Oak Street

 I went to see The End of Oak Street yesterday.  It is a strange kind of film but enjoyable enough.  I am not usually a fan of Anne Hathaway but I thought this was one of her best roles yet and she seemed made for it.  Ewan McGregor plays Hathaway's husband.  He was good too.  I don't know much about him but loved him in A Gentleman in Moscow on Paramount a couple of years ago.   

This is a film about a shift in time when a street suddenly overnight with light flashes goes back to the time of dinosaurs in the streets and the people start getting eaten by them. 

Hathaway and McGregor have two children, a girl and a boy,  and a dog named Starbuck.  They are just a normal suburban family with the usual family problems of their age and time.  Suddenly all family issues have to be forgotten while they survive the dinosaurs coming after them. 

We see them surviving the attacks until McGregor gets eaten by a T Rex and disappears.  Hathaway is Denise and I can't remember his name.  The kids are Brian and Audrey.  I don't think I knew any Audreys at that time, supposedly 1982 we learn although it looked more like 1972 to me and even then there weren't any teenage Audreys.  However, that is by the by.  It is funny in parts and made me smile at the nonsensicalness of being chased by pterdactyls in the streets and big wormy things in the house although it is all very serious in the film and not meant to be funny.  The kids are great and the dog is too.  I wondered how they train dogs for movies whilst I was watching.  

Anyway in the end they find a way out of the dinosaur period and manage to jump back through a bubble  to the present (1982) and return to normal again.  

All things considered it was a pleasant enough afternoon out to the cinema and whilst I don't normally go for this type of movie with monsters,  the dinosaurs were not really scary and Hathaway and McGregor did a lot to make this a movie worth seeing.  How they ever got to doing it I will never know but I am glad they did.   Given the poor assortment of movies on at the moment it was the best of a bad lot really and my visits to the cinema are currently at an all time low  (ignoring 30 years of never seeing a movie at all of course).

Norwich has its own Oak Street, an important street in the city and where I first used to go out when I was 16 to a forbidden venue so the title made me think of those times too.  I am sure many other people in Norwich will think of our own Oak Street.  The street got cut in two by the inner ring road in the 1970s and was never the same after that anyway.  Our own end of Oak Street.