This is a film I saw once. When I was six. So why did I nominate it for the Freaky Trigger Top 100 films? You may pick the analytical version or the honest version, dear reader.
THE ANALYTICAL VERSION: As I was saying on The Brown Wedge the other day, there is a certain reluctance among critics to embrace a childlike reaction to art; what you might call the Wow-factor. This applies in films more than anything else, partly because mainstream cinema panders more than any other cultural medium to precisely that factor: if you can hardly move for producers trying to wow cash out of you, it’s easy to become cynical. But rather than honing a sense of when something is actually kewl and when something is ersatz or rehashed or trying too hard, the sensible critic is encouraged to distrust and discount the Wow-factor entirely. When you get a load of people together drinking in a pub, though, “Wow”-ness tends to get its due. So it seems absolutely appropriate that a half-remembered movie that totally entranced me at the Saturday matinee when I was six should have been the first I chose for this list. And it didn’t surprise me in the slightest that my fellow drinkers agreed.
THE HONEST VERSION: It is called “One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing”!! It is about a missing dinosaur which is being driven round London on a big truck!!! ROXOR!