Little Joe

A fascinating premise and setup, but the execution is tedious

The Capgras Delusion has been known since the turn of the century but has been treated as a curiosity, an anomaly. The standard explanation, which you find in most psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian one and the idea is something like this: this young man, like most young people, when he was an infant, growing up, he had strong sexual attraction to his mother, the so-called "Freudian Oedipus complex". But then along comes a blow to the head, and suddenly and inexplicably these sexual urges come flaming to the surface, and _he finds himself sexually attracted to his mother. And he says, "_My God, if this is my mother how come I'm attracted to her? How come I'm aroused?...

A fascinating concept - a firm determined to succeed at a flower fair work to create the ideal blossom. When two of their team - Emily Beecham and an almost robotic Ben Whishaw develop a flower that exudes a pollen that creates happiness; they are certain they are onto a winner. She even smuggles one home as a gift for her young son, and they christen it "Little Joe". À la "Jurassic Park" the plants are sterile so they cannot reproduce - well, that's the theory anyway but as Jeff Goldblum would have said "nature finds a way". Problem here is that the way chosen by the plants to perpetuate their species is so convoluted and ponderous that I'd long lost interest before this rather short feature got anywhere near the sharp end. Neither star ma...