Posted on September 18, 2015 at 8:00 am
I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to remake “Point Break,” because it is such a perfect combination of silly and awesome, with my all-time favorite movie stunt. What could a remake be but superfluous? But I have to say, this trailer looks pretty cool.
Posted on September 17, 2015 at 8:00 pm
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | High School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements involving violence and substance abuse |
| Profanity: | Some strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drugs and discussions of drug abuse |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Prison escape, violent murders, tense confrontations, hostage situation |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | September 18, 2015 |
Two desperate people who think they have nothing discover that there is still a lot more to lose in this fact-based story about an escaped prisoner and the woman he held captive.
The story made headlines throughout the country. Ashley Smith, a young widow still in her 20’s, was in the early, fragile stages of recovery from drug abuse. Her daughter was living with Smith’s aunt, but Smith was working hard to be able to care for her. Brian Nichols was in prison, charged with rape. When he was being transferred for his trial, he beat the security guard, stole the civilian clothes he was to wear for the trial, and went on the run, killing a judge and three other people. He grabbed Smith, and forced her to let him into her apartment. He held her there for seven hours before she was able to leave and call 911. While they were together, they talked, she made him pancakes, and she read aloud to him from Rick Warren’s best-seller, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?
Kate Mara plays Smith and David Oyelowo plays Nichols, and the heart of the movie is seeing each of them find some humanity in the other. Neither has any reason to trust, and neither does much to earn trust, either. “I’m a mother!” she says when he first captures her. She wants him to see her as a person, and as a person someone else depends on. But she tells him the truth, that her daughter is not there and will not be returning. And then she lies to him and says that her husband is coming home soon. He asks her for weed, and she says there isn’t any, but he can tell from the way she says it that she is holding something else. It is “ice” (meth) and it is in a small packet she almost could not resist shortly before Nichols captured her.
He takes some and tries to force her to take the rest. But she realizes that she would literally rather die than start using again, and it is the strength of that moment that is the turning point for her. Hopped up on drugs, Nichols says he wants Smith and her daughter to come with him to Mexico. He will kidnap his infant son and they can all be together. But he knows it is impossible. Listening to the book, or perhaps seeing Smith get the message that she can still have a purpose even after all her mistakes, helps him understand what he must do. Smith herself says that moment was when faith in God’s love filled her heart and she knew she would be all right.
The movie loses momentum when it shifts to the law enforcement efforts to track Nichols. What matters is two people who think they have lost everything and how one of them chooses life, hope, and purpose.
Parents should know that this movie includes a prison escape with four brutal murders, guns plus reference to drug dealing and another murder, hostage, drugs and discussion of drug abuse, some strong language, and issues of child custody and parental fitness.
Family discussion: What were the most meaningful parts of the time they spent together to Ashley? To Brian? What book would you want to read to someone afraid and in pain?
If you like this, try: the book by Ashley Smith Robinson and Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life
Posted on September 17, 2015 at 6:00 pm
Director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) has assembled a superb cast to tell a complicated story. Bulger was a full-service crook — a killer, racketeer, extortionist, and drug dealer. When a businessman would not cooperate, he did not waste time making him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Told that he wouldn’t make a deal, he asks, “Will his widow make a deal?” And then the guy gets shot in the parking lot of his country club and she is a widow.
What makes this story different from the usual gangster film is that Bulger was enabled by a childhood friend from the neighborhood who became an FBI agent, John Connelly (Joel Edgerton). At first, they help each other, especially when Bulger tips off the FBI so they can go after his rivals, clearing the way for the expansion of Bulger’s Winter Hill gang into new territories and lines of illegal business. But the FBI ultimately becomes complicit, even turning over to Bulger the names of informants so he can execute them. “Black Mass” is a reference to a Satanic perversion of the Catholic rites of prayer, and this movie is about the secular perversion that has a murderer sharing a jolly Christmas dinner with the most powerful politician in the state (Bulger’s brother Billy, played with wily street smarts by Benedict Cumberbatch) and the FBI agent who is supposed to be investigating him.
Cooper and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (based on the book by Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill
We see Bulger harden over the years, as though he is freezing from the inside out. There is a lot of talk about loyalty but it is really about pride and power. Its exploration of the compromises that may be necessary to stop someone who operates entirely outside the rules and the implosion of spirit necessary to maintain those compromises gives a texture to the story by asking us to consider who was responsible for more damage and who was more responsible as well. Bulger is a deeply frightening bad guy. But the scarier bad guys are the ones who are supposed to be protecting us from the Bulgers of the world and protect them instead.
Parents should know that this movie is based on the true story of a notorious crime boss. It includes many brutal murders, drug dealing, racketeering, corrupt law enforcement, graphic and disturbing images, constant strong language, sexual references, prostitution, drugs, drinking, smoking.
Family discussion: What should the rules be for working with informants who are involved enough with crime to provide reliable testimony? Do you agree with the punishments for the various characters? What would you do differently?
If you like this, try: “The Departed” (Jack Nicholson’s character was in part inspired by Bulger) and “Goodfellas,” and the documentary “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger”
Posted on September 17, 2015 at 5:57 pm
This is why we can’t have nice things. As the brief history at the beginning of “Everest” points out, the first successful group to reach the summit of the world’s tallest mountain was led by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. The mountain was the exclusive province of hardy adventurers. But then four decades later, commercial tour groups began to clog the mountain. This made it possible for people who had no business to be there to arrive with certain expectations that people who were being paid to guide them were under a lot of pressure to deliver on. And the crowding itself made it more difficult to keep everyone safe.
Writer Jon Krakauer went on one of those trips for Outside Magazine in 1996, when a huge storm and some bad decisions resulted in the deaths of twelve climbers. His best-selling book, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
The scenery is spectacular, and the 3D IMAX cinematography is literally breathtaking, especially when one climber slips on a precarious ladder across a gorge and we get a vertiginous view straight down. But the people blocking the scenery never come alive to us as characters, partly because most of the time they are wearing near-identical parkas with hoods and speaking through masks or covered with snow, so it is impossible to tell them apart, and partly because so many of them are arrogant idiots. It is difficult to keep the characters straight, much less connect to them, and impossible to feel sympathy for people who make so many bad choices and then go to a place where the altitude, as high as the pressurized cabins of commercial aircraft, literally swells the brain so that thinking is impaired even further.
There are things we do because we dare. And there are things we do because we have big egos and $65,000. Asked repeatedly why they are climbing, no one has a good answer. Some echo Mallory: “Because it’s there!” but the very act of quoting someone else about daring undermines that spirit.
A woman from Japan (Naoko Mori) says that she has already climbed the other six peaks of the world’s seven tallest mountains. A man from Texas (Josh Brolin) wearing a Dole/Kemp t-shirt to make sure we know he’s a proud Republican, says he feels depressed when he’s not on a mountain — and that when his wife (Robin Wright) says she would divorce him if he went on another climb, he went on this one without telling her. A mailman/carpenter (John Hawkes) wants to tell the schoolchildren who helped him raise the money for the trip that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Everyone else kind of mushes together.
Then there are the two rival tour guides, the only distinctive and relatable characters. Rob (Jason Clarke) is a tender-hearted New Zealander with a pretty pregnant wife (Keira Knightley) waiting back home. Scott (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a seemingly laid-back American who beams beatifically when he says “It’s all good,” but points out that all of his group made it to the top when Rob’s group has not.
The film touches on important issues of hubris and the impact of commercialization turing an area that was for thousands of years reserved for the hardiest of adventurers into a playground for people with too much money and too little judgment, but frustratingly abandons them for an increasingly confusing storyline. We know a lot of things are going wrong, but it is difficult to tell what is happening to which climber and where they are in relation to each other. The anguished faces of the people trying to make contact do not come close in impact to that one moment on the bridge.
Parents should know that this film depicts real-life events of extreme peril with many characters injured and killed, very sad deaths, some disturbing images, and some strong language.
Family discussion: What changes would you recommend to prevent these kinds of fatalities in the future? What would you say to Rob in those final conversations if you were Helen? If you were Jan?
If you like this, try: “Touching the Void,” a gripping documentary about another real-life mountain climbing accident and Jon Krakauer’s book about the events of this film
Posted on September 17, 2015 at 5:51 pm
The first Maze Runner movie had an arresting premise and a solid structure, literally and metaphorcally. Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), with his memory wiped, arrived at a mysterious facility called The Glade, populated entirely by teenage boys. It turned out to be an enormous maze that re-arranged itself every night, when horrible monsters called The Grievers came out and one sting from them caused madness.
Thomas figured out how to escape from the maze at the end of the film, but the triumph was tempered by indicators that his worst problems were just beginning and by our knowledge that there were two more books in the series by James Dasher
This sequel is very much a transitional film, with non-stop action and not much story. It’s as though Dasher decided to throw just about every bad thing possible at Thomas and his small band of escapees from The Glade.
They are greeted warmly by a man whose first indicator of untrustworthiness is that he does not introduce himself. When asked, instead of saying his name, he says, “You can call me Janson” (Aiden Gillen). But the teenagers are so happy to have a shower, food, and real beds that they are not inclined to question the bleak, prison-like structure with high security doors. And Janson’s promise to send them to a place free of the virus and blight that wiped out most life on earth sounds so good that they believe it, especially when they see the other teenagers in the facility cheering each night as another group is selected to leave for the haven he described.
But Thomas is skeptical, and when Aris (Jacob Lofland), a boy who has been at the facility for weeks, takes him on a tour through the air ducts, they discover that instead of being brought to a wonderful new home the teens who have a genetic immunity to “the flare” disease that wiped out most humans are being taken to a medical facility to be drained of their blood for doctors working to find a cure, even at the expense of the kids’ lives. Thomas leads yet another escape, though Janson taunts him that no one can survive the Scorch, the wasteland conditions outside the bunker. Thomas and his friends, including Aris, battle sandstorms and lightning, zombies, and outlaws.
So much happens that it gets repetitive. If a major character appears trapped and you hear a bang, you can bet the bang is a last minute save from behind the bad guy. Some red shirts don’t make it and there are some twists of alliances and betrayals, but eventually it is more video game than story, raising questions that are more “how does this make sense?” than “looking forward to the answers in part three!”
Parents should know that the film has constant very intense peril and extensive violence including zombies, lethal medical procedures, guns, and explosions, suicides, some very disturbing images, many characters injured and killed, a kiss, some strong language, and teen substance abuse.
Family discussion: How is Thomas different from the other characters in the way he evaluates his options? Why did Teresa make her controversial decision?
If you like this, try: the books and the first movie in the series, the “Hunger Games” and “Divergent” movies
