Brother Francis DVD Series for Catholic Children

Posted on February 10, 2012 at 8:00 am

The Brother Francis series is a gentle, accessible animated series for Catholic children with inviting and entertaining explanations of rituals and beliefs.

“The Rosary” DVD includes the prayers of the Rosary and the Apostles’ Creed and a touching version of Mary’s joyful submission to God’s will. It also features two songs, “I Love to Pray” and “The Our Father.” “The Bread of Life” introduces children to the Eucharist and helps them prepare for their first Holy Communion as it portrays “The Story of Blessed Imelda Lambertini,”: the patroness of first Communicants. It includes the songs, “I am the Bread of Life” and “What More Can He Give.” And “Let’s Pray” tells children that practice makes perfect — for prayer like everything else. The song, “The Sign of the Cross” helps children remember how to make the sacred gesture and the title tune shows children that they can pray anywhere because God is everywhere. It also includes a musical version of “The Our Father” and the story of Saint Therese’s “little way.”

The Vow

Posted on February 9, 2012 at 6:39 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for an accident scene, sexual content, partial nudity, and some language
Profanity:	A few s-words
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Car crash with injuries
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 10, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	May 8, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005LAIGSM

More than any other attribute, memory is what defines our identity and our connections to each other. When a young woman’s traumatic brain injury erases her memory not just of having married her husband but even of having met him, both of them face daunting challenges about who they are and what they can be to each other.

The first time was so easy. Leo (Channing Tatum) sees Paige (Rachel McAdams), a free-spirited art student, and they are immediately drawn to each other. It was just two weeks later, we will learn, when she first said, almost to herself, that she loved him. They had a quirky-cute wedding at the Chicago Art Institute (near the Seurat painting Ferris Bueller visited on his day off) with their quirky-cute friends and their vows written on the menus of their favorite little coffee shop (Cafe Mnemonic, a bit of memory foreshadowing). They love, love, love each other until their car is hit by a snow plow and she goes through the windshield. When she wakes up from a chemically-induced coma, she thinks Leo is a doctor. She has no memory of him or of the past five years. She thinks she is still in law school and engaged to Jeremy (Scott Speedman). She can’t figure out why her hair is so unstyled or how she got a tattoo. Leo has to try to make her fall in love with him all over again, and this time it will take much longer.

It is inspired by the true story of Kim and Krickett Carpenter, who wrote a book about about their experience but the marketing is intended to tie it to the stars’ previous appearances in Nicholas Sparks movies. It does have Sparks-ian themes of love and loss and it has a gooey layer of Hollywood candy topping, but it is a bit sharper and less sudsy than Sparks movies like “The Notebook” and “Dear John.” Leo and Paige and their friends all so quirky-cute they might be Shields and Yarnell performing in “Godspell.” The further it departs from the real story, jettisoning the importance of the couple’s faith and some of messiness of her recovery and throwing in a tired twist with Paige’s wealthy, uptight, controlling family, the further it gets from what does work in the movie, the palpable tenderness and devotion of Leo and the wrenching challenge of trying to reconnect with Paige as her uncertainty about who she is makes her retreat. The great philosophy professor Stanley Cavell has written about the enduring appeal of the “comedies of remarriage,” movies that are not about falling in love but about re-falling. There is something very captivating about the idea of someone who knows us and is willing to fall in love with us anyway.

Parents should know that this movie includes brief language (s-word), sexual references, adultery and male rear nudity, one punch, alcohol, and a car accident with injuries.

Family discussion: Why was Paige afraid to remember her life with Leo? What does “I wanted to earn it” mean? What does the name of the place Leo and Paige went to eat mean?

If you like this, try: “The Notebook” and “Dear John” and this poignant and inspiring Washington Post article about a similar real-life “in sickness and in health” love story. And read the Carpenters’ book, The Vow: The True Events that Inspired the Movie.

Safe House

Posted on February 9, 2012 at 6:10 pm

Denzel Washington is the vodka and Ryan Reynolds is the orange juice in this spy story with top-notch action, middle-notch story, and bottom-notch ending, with a “surprise” plot twist that is obvious from the first 10 minutes.

Apparently, the CIA has big, high-tech, empty “safe houses” all over the world, just in case we need to stash an “asset” there for debriefing with or without torture, but I gather more often with. Reynolds plays a junior CIA agent named Matt, stationed in Cape Town, South Africa. His lissome French oncologist girlfriend (the glorious Nora Arnezeder of “Paris 36”) has no idea that he is really a spy. He’s not so sure himself, after a full year of sitting alone in the safe house, throwing a ball like Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape” and waiting for something to happen. He begs his mentor back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) to reassign him, but Barlow tells him to be patient.

And then the most notorious rogue spy to go AWOL from the CIA, Tobin Frost (Washington) , a man who ” has no allegiance and is wanted on four continents” walks into the American consulate. We know he has injected some sort of memory chip into his thigh and that some guys with guns are willing to kill a lot of people to get to him. Matt gets the call that a “guest” is en route and when Tobin arrives with an entourage of serious-looking guys, he escorts them to the interrogation room. They tell him to turn off the surveillance cameras and they start waterboarding Tobin, who calmly first offers to tell them whatever they want to know and then advises them that they are using the wrong kind of towels for torture. Then the other group of bad guys break in, shooting everyone they see, and Matt grabs Tobin, steals a car, and they’re on the run.

It’s “Bourne”-lite, a lot of well-staged action but without the personal or political identity issue resonance of the Bourne stories. Washington is superb as a spy whose specialty was manipulation and whose moral code is compromised, but clear. “I only kill professionals,” he tells Matt. “You’re not going to get in my head,” Mitch says. “I’m already there,” Tobin responds, and, predictable as it is, we know he is right. Part of what makes him effective is that he tells the truth. But Matt, whose specialty is analysis, strategy, and spycraft, gets into Tobin’s head, too, partly from observation and partly from the encounters along the way that show him

The hand-t0-hand combat and shoot-outs are intense, prolonged, and graphic. But when it comes to acting and holding our attention on screen, Washington wins by a knock-out.

(more…)

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Action/Adventure Spies

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

Posted on February 9, 2012 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild adventure action and brief mild language
Profanity:	Some brief schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Action-style peril, minor injuries, some large insects, scary animals with big teeth, and some gross and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, mild sexist humor
Date Released to Theaters:	February 10, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	June 4, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B007R6D74G

Like its predecessor, Journey to the Center of the Earth, this is a well-paced and highly entertaining family film made with good humor, panache, and imagination. Josh Hutcherson returns as Sean Anderson, a teenager whose last expedition was in search of his father. Refreshingly, it does not take itself seriously. Even more refreshingly, it takes the idea of adventure seriously, with a welcome reminder that the actual thrill of exploring beats even the most entertaining movie or game.

Sean receives an encrypted radio signal and suspects it may be from his grandfather, Alexander, an explorer. Sean’s stepfather Hank (Duane “The Rock” Johnson) is a Navy veteran who once one a prize for code-breaking. Sean does not want to have anything to do with Hank, but cannot resist letting him help solve the code. When it appears to be coming from Sean’s grandfather, with a clue that leads them to more clues in classic stories of island adventure by Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jonathan Swift, Sean is determined to find it. Hank persuades Sean’s mother (Kristen Davis), to let them try because it is the first real opportunity he has had to get close to his stepson.

They fly to Palau, where the only person crazy and desperate enough to try to take them to an uncharted and possibly imaginary island in the middle of the most dangerous storms on the ocean is Gabato (Luis Guzman, providing awkward comic relief). Sean and Hank get into Gabato’s rattletrap of a plane with Gabato’s beautiful daughter Kailani (“High School Musical’s” Vanessa Hudgens) as a navigator. Like the Millennium Falcon being sucked into the Death Star by the tractor beam, Gabato’s plane is pulled onto the island by the swirl of the storm for a crash landing that shatters it to shards.

Sean is thrilled to find his grandfather (a game and very dapper Michael Caine) and the group is enchanted by the lush beauty of the tropical island and by its big/small reversals. Animals that are big in the rest of the world are small, and animals that are small are big. So the elephants are the size of border collies and the lizards are the size of dinosaurs. Alexander has created a “Swiss Family Robinson”-style treehouse and has discovered the ruins of an ancient city. But when Hank discovers that the island is sinking and will be submerged in a few days, they have to find a way to get back home. They set off for the coast. Alexander at first is hostile to Hank but, like Sean, learns to appreciate him after he shows how skillful and dependable he is — and after he pulls out a uke and sings a very respectable and funny version of “Wonderful World.”

Director Brad Peyton keeps the characters and the plot moving briskly and manages to bring in some nice moments as Alexander, Hank, and Gabato demonstrate different styles of fatherhood. Kailani reminds Sean that it may be bad when parents embarrass you but it is worse when they don’t even try to provide support and guidance. The humor is silly, but reassuring, not condescending to the young audience. It balances the scenes of peril as the group tries to find an escape. However, Gabato is so over-the-top he is likely to grate on anyone over age 10. It palpably conveys the fun of exploration and discovery and the pleasures of being part of a team. The production design by Bill Boes is spectacular, especially Alexander’s wittily imagined house, the ancient city, and the 140-year-old submarine that starts up like Woody Allen’s VW Bug in “Sleeper” after a unique jump start. It perfectly matches the fantasy-adventure-comedy tone of the story, where you can hold a a baby elephant in your arms and fly on the back of a giant bee. “Are you ready for an adventure?” characters ask more than once. This movie will have you ready to say, “Yes.”

As an added treat, there’s an “What’s Opera, Doc”-ish 3D Daffy Duck cartoon before the film, with audio from the original Daffy and Elmer voice talent, Mel Blanc.

Parents should know that this film has characters in peril, minor injuries, some icky and scary-looking animals with big teeth, some jump-out-at-you surprises, some potty and briefly crude humor, and brief schoolyard language.

Family discussion: How many different styles of parenting were portrayed in this movie? Which do you think is best? What adventure would you like to go on?

If you like this, try: “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and books by Jules Verne

Giveaway: ‘Geek Charming’ with ‘Modern Family’ Star Sarah Hyland

Posted on February 9, 2012 at 8:00 am

Sarah Hyland stars in the very cute Disney Channel movie Geek Charmingas Dylan, a popular high school princess whose only aspiration is to be even more of a popular high school princess. Matt Prokop is Josh, the “film geek” who needs a subject for his documentary. But there is more to both of them than it first appears and even Dylan and Josh are in for a surprise when they discover that populars and geeks are not as different as they thought. Based on book by Robin Palmer, it is a smart, fun, and funny story and Hyland is an especially appealing actress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smYLGJZrvZg

I have a copy to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Geek Charming” in the subject line and tell me your favorite movie about high school. Don’t forget your address! I’ll pick a winner at random on February 16. (Sorry, US addresses only.)