Lejink

I'm no "Star Wars" geek, but it's hard for even me to not see the similarities of this George Lucas-penned story to his earlier adventure. Again we have a young man, low-born but not lacking in courage or spirit, setting out on a mission against evil forces, headed up by a malevolent evil master (or mistress, in this case), with a gallant couple joining the fight at his side and just to top things off, a pair of even smaller companiions really just along for comedic effect. The twist here is that we're not in some far-flung galaxy but in a mystical Middle Earth-type landscape populated by wizards, castles and evil queens.

Warwick Davis plays the title role of Willow, one of the little people, a devoted family man who nevertheless steps up to rescue the new-born full-size human baby his wife and children brought to him when it was found Moses-like in the rushes of a nearby stream. The infant is in fact the Princess Elora and is being sought by the evil Queen Bavmordia played to the hilt by Jean Marsh who wants to cast out the child who has been prophesised to rule in her stead. Sure enough, her armed soldiers raid Willow's camp and take the child to the queen which emboldens Willow's resolve to bring her back safely and so foil Bavmordia's murderous plan.

Along the way he frees Val Kilmer's caged renegade Madmortigan, an athletic swordsman, even if he's not immediately on-board with the mission aand is also joined by Kilmer's future wife Joanne Whalley's Princess Sorsha, the queen's own daughter sent out by her to lead the kidnap team but who sees the light and turns away from the dark side. The party is completed by Razisl, a transformed good witch who undergoes a number of different animal transformations before aspiring wizard Willow finally learns to successfully magic her into the form of Patricia Hayes. That just leaves, two tiny Tagalog Brownies Rool and Franjean, pretty much just along for the ride but whose purpose is to puncture the action with some squeaky R2D2-C3PO-type humour.

It all culminates in a grand battle royale at the queen's castle where Kilmer has to fight for his life and Hayes and Marsh face off over the baby princess with Willow anxiously awaiting his chance to intervene.

Imaginatively cast with a nice mixture of British and American talent in prominent parts, the film rolls along entertainingly enough for the first two-thirds, as Willow and co. Set out on their epic journey to save the little princess, but it really comes to life with the dramatic siege of the castle at the end. Director Howard does an accomplished job of depicting this fantasy adventure although I personally felt the journey could have been hurried up a little and certainly dispensed with the weak humour of Rool and Franjean.

Warwick Davis makes for an appealing lead, demonstrating that heroes come in all shapes and sizes although admittedly Kilmer is there at his side, every inch the more traditional handsome warrior. Marsh gets to cackle and scream to her heart's content as the evil queen but Whalley seems underused as her rebellious offspring.

One suspects if the movie had been more successful on first release that it too may have spawned sequels and prequels like you-know-what but as a standalone epic, it's nevertheless a very enjoyable family entertainment.

This review encapsulates all of Series 6.

Series 6 of the ITV procedural crime drama saw the return of Sinéad Keenan as DCI Jess James leading the "cold case" team in another well-made, well-written and well-acted six-part investigation. Yes, the criticism could be levelled that the series has become formulaic, every one I've seen starts with a murder investigation arising from the discovery of a dead body from years ago. This then branches out to take in usually four or five apparently unrelated individuals but who are of course inevitably connected to the case and indeed destined to become suspects, then they're all brought together before the final reveal is delivered.

Along the way we get continuing insights into the private lives of DCI James and her second-in-command, Sanjeev Bhaskar's DI Sunil "Sunny" Khan, although sadly this privilege isn't extended to the remaining members of their team, which is a pity because they too seem on the face of it to be interesting characters and worthy of further development. Jess's marital problems continue from the previous series in that she still has to come to terms with the fact that her philandering husband slept with her sister. Can she forgive either or both of them, especially as her sister appears to be genuinely contrite and indeed is still suffering mentally from the aftermath, while her hubby now pleads forgiveness and that he won't be a bad boy again. But just what is that stray hair she finds on his jacket collar and to whom does it belong? Sunny meanwhile is on the rebound from his recently failed relationship and is now looking for love from the local female pathologist but his path to true love doesn't run smoothly either.

The case itself revolves around the murder victim, his body dismembered and the parts then strewn separately in local marshland, who turns out to have been a rather unpleasant man who was unfaithful to his wife and daughter, violent to the wife and indeed to his new girlfriend even after she aborted their love child. Just for good measure he also summarily dismissed an autistic man without paying him and finally was a grasping landlord who preyed on needy asylum-seeking tenants and subjected one family in particular to living in such poor housing conditions that their infant son actually died from a respiratory condition picked up in their damp-infested flat, thus enraging the family's translator, a fellow immigrant himself from Afghanistan.

There you have all the runners and riders in the parade ring for his murder with each of them having their own personal and work-related issues to contend with. Some of these are a touch over-sensationalised but with allowances duly made for some wokism aspects applicable to each of their stories plus an ending I worked out in advance, I still felt this show maintained its previous high standards

One of the secrets of the show's success is the excellent casting of all the supporting characters besides those of the established team, plus it's good to see the blossoming chemistry between Keenan and Bhaskar as the two leads.

I'm fairly confident judging by the quality of this latest run that there will be a series 7 to come and I will look forward to viewing it and enjoying it as I have done with all of the previous six.

I'm not quite old enough to remember all the detail surrounding the kidnap and murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games and of course, being British, I wouldn't have seen hardly any of the US TV network ABC's coverage of the events as they happened in real-time. This historic catastrophe has of course been covered in documentaries and most prominently in Spielberg's "Munich" feature, but the unusual approach taken here is to take a very much reactive rather than immersive view of events.

Told entirely from the point of view of the ABC channel's sport-section who happened to be on the air during a quiet shift mid-way through the Games, we see their media team react spontaneously to the breaking horror story which will immediately dominate global news. One amazing thing I picked up was that during the day of the disaster, the Olympic sporting programme continued to be broadcast on other channels, even while the terror was playing out in the neighbouring Olympic Village.

The moral dilemma of how to sensitively treat such powerfully emotive subject matter with the natural journalistic instinct to get the story out there before any of your rivals jump on it is writ large which seems to be the central point of the movie, the celebration of under-pressure journalism which it certainly does but perhaps at the expense of missing the real story that ten Jewish athletes were slaughtered in the first mass-televised terrorist attack.

I suppose I could have just watched the Spielberg film or the documentary, which I now probably will, if I wanted to properly appreciate the whole story from within and it's maybe my own fault for putting the cart before the horse in watching this movie first, but while I appreciated the skill with which the director and cast combined archive footage with the on-the-ground recreation of a live rolling news-story, I'm not sure I was completely comfortable with this approach.

I just felt as if my emotions were being misdirected to equate the tensions of making the wrong editorial calls in a news broadcast with the actual life-or-death scenario was playing out with a tragic outcome off-camera. Who cares ultimately if the sub-editor initially mis-called the fictitious rumour that all the hostages had survived the attempted airport rescue when innocent people did indeed lose their lives. That was the real story and anything that detracts from that just seems beside the point from where I'm sitting.