Priceless

Spent the morning editing some testimonials for my class then watched Danny Boyle's movie Millions, and was very glad I did so. I've had the DVD for quite some time, since 2004 when it first came out, but the last time I gave it a spin, around 2006, it refused to play properly (on more than one DVD player) and I became convinced there was something very wrong with it. Since I loved the film, and the novel by screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, I'd been very disappointed at the time. Then why did I try to play it today? Well, I now possess a blu-ray player for one thing, and there are no obvious marks on the actual DVD of the movie to indicate anything definitely flawed about it. So it sort of seemed like a good idea to give it a go, and that's the way it turned out to be.

If anything I think I enjoyed the movie this time round more than previously. It's possessed of tremendous charm, imagination, verve and a real sense of wonder. The two juvenile leads are sensationally good, by far the best child-actors I've seen in films. They are so unaffectedly unselfconscious that you start to wonder how exactly the director got the performances out of them. And the fact that the whole thing is based in Manchester is the icing on the cake for me.

The puzzling thing is that so few people have ever heard of the film as far as I can tell. Their loss, I'm afraid.