Posted on November 3, 2010 at 8:00 am
Arcade Fire has created an interactive video that will show you a boy running through the street in front of your childhood home (or any other address you type in), created with the help of Google Maps. It is hauntingly lovely. (For best results, use the latest version of the Google Chrome browser and close down all other programs.)
Posted on November 2, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Walden has just about mastered the art of turning the very best in children’s literature into very fine family films. It doesn’t get any better than Beverly Cleary’s marvelous series of books about Ramona Quimby and her family, and here director Elizabeth Allen (who showed a gift for stories about young girls with “Aquamarine”) brings them to life in a way that both fans and those new to the characters will enjoy.
Joey King is just right as Ramona, age 9 years and 3 months, a girl with a big imagination and an even bigger heart, both of which get her into trouble when she tries to help out without thinking things through. As in the books, the Quimby family is instantly relatable and utterly irresistible, funny, touching, and completely endearing.
It helps to have first-class talent among the adult performers. John Corbett (“Sex and the City” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) and Bridget Moynahan capture the believably lived-in feeling of experienced parents who are almost always there when needed and are always ready to be captivated by their kids. The always appealing Josh Duhamel as the uncle of the kid next door and Ginnifer Goodwin as Ramona’s beloved Aunt Bea make their love story work while keeping the focus on Ramona and her view of the world.
Ramona’s perspective is expertly handled, and some of the best moments give us the world through her imaginative point of view, whether turning a hole in her house during construction into a portal into adventure or believing that an embarrassing moment on the jungle gym is a humiliation heard around the world. The harshest criticism of Walden’s faithful adaptations of children’s literature classics is to say that they are a little too faithful. They err on the side of literalism rather than taking greater liberties to get the benefit of the full range of cinematic storytelling. That saps some dramatic tension from the movie, making it feel a little too episodic and discursive. But if it re-creates the feeling of the book that way and especially if it inspires young viewers to read it for the incomparable pleasure of Beverly Cleary’s writing, then that is fine with me.
Posted on November 2, 2010 at 10:00 am
Director Edgar Wright’s latest movie is based on the popular series of graphic novels about Scott Pilgrim
Those who were born before 1980, don’t recognize gamer terms, and are easily confused by a cuddle puddle of comics, Bollywood, indie music, and the omni-connectedness of the 2010’s, will either find this an imaginative anthropological journey or an unintelligibly precious mish-mash of smug self-awareness. Those who are in the right age group will either find it uniquely speaking to their own sense of alienation mixed with a boundary-less
hive-mind ultimate oversharing — or an unintelligibly precious mish-mash of smug self-awareness.
I thought it was cute and funny and surprisingly sweet. Director Edgar Wright (“Shawn of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”) tells the story with great energy and imagination, incorporating an pan-media range of story-telling techniques. When Scott has a realization, Wright has a quick cut to a parking meter with a needle that swings from the red “no clue” to the green “gets it.” Another character’s feelings are expressed when the pink, fluffy word L-O-V-E wafts in Scott’s direction.
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, of course) is a nice if somewhat clueless guy whose cluelessness is tolerated and sometimes enabled by his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin, employing a terrific, seen-it-all-and-finds-it-amusing deadpan), his fellow band mates (Sex Bob Omb, and his high school girlfriend Knives (Ellen Wong). Yes, her name is Knives and she is his high school girlfriend not because he met her in high school but because she is in high school. What do they do together? “She tells me about how yearbook club went and once we almost held hands on the bus.”
And then Scott sees Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and in a time-honored tradition that goes back even before Hot Pockets and Nintendo, love will make him braver, stronger, and able to consider the feelings of others for pretty much the first time in his slackery life.
But first he has to fight her seven evil ex-boyfriends, I mean exes. Each one is a physical manifestation of anyone’s insecurities in a new relationship. Will he be strong and brave enough for her? Pure enough? Successful enough? What have they got that he hasn’t got? On the way to understanding, I felt big, pink, fluffy L-O-V-E wafting from me toward the screen.
Posted on November 2, 2010 at 8:00 am
Zac Efron makes an affecting and credible dramatic lead in “Charlie St. Cloud,” the movie Nicholas Sparks wishes he could write, based on the book
Efron has shown himself as an agreeable teen idol in the “High School Musical” series, and he demonstrated comic skills in “17 Again” and an an ability to work well in a dramatic ensemble period piece in the under-seen “Me and Orson Welles.” He has chosen wisely, reportedly walking away from a remake of “Footloose” for this film, which makes the most of his natural charm and gives him an opportunity to show off some acting skill as well.
Efron plays the title character, a good kid, just graduating from high school with a world opening up to him. He has a sailing scholarship at Stanford and a chance to leave behind his responsibilities to his overworked mother (Kim Basinger) and kid brother Sam (likable Charlie Tahan). He is devoted to both of them, but as he swings his sailboat around in the first scene to win a race, we can see that even he is not aware of how impatient he is to get on with his life.
But then he and Sam are in a car accident. Charlie almost dies but is brought back by a devoted EMT (Ray Liotta). Sam is killed. Charlie is devastated, shredded with guilt. Five years later, he still hasn’t left town. He is a full-time care-taker at the cemetery where Sam is buried. He keeps to himself. Except that every day at sunset, for an hour, he goes off into a clearing in the woods, where he throws a baseball with Sam.
Charlie can still see Sam. And he can’t let go of him, and of the promise he made to coach him for an hour every day. He is all but ruined by survivor guilt he cannot begin to acknowledge. He feels alive only when he is with Sam.
And then a girl comes back to town. Her name is Tess (Amanda Crew) and she represents everything that is most threatening to Charlie’s cocoon of grief — adventure, travel, life, and romantic love. She is a sailor preparing to go solo around the world.
Screenwriters Craig Pearce and Lewis Colick have adapted Sherwood’s book with a light touch for visual metaphor, nicely handled by director Burr Steers (“Igby Goes Down”) and the exquisite images from director of photography Enrique Chediak. The vigorous dynamism of the sailing scenes contrast with the quiet, static cemetery (even when invaded by geese). The characters represent a range from the vital engagement of the young woman embarking on a solo voyage to the character preparing for his own death by sharing what he has learned.
Efron is genuinely splendid in the early scenes. Charlie has not had an easy life, but he has a natural ease that makes him seem on top of the world. He is a good kid who wants to do the right thing, but he has the impetuousness and carelessness of someone who thinks his time has come. After Sam’s death, Efron’s perfomance becomes more subtle as he shows us Charlie’s uncertainty and isolation. That natural ease has become a shield to keep everyone away. He is comfortable doing his job and living half in the world of the living, half in the world of the dead. When Tess arrives, we see him struggle with longing and the possibility of hope.
And then, just as on that first sailboat race, he takes a turn we did not expect to cross the finish line, leaving us a little breathless at the way it comes together, moved by both Charlie and by Efron and wanting good things for both of them.
Posted on November 1, 2010 at 10:45 pm
The ultra-violent “Saw 3D” gets an R. The ultra-explicit and disgusting “Jackass 3D” gets an R. But how does “The King’s Speech” get an R? This is an acclaimed historical drama about the King of England (Colin Firth) who has to have speech therapy to help his stutter. As a vocal exercise, he has to say some bad words. And so it gets an R rating. The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein has an excellent article about the arbitrariness of the MPAA’s rules and the outrageous results.
To call the decision crazy and unhinged would be to let the MPAA off too lightly. Its ratings decisions, which frown on almost any sort of sex, frontal nudity or bad language but have allowed increasing amounts of violence over the years, are horribly out of touch with mainstream America, where families everywhere are disturbed by the amount of violence freely portrayed in movies, video games and hip-hop music.
He quotes Tom Hooper, director of “The King’s Speech.”
“What I take away from that decision,” says Hooper, “is that violence and torture is OK, but bad language isn’t. I can’t think of a single film I’ve ever seen where the swear words had haunted me forever, the way a scene of violence or torture has, yet the ratings board only worries about the bad language.”
And he quotes me:
he ratings board judges violence on a far more amorphous and clearly subjective sense of overall tone. That discrepancy sets up the MPAA for all sorts of criticism, much of which has come from Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert whose must-read Movie Mom blog has frequently taken the MPAA to task for its inconsistencies.
“The ratings decision on ‘The King’s Speech’ is just another example of how completely out of touch and useless the guidance is that we get from the MPAA,” Minow told me Monday. “The one thing we want from them is a general sense of where a movie fits into our family values. But by putting ‘The King’s Speech’ in the same ratings category as ‘Kill Bill’ or ‘Scarface’ or ‘Saw,’ then it really makes a mockery of the whole system.”
