Want to See A Movie With Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, and Olaf the Snowman’s Josh Gad?
Posted on March 21, 2015 at 8:00 am
I am quite fond of a little film from 2008 called “The Rocker,” starring Rainn Wilson. And it’s even more fun now, as three of its actors have become big stars. Wilson plays a drummer who was let go just before his group became hugely successful in 1998. Twenty years later, his life is a mess and he is living with his sister and her husband (Jane Lynch and Jeff Garlin). His nephew (Josh Gad) has a rock group called A.D.D. that will be performing at prom, and they need a drummer. The group takes off — in both senses of the word. Emma Stone plays the group’s bass player. And Bradley Cooper is unrecognizable under a massive wig in a brief but funny as a member of Wilson’s original band, along with Will Arnett and Fred Armisen. The cast also includes Demetri Martin as the director of A.D.D.’s music video, Jason Sudeikis as their manager, and Christina Applegate as the mother of A.D.D.’s frontman, real-life musician Teddy Geiger. It’s a lot of fun and the music is great.
A Rare Interview with Bill Watterson of “Calvin and Hobbes”
Posted on March 20, 2015 at 3:27 pm
I am a huge fan of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strip and it was a thrill to see so many of the original drawings in the superbly curated show at the Billy Ireland Museum last year. Now that show’s catalogue, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue, has been published and it is a treasure. Watterson does not do interviews, preferring to let the work speak for itself. But he did agree to an interview with the curator who organized the show, and it is, as expected, wise, witty, and insightful. A portion of the interview ran in Michael Cavna’s Washington Post column. Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt.
As Calvin and Hobbes went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity. One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head. So that, and my interest in creating a lively sense of animation, forced me to push the flatter, more cartoony and loose designs I started with into a more three-dimensional conception of form and space. If I wanted to draw Calvin from some odd camera angle, I had to visualize him sort of sculpturally, so I could draw it. That’s when you discover that the zigzag shorthand for his hair doesn’t work in perspective very well. Or you find that his tiny little legs are hard to make run, because he hardly has knees. You invent solutions to these sorts of problems, and that gradually changes the appearance of the strip.
Another factor was simply that I got better at drawing as I went along, so I wanted to throw in whatever I was capable of doing. I kept trying to push the art as far as I could, because drawing was the fun part. I was eager to keep raising the bar and discover what else I might be able to do with the strip. By the end, I had a sort of calligraphic brush line I liked and I was very happy with the look of the strip. It looked like what I had in my head.
Brittany Snow (“Pitch Perfect”) and William H. Macy star in “Dial a Prayer,” about a troubled young woman who takes a job praying for and with anyone who calls in.
Jean-Michel Cousteau begins this dazzling underwater documentary with archival footage of his father’s pioneering work in showing us life in the other two-thirds of the planet. And then he uses the latest technology to bring those flickering monotone images up to date with spectacular visions of exquisite sea animals shaped like plants, a 30-pound snail that eats food to make it taste bad to predators, a creature that looks like a pile of twigs and has no head and no blood but can regenerate its appendages, a candy-cane striped shrimp, all in a world exotic, strange, and wondrously interdependent with our own. Plankton, we learn from narrator Dr. Sylvia Earle, is not just the source of food for many of the creatures who live in the sea (and who themselves are food for other animals), but the source of much of the oxygen we breathe. The environmental message is subtle, but powerful. These creatures cannot survive without us and we cannot survive without them.
The images are stunning beyond words, but it would have been nice to get more information about the locations and habits of the animals we are observing. Still, this is as spectacular a series of images and as provocative a series of characters as you will see on any screen this year.
01 – DIGITAL3D – February 20, 2015 – Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland (OR)
02 – IMAX3D – February 27, 2015 – The Henry Ford Museum IMAX Theatre, Dearborn (MI)
03 – DIGITAL3D – March 6, 2015 – Moody Gardens 3D Theater, Galveston (TX)
04 – IMAX3D – March 20, 2015 – Indiana State Museum IMAX 3D Theatre, Indianapolis (IN)
05 – IMAX3D – March 20, 2015 – Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Samuel C. Johnson IMAX, Washington (DC)
06 – IMAX3D – April 3, 2015 – Montreal Science Center Telus IMAX 3D Theater, Montreal (QC)
07 – IMAX3D – April 16, 2015 – New England Aquarium Simons IMAX Theatre, Boston (MA)
08 – IMAX2D (DOME) – No later than April 20, 2015 – Planetario Puebla Omnimax Theater, Puebla (Mexico)
09 – DIGITAL3D – May 22, 2015 – Houston Museum of Natural Science 3D Theater, Houston (TX)
10 – DIGITAL3D – May 23, 2015 – New Mexico Museum of Natural History Lockheed-Martin DYNA Theatre, Albuquerque (NM)
11 – DIGITAL3D – June 12, 2015 – Milwaukee Public Museum 3D Theater, Milwaukee (WI)
12 – DIGITAL3D – July 10, 2015 – American Museum of Natural History 3D Theatre, New York City (NY)
13 – IMAX3D (DIGITAL) – No later than August 30, 2015 – Challenger Learning Center IMAX, Tallahassee (FL)
Rated PG-13 for intense violence and action throughout, some sensuality, thematic elements and brief language
Profanity:
Several strong words, one f-word
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drugs used for suppression and torture
Violence/ Scariness:
Extensive peril and violence, disturbing images, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
March 20, 2015
Copyright Summit Entertainment 2015
This second in the “Divergent” series suffers from sequel-itis. The exuberance of the premise buoyed the first episode, as we and the central character, Tris (Shailene Woodley) explored the post-apocalyptic world that divided all citizens into strictly segregated factions. But now that the foundation has been laid, the next steps are not nearly as exciting.
There is Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). The tasks of the society are assigned according to the qualities of each. Amity are the farmers. Dauntless are a combination of law enforcement and military. Candor are the judges. Erudite make the laws. Abnegation care for everyone, even the factionless, and due to their tradition, culture, and ethos of putting the good of others before themselves, they are the governing body.
But over time, the system has eroded. When Tris is evaluated for assignment to a faction, she is found to be “divergent,” with more than one of the qualities, and that is considered profoundly threatening to the system.
At the end of the last episode, she had joined the Dauntless and survived their brutal series of tests and escaped with Four (Theo James), following a battle that killed her mother, as Jeanine (Kate Winslet), an Erudite, is consolidating her power and turning the community into a dictatorship. As this chapter begins, Tris and Four are hiding out in Amity with Tris’ Erudite brother, Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and a member of Dauntless named Peter (Miles Teller).
Tris chops off her hair so that she spends the rest of the film looking like a cross between Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Her Dauntless side is impatient in the tranquil community of Amity, where people murmur, “Go with happiness,” as they hand out food in the cafeteria line. She is determined to go back into the city and kill Jeanine.
Meanwhile, Jeanine has found a box that was hidden by Tris’ mother (Ashley Judd), and can only be opened by someone who is fully Divergent, possessing in equal amounts the qualities of all five factions. She is certain the box is the key to controlling everyone, and she must get Tris — alive — to get it open.
Four and Tris end up in Candor, where they are given a powerful truth serum. “May the truth set you free,” is not just rhetoric as the serum is administered. It will determine whether Four and Tris are turned over to Jeanine. They are proven to have been telling the truth but it is a painful experience and they end up captured anyway. Tris is forced to endure a series of excruciating “sims” to qualify to open the box (not clear why she couldn’t just try it to see), and the results are not what Jeanine was expecting.
Some of the plot developments, from a book written by an author in her early 20’s, simply cannot hold up to being portrayed onscreen. At times it’s just a weaponized vision of the highly cliquish tables at the high school cafeteria. Even pros like Winslet and Naomi Watts (as a rebel leader) cannot quite put their thinly conceived characters over. But Woodley never lets us forget that the biggest struggle Tris has is not with the repressive regime but with her own fears and regrets. Her sincerity and resolve outshine all the fight scenes and give some depth to the superficiality of the storyline.
Parents should know that this film includes constant peril and intense violence with guns, knives, suicide, and threatened suicide, many characters injured and killed, some disturbing images, a sexual situation, a storyline about repressive government and personal and political betrayal, and several swear words.
Family discussion: Why does Jeanine think she is acting on behalf of the greater good? Why does Caleb? How does our society try to categorize people?
If you like this, try: the “Hunger Games” films and “The Giver” and the books they are based on
, has been published and it is a treasure. Watterson does not do interviews, preferring to let the work speak for itself. But he did agree to an interview with the curator who organized the show, and it is, as expected, wise, witty, and insightful. 
