Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman…And 4 More Spine-Tingling Tales

Posted on October 28, 2011 at 8:00 am

Date Released to Theaters:	September 26, 2006
Date Released to DVD:	October 27, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000H0M47U

Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman… and 4 More Spine-Tingling Tales is a perfect Halloween treat for the littlest trick-or-treaters, with stories that are more fun than scary.

Teeny-Tiny is the story of a boy who outsmarts the witch who wants to eat him and his brothers and sisters for dinner. The Witch in the Cherry Tree wants to eat a family’s freshly-backed cakes and David and his mother must find a way to outsmart her. The Boy With Two Shadows finds out what can go wrong when you promise to help a witch. In Space Case, a space traveler makes a friend on Earth. And in King of the Cats, an old man tells his wife about the strange procession of cats he saw in the Louisiana bayou.

The Rum Diary

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 6:15 pm

22-year-old Hunter S. Thompson wrote a novel about men in their 30’s working for a Puerto Rican newspaper, equally soaked in the title libation and the brinier flavors of cynicism and failure, but it was not published until more than 30 years later.

Now, it is a movie starring Thompson fan Johnny Depp (who played Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”). He plays Paul Kemp, a would-be novelist and near-alcoholic who extends his fiction-writing skills to his resume to apply for a job working for a near-broke newspaper in Puerto Rico. He needn’t have amplified his credentials; no one else applied for the job. The exhausted editor (Richard Jenkins) knows he lied but has no other choice and his expectations are even lower than his alternatives. He says all he wants is a writer who won’t drink all the time.

No such luck.

Kemp is most interesting as the reflection of the real-life 22-year-old who was already worried about becoming dissipated, ineffectual, and hopeless. His passionate love of language is palpable. He spins out an elaborate sentence with the exuberance of youthful excess but lands it with breathtaking precision that demonstrates he is already a master. The plot is simple. Kemp is frustrated that the paper will only publish pieces that make the advertisers happy, which means nothing critical of anyone or anything in Puerto Rico. He briefly agrees to moonlight as a writer for a shady real estate development coordinated by Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), who has a beautiful home and a beautiful girlfriend (the very lovely Amber Heard). And he briefly stops drinking.

There’s an endearing sweetness to the film. The unabashed affection Depp and writer/director Bruce Robinson have for Thompson is contagious as we see Kemp begin to find himself as a writer even as he perhaps begins to lose himself in the gorgeous excess of his appetites. The book is a novel, but the movie concludes by merging the fictional Kemp with the real-life Thompson with a buoyant couple of lines about what happens next.

In one scene Sanderson’s girlfriend and Kemp are driving in a borrowed convertible and she dares him to drive faster: “I’ll bet you scream before I do.” He floors it and they surge ahead, both reckless, ravenous for adventure, seeking the ultimate, no matter the cost. They both scream, and screech to a halt inches from the end of a pier. Knowing what lay ahead for Thompson, it feels good to see a moment when he knew where to stop.

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Based on a book Comedy Drama

Puss In Boots

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 6:00 pm

The popular feline bandit of the “Shrek” series gets his own feature film, one that is less of a fractured fairy tale and more of a swashbuckler. Antonio Banderas returns as the voice of Puss in Boots, the cat with the heart of a lion — and the eyes of a cute little kitty.

This is a prequel, set in a fanciful Spanish countryside, showing us Puss’ life as an orphan, his early friendship with Humpty Dumpty, the betrayal that led him to become an outlaw, and his efforts to find redemption.

“What can I say? I was a bad kitty,” he tells us as he bids farewell to a pretty feline whose name he can’t quite remember. He is “a fugitive from the law, searching for a way to clear my name.” He walks into a bar and silences the snickering caballeros, telling them, “You don’t want to make the cat angry.” He is looking for a way to score but he has his own set of values: no stealing from churches or orphans.

Magic beans, on the other hand, are another story, especially if they have already been stolen. And it turns out that the magic beans have special significance to Puss and to his old friend.

Puss makes a new friend, too, a hooded fellow thief who wants the same beans. At first, in a charmingly designed cat hide-out, they compete against each other with an hilarious dance-off. But then the thief removes the hood and is revealed to be the notorious Softpaw, a brilliant and beautiful female thief (voice of Banderas’ “Desperado” co-star Salma Heyek). And they are joined by Humpty, though their history makes it difficult for Puss to trust him.

The beans are magic, and the beanstalk takes them to a cloud-land where they find the goose that lays golden eggs. Or, as Softpaw puts it, “It’s a gold pooper; we’re taking it.” Will this be a chance for Puss to right past wrongs? Or will it just make him an even badder kitty?

Less visually striking, less funny, and less heart-warming than the Shrek movies and with completely unnecessary 3D, it is a step down for the series. The kitty hide-out and dance-off are well handled and there are some funny moments, but the death of a major character is too jarring for younger children. Puss is a better supporting player than a star.

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In Time

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 6:00 pm

In the future, according to this film, our currency will not be money but time. Everyone gets 25 years. Then the clock starts ticking down. If you have not earned, begged, borrowed, stolen, or inherited time, you die.

Everything is bought and sold for time. A millionaire has a million years saved up and can use them to buy a mansion, hire bodyguards, and postpone death, perpetually looking 25 years old. Everyone else lives — literally — one day at a time.

Writer/director Andrew Niccol likes provocative ideas (he wrote the similarly dystopic “Gattaca” as well as “The Truman Show” and the underrated “Lord of War” and “S1mone”) and this is a good one, well timed with themes that resonate with the 99%/Occupy Wall Street/collapse of the Greek economy issues. People treat and speak of time in this world the way we do with money. Prostitutes offer ten minutes in exchange for an hour of extra life. Toll roads charge in years. People speak of those who “come from time” (inherited wealth) and a nouveau riche character is spotted because he moves fast (“not in everything,” he responds coolly). Those who are used to wealth move very slowly, first because they have literally all the time in the world and second because the one thing that can kill them is a violent accident — or murder.

Justin Timberlake plays Will, a guy from the poor side of town whose fury at being unable to get more time for his mother (the three years younger than the real-life Timberlake Olivia Wilde) makes him determined to topple the entire system. Amanda Seyfried in a red Dora the Explorer-style bob is Sylvia, the wealthy girl he takes hostage until like a cross between Patty Hearst, Bonnie Parker, and Maid Marian, she joins him on a crime spree, stealing time and giving it to those who are running out. Cillian Murphy plays the “Timekeeper” who is chasing them, and “Mad Men’s” Vincent Kartheiser plays Sylvia’s father, who has all the time in the world and wants to keep it that way.

The production design contributes a lot to the story with retro cars and phones in the poorer communities and banks like citadels, and Roger Deakins’ cinematography makes the world of the story look bleak but not hopeless. Timberlake and Seyfried are both talented performers who are a bit out of their element in a sci-fi action film. The idea is better than the execution and it gets rather silly in the last half hour. Until then it is kept aloft by a timely concept that strikes pretty close to home.

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The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 10:51 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Date Released to Theaters:	October 27, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	1591141222

Documentaries made by adult children about their fathers have become a significant new genre. My Architect is the story of Louis Kahn by the son he never publicly acknowledged. In Tell Them Who You Are, filmmaker Mark Wexler trains his camera on his cinematographer father, Haskell. And in “Five Wives, Three Secretaries, and Me,” Tessa Blake uses her million dollar trust fund to make a movie about her multiply-married father, Texas oilman Thomas Walter Blake, Jr. All of these films, in their way, are about secrets. But this film, about the head of the CIA, is about family secrets and national security secrets, too. Can a man whose job is keeping secrets share enough of himself to be a good father? Does a man who loves secrets even want to be? “I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt,” says his son, Carl.

Part family story, with insightful comments from the woman who was wife to the movie’s subject and is mother to the movie’s director and part “Fog of War”-style exploration of America’s role in post-WII international affairs with a Who’s Who of Cold War policy-makers, this is a riveting and important film that does not rest too heavily on the connection between its subject’s personal emptiness and the moral failures Colby would come to regret. He kept so many secrets he lost touch with the reasons. Its elegiac tone concluding in Colby’s mysterious death — alone — in a boating accident, ties together the sense of personal, professional, and national loss.

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