If I Stay

Posted on August 21, 2014 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and some sexual material
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, including teen drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	The film's themes include a tragic accident, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 22, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	November 17, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00NT964VS

Hamlet asked it best. “To be, or not to be: That is the question.” We struggle through, worrying about whether someone likes us or whether we will be accepted at the school of our choice. Those seem like serious problems. And then something really huge shows us how small those problems are, and forces us to confront the only question that matters: will we continue to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or will we obliterate ourselves, and everything we can perceive?

That is the question faced by a young cellist named Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz, in one of her first roles as a normal girl). She has a wonderful family, loving, supportive, understanding and remarkably hip and gorgeous parents (Mireille Enos as Kat and Joshua Leonard as Denny) and a not-too-pesky kid brother named Teddy (Jakob Davies). She has the kind of kindred spirit best friend who is always vitally interested in every detail and always on her side (“Trust’s” terrific Liana Liberato). And they are a part of a warm, loving community in Portland, Oregon that seems like an endless pot luck dinner party, seamlessly blending from one time and place to another, always filled with laughter and music.

And there is Adam (Jamie Blackley). He is the perfect combination of untamed/angsty and utterly devoted swain. He is supposedly a punk musician, though his performances are disconcertingly pop-ish with even a bit of emo. And he says swoon-worthy things like, “You can’t hide in that rehearsal room forever. It’s too late. I see you.” Mia feels like an outsider as a classical cellist in a family of rock musicians. And, of course, she attends high school with teenagers who have no interest in orchestral music. “Right on, I love classic rock,” one of them responds when Mia tries to explain the kind of music she plays.

Adam watches Mia rehearse and instantly sees that in the most important way she is just like him. She is someone who is not just moved by music, but saved by it. She says, “I loved the order, the structure, that feeling in my chest. Like my heart is beating with the cello.” The “whole messy live for the moment punk rocker thing” does not feel right to her.

Soon Adam and Mia are a couple. But then his group becomes successful and he starts to tour. And she may have a chance to go to Juilliard, on the other side of the country.

And then there is the accident. Mia’s family takes advantage of a snow day to go off on an excursion together, but a car slips on the ice and there is a very bad crash. The entire story is told as Mia’s spirit, alone in the limbo between life and death, able to see and hear everyone around her but not able to be seen or heard, is remembering her life, beginning to understand what has happened, and recognizing that it is up to her to decide whether to re-enter her body and fight to stay alive.

Gayle Forman‘s book is thoughtfully adapted by Shauna Cross (“Whip It”), who has a good sense of the inner lives of teenage girls. While Adam and Mia have their struggles, they are thankfully a step above the typical teenage drama (on and off-screen), and almost always respectfully handled and based in character and context and not the usual sitcom-ish miscommunication. Moritz takes on a tough challenge in playing a character who has to express so much anxiety with so little interaction with other actors, except in flashbacks. She does well, as does director R.J. Cutler in keeping an internal story visually engaging. If it doesn’t have the emotional impact of recent YA weepies like “The Spectacular Now” and “The Fault in Our Stars,” it is a touching story about an appealing young couple.

Parents should know that this film has literal life-and-death situations, with a serious accident, and characters injured and killed. It also includes strong language, teen drinking, and non-explicit sexual references and situations.

Family discussion: How did their families influence the different ways Adam and Mia saw their options? Why did Mia’s grandfather tell her she could go? What would you decide and why?

If you like this, try: “The Spectacular Now,” “Save the Last Dance,” and “Bandslam” as well as the book by Gayle Forman and its sequel, told from Adam’s perspective, Where She Went

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Posted on August 21, 2014 at 5:59 pm

If you want to not just see but hear an eyeball being pulverized, then see “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” If you want to see and hear it in the company of an audience who thinks that’s funny, buy a ticket.

Like the first “Sin City,” this sequel is co-directed by Frank Miller, who created the comic book series that inspired it, and Robert Rodriguez, and they have again perfectly transferred the dark pulp sensibility and striking visuals from page to screen. Like the first film, it is in stark shades of black, white, and gray, with splashes of color — bright red lips, shining blonde hair, sleek blue satin — and, of course, blood.

Sin City is a place of corruption, betrayal, and decay, of haunted souls who can’t remember or who remember too much. “How did I get here? What have I done? And why?” Marv (Mickey Rourke) asks as the film opens and he finds himself with some dead and dying guys. He does remember “wishing I had an excuse to break somebody’s face.” When he gets an excuse, he says he feels like Christmas.

The interlocking stories center on a young gambler named Johnny who wants to bring down crooked Senator Roark (Powers Boothe), who controls just about everything and everyone in Sin City, a private detective named Dwight (Josh Brolin) who takes photos of indiscretions for his clients and who knows he should not trust the woman he loved and lost to a man who could afford her (Eva Green as Ava), and a stripper named Nancy (Jessica Alba), who cannot decide whether she should kill the man who murdered her lover or just drink herself into oblivion and hope she can forget him.

People say a lot of tough things to each other. “They’ll eat you alive,” someone tells Johnny. “I’m a pretty tough chew,” he answers. Everyone in this film is a pretty tough chew. “Death is just like life in Sin City,” another one says. “There’s nothing you can do and love don’t conquer anything.” There are monsters everywhere in Sin City, and some of the most painful struggles are with the monsters within.

But that doesn’t keep people from trying.

There is a lot of artistry in “Sin City,” but it is so stylized that it calls attention to itself instead of its story, characters, or themes. The artistry in visuals and storytelling is so self-conscious it is fetishistic. It always keeps us at arm’s length. Despite superb work from everyone in the cast, especially Brolin, Willis, and Gordon-Levitt, the visuals are more striking than the story and ultimately they overpower it.

Parents should know that this is an extremely violent movie with themes of corruption and betrayal. People are injured, maimed, mutilated, and killed by a wide variety of weapons including a sword, knives, guns, pliers, and arrows. There are graphic and disturbing images and sounds. It also includes explicit sexual references and situations and nudity and strong language. Characters smoke, drink, and use drugs.

Family discussion: How do Dwight, Johnny, and Marv define justice? What do we learn from stories of corruption and betrayal?

If you like this, try: “Sin City” and the Frank Miller comics

When the Game Stands Tall

Posted on August 21, 2014 at 5:59 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic material, a scene of violence, and brief smoking
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Shooting, very sad death, serious illness, parental abuse, tense confrontations
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	August 22, 2014

This dreary assemblage of every possible sports cliché has one thing in common with the game it portrays. Every time it seems to be going somewhere, it stops.

More frustratingly, it wastes the opportunity to tell a good story by trying to squeeze in too many great ones. There are too many crises, too many story arcs, too few resolutions, too few reasons for us to invest in the outcome. When a movie is based on (or even “inspired by”) something that really happened, the first step has to be deciding what the theme is and streamlining all of the real-life details that are not central to that theme. Or, as a coach might say, “Don’t lose focus.”

The real-life high school football team that inspired this story is Concord, California’s De La Salle Spartans, from a small, all-boys Catholic school. They hold the all-time winning streak record for any sport in any category and at any level. We meet the team just as the streak is about to end. The last game of the season is the 151st win in a row. But then Coach Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel) has a heart attack. A player is killed in a drive-by shooting. Another one becomes an orphan, responsible for his younger brother. The other teams do not want to play the Spartans anymore, so they take on the number one team in the state (in a game that is the subject of a book. The winning streak that went from 1992-2004 came to an end.

That’s an interesting place for a sports movie to begin, a refreshing change from the over-familiar sports movie storyline of a scrappy group of underdogs who have to learn to work together. And the film is sincere and good-hearted, though not much we haven’t learned from reading Kipling’s If, especially the part about understanding that winning and losing are both imposters. But the dramatic force of the narrative keeps being mowed down by so many over-familiar sports movie lines that the film’s greatest appeal may be as a drinking game. How many times do we have to hear about how the teammates are family, especially when we hear it more than we see it? (Though I did enjoy seeing the team come on the field holding hands like a kindergarten field trip.)

There is a lot to explore here about what we learn from winning and how much more we learn from losing. Ladouceur’s techniques include “commitment cards” with training goals, practice goals, and game goals, each one written by a player and shared with a teammate to help them understand they are responsible for each other’s performance as well as their own. It is good to hear a coach say that end zone antics are inappropriate and that the purpose of the training is not to produce great high school football players but responsible men.

A number of issues are set up or glancingly referred to without any real connection or follow-through, including some of the coach’s lessons about what matters more than winning. The coach’s son says that when he needed a dad he got a coach and when he needed a coach all he got was a “lame dad.” The coach’s wife (a criminally under-used Laura Dern) says he does not share himself with her or their children. Ladouceur acknowledges that he has been “a bad husband and a worse dad.” But all we see as a response is Ladouceur burning some burgers when he tries to grill.

We do not get enough of the history between the two players who struggle over whether they will stay together through college for it to be meaningful. A brutish father (Clancy Brown) pushes his quarterback son to break the state record in scoring, but the resolution is not set up in a way that makes it a triumph for anyone. Intrusive product placement from a sporting goods store is a distraction as well. As though to keep us on track, equally intrusive sports announcers keep reminding us what the stakes are. Even more intrusive is a musical score that is ploddingly obvious, with hip-hop in a black player’s home and syrupy pop over the white characters. Meanwhile, over on the sidelines (literally), Michael Chiklis as the assistant coach turns in the film’s most intriguing performance.

“It’s no longer about who the bigger, stronger, faster players are,” the coach who has the bigger, stronger, faster players says about playing against the Spartans. (You can tell what’s coming next, right?) “It’s about who plays with more heart.” The heart in this film is mostly over the end credits, where we see the truly inspirational Ladouceur and wish we had just seen a documentary about him instead.

Parents should know that this film includes the tragic murder of a teenager, serious illness of a parent, death of a parent, parental abuse of a teenager, scenes of wounded warriors in rehab, smoking, and brief crude sexual references

Family discussion: What goals will you put on your commitment card? Why didn’t the coach want his players to pay attention to the streak? What was his most important lesson?

If you like this, try: “Friday Night Lights” (the movie and the television series) and “Remember the Titans,” as well as the books about the Spartans: When the Game Stands Tall: The Story of the De La Salle Spartans and Football’s Longest Winning Streak and One Great Game: Two Teams, Two Dreams, in the First Ever National Championship High School Football Game

Christian Indie Films of 2014

Posted on August 21, 2014 at 3:59 pm

This year has already seen a remarkable and perhaps unprecedented number of Christian and Biblically-based films, from big-budget epics like “Noah” and “Son of God” to small faith-oriented films like “God’s Not Dead.” There is an excellent summary of four Christian independent films of 2014 on Indie Outlook from the perspective of a church-going film critic.

In just the last several months, an assortment of independent filmmakers have achieved the success that forever eluded Fox Faith. Numerous grassroots productions have screened in theaters located not in big cities but small towns and suburbs (many of them found in the South). These films don’t have big budgets, big names and are usually not screened for critics. And yet, they have struck a chord with American audiences, proving that there is a hunger for pictures that cater to a spiritually convicted crowd routinely ignored by Hollywood. The target audience is, again, evangelical Christians, only this time, they’re turning out in droves.

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Spiritual films

Frank: The Real Story of the Singer With the Paper-Mache Mask

Posted on August 21, 2014 at 9:10 am

One of the handsomest men alive spends almost the entire movie wearing a huge round paper maché head in “Frank,” a moving film inspired by the real-life story of the late Frank Sidebottom. Michael Fassbender plays Frank, a sweet-natured but very quirky musician who wears his big head mask even in the shower.

The film is co-written by journalist Jon Ronson, based on his own experiences playing keyboards for Frank Sidebottom, the stage name/head of the late Chris Sievey.

There was something fantastically warped about the act, which was four men assiduously emulating and fleshing out with real instruments the swing-beat chord sound of a cheap children’s Casio keyboard, with a living, slightly eerie cartoon character prancing around at the front, singing in a nasal Mancunian twang, as if he had a swimming peg attached to his nose. Each song ended with the same words: “You know it is, it really is, thank you.”

…

In those days, the identity of the man under the head was the subject of great speculation. On many occasions, Sidebottom fans would barge into the dressing room before a show and refuse to leave until the real Frank revealed himself. They’d go around the room: “It’s you, isn’t it? No. You’re Frank, aren’t you?” On most occasions, the only person they wouldn’t bother asking was the unassuming Chris , who blended into the wall.

The New York Times writes that the film version of Frank includes attributes of several quirky performers.

Thanks to the head, “Frank” the film functions as a biopic mash-up of multiple artists. “We spent a lot of time together hammering out how this hidden character could contain almost any number of influences and traits,” said the director, Lenny Abrahamson. “And as we went on, it became clear that the most exciting thing for us would be to make him stand for and refract lots of these outsider musicians.”

And so Frank is the eccentric Syd Barrett. Frank is Lee (Scratch) Perry. Frank is Brian Wilson. Frank is Roky Erickson. The deeply troubled but beloved Austin, Tex., singer songwriter Daniel Johnston is under that head as well. And when the fictional band decamps to a remote home in the countryside, “That’s a riff on Captain Beefheart’s recording of ‘Trout Mask Replica,’ ” Mr. Abrahamson said, referring to the 1969 classic.

Eliminating the burden of fact freed the filmmakers to explore the madness involved in creating art itself rather than the minutiae of one particular artist. It’s at heart a slapstick comedy, albeit one about extremely messed-up souls. “You’re just going to have to go with this,” a band mate played by Scoot McNairy explains to the fictional Ronson.

Here’s Frank Sidebottom performing Queen covers.

The real Sievey’s best-known song was with his earlier group, The Freshies.

Related Tags:

Music The Real Story