventually the supply of jewels was exhausted and nobody else became rich because there was nothing left to steal. Red Reginald would have appreciated the socialist irony of this.

Gareth the Knight

Gareth was a knight. He rode a cheese horse with a banana skin saddle. His livery was livers and his lance was an old licorice stick. They called him The Stale Knight. He would ride from town to town despatching villains and rescuing damsels in distress. He worked several towns over and over again, as the issue with a licorice lance was that it didn't tend to kill people so much as stun them. It was a convenient arrangement as several dastardly types got to kidnap and ravish maidens repeatedly, then Gareth got to rescue them. The maidens didn't think much of this though, and were thoroughly tired of Gareth and his extremely ordinary approach to rescue. So they hired a piper to draw in all the mice and rats in the region. The next time Gareth rode in, the rodents chewed up his horse and saddle and lance. In fact, the only thing they left him was his underwear. He was extremely embarrassed, but the girls were not so cruel as to leave him that way. They had slowly been stealing coins and jewels from the villains who kidnapped them. They had pooled their resources and bought Gareth a real horse, armour and a sword. So they dressed him up as a real knight and told him bluntly he'd either better start dispatching the knaves who tormented them or they'd be calling on a wizard to turn him into a newt. No longer a creature of fantasy, Gareth quickly set about slaughtering the evil in the land. The people rejoiced and the King gave him a castle and set him as Knight Protector of the land. And everyone lived happily ever after. Except for Edam, Gareth's cheese horse, who was dead.