Of the Three Movies Released This Week, the One With the Most Racial and Gender Awareness is….Zootopia

Posted on March 5, 2016 at 12:27 pm

The two live-action releases this week, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and “London Has Fallen,” featured stereotyping and white actors playing characters of color. So it was especially refreshing to watch “Zootopia,” a Disney animated movie with talking animals, and discover some genuinely thoughtful and sensitive portrayal of race and gender. It is dispiriting to see that in 2016 movies like “Gods of Egypt” and “Whisky Tango Foxtrot” are using American, Australian, and European actors to play Middle Eastern characters. As Ann Hornaday points out in a very perceptive essay for the Washington Post,

, starring Tina Fey as an intrepid, amusingly clumsy television reporter assigned to cover the war in Afghanistan, takes full advantage of its lead actress’s unforced warmth, in the service of a film that balances drama, romance and comedy with admirable skill. But in the midst of what could have been a thoroughly delightful mid-winter diversion, viewers are presented with the off-putting spectacle of two white actors — Christopher Abbott and Alfred Molina — portraying key Afghan figures in the story, one wearing layers of bronzing powder and a native pakol, the other leering from behind a bushy beard.

The problem goes behind misrepresentation, authenticity, and making it tougher for non-white performers to get jobs and tell their own stories. “It’s a matter of aesthetics,” she notes. “Rather than getting lost in the story up on the screen, viewers find themselves distracted by a bad makeup job or too-obvious prosthetics. Rather than becoming wrapped up in the emotional truth a performer is trying to convey, they remain at arm’s length from a character that can never be fully, seamlessly realized.” It sends messages that audiences of all races cannot help but absorb about standards of beauty and appropriation.

But “Zootopia,” an animated family movies, has a remarkably sophisticated and thoughtful understanding of race and gender, perhaps because the characters are all animals, so the message is metaphorical. As Slate’s Dan Kois writes in a piece called “Disney’s Zootopia is a Delightful Kids’ Movie that is Also Totally About Racial Profiling,”

The movie gets laughs from some surprisingly touchy racial material: “A bunny can call another bunny cute, but you can’t,” Hopps scolds Wilde. Later, another character gets reprimanded for an impropriety that, famously, black men and women have to deal with all the time: “You can’t just touch a sheep’s wool!”

But as broad as the movie sometimes plays, it delivers a clear message that when individuals prejudge others based on their heritage—or when a police force cracks down on a certain kind of person based only on their own bias and fear—people get hurt and treated unfairly.

The lead character is a small female bunny who responds tartly to being called “cute” by explaining that bunnies can use that term about each other, but it is inappropriate from another species. And the focus on the story is on her challenges in overcoming stereotypes — and realizing that she has some of her own to overcome, too. This is a lesson the makers of films like “Gods of Egypt” and “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” should learn as well.

Trailer: The Meddler

Posted on March 5, 2016 at 8:00 am

The latest from Lorene Scafaria, director of the delightful “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,” is “The Meddler,” starring Susan Sarandon (with bagels!) and Rose Byrne.”

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Trailers, Previews, and Clips

Star Wars Costumes on Display at Discovery Times Square

Posted on March 4, 2016 at 8:00 am

Photos copyright 2016 Nell Minow, Costumes courtesy of LucasFilms and Discovery Times Square

Discovery Times Square has a fabulous exhibit of “Star Wars” costumes and props, from all seven films, with fascinating behind the scenes details and commentary from the people who created the costumes — and the people who wore them. The costumes for Queen Amidala are especially stunning and there even fabric samples to touch.

Photos Copyright Nell Minow 2016 Costumes Courtesy LucasFilms and Discovery Times Square

And yes, Princess Leia’s harem bikini costume is there, and you can see what Carrie Fisher had to say about wearing it.

When you visit, be sure to save time to play with the display at the end that lets you see yourself as C-3PO or Darth Vader.

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London Has Fallen

Posted on March 3, 2016 at 5:22 pm

“London Has Fallen” is a love letter from producer-star Gerard Butler to himself and every bit as dumb and dreary as that sounds. This sequel to the more violent of the two attack on the White House movies of 2013 follows an opening scene of a drone attack on a terrorist group, establishing the revenge motive, with a re-introduction to our hero, manly showboat Secret Service hero Mike Banning (Butler), out jogging with (and out-jogging) President Benjamin Asher. “What are you made of?” the President asks with the same air of astonished admiration producer/star Butler clearly expects from the audience. “Bourbon and bad choices,” says Mike, letting us know that he is harder than nails and tougher than hell. All right, then!

Bad news from London. The Prime Minister has died. So that means all the world leaders will attend the funeral, creating a security problem of unprecedented proportions and a heck of a traffic jam, too. Meanwhile, just to amp up the emotion in the laziest possible way, manly Mike and his adoring wife Leah (Radha Mitchell) are expecting a child. Mike stops home to chat with her about paint samples for the new nursery (and whether six security cameras trained on the crib is overdoing it, “and a Kevlar mattress,” ha ha). He also composes a draft letter of resignation but has to leave when the President needs him for the trip to London.

The rest of the movie is just a lot of shooting and explosions as most of the world leaders are wiped out and Mike has to keep the President safe and get him back to Washington. Plus some totally predictable (especially if you saw the last one) scenes of officials back home in the situation room watching intently on screens and saying things like “I think you’d better see this,” and at least one highly predictable death of a major character and at least one “surprise” about a traitor who turns out to be someone previously trusted.

I’d say it was more FPS game than movie, but at least in a game there is some excitement in the challenge of skill and timing. This is just passively watching things and people getting blown up and blown away, with many squishy sounds to remind us that blood is spurting. It is porn-y and fetishistic in the loving depiction of so much carnage, with iconic locations destroyed and many characters killed.

Just as distasteful is the portrayal of producer/star Butler as super-smart, always right, always picking the right target to hit and the right corner to turn, and able to take out dozens of bad guys all by himself, every single time. Excesses of self-regard and self-promotion are dwarfed by a complete failure of self-awareness. Mike blows away yet another swarthy generic bad guy and someone says, “Was that necessary?” “No,” Mike answers casually and moves on to the next one.

Those bad guys are tough. Not only do they blow up the city and murder world leaders, they “are all over social media.” Try burning that down, Mike Banning!

Gerard, was this movie necessary?

No.

Parents should know that this movie has extensive, intense and graphic peril and violence with guns, explosions, terrorism, and many characters injured and killed, disturbing images, world leaders assassinated, massive destruction, and constant strong language.

Family discussion: How do Mike and the President see things differently? If you were running the Secret Service, what would you do to protect the President?

If you like this, try: “Olympus Has Fallen” and “G.I. Joe”

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Action/Adventure Series/Sequel

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Posted on March 3, 2016 at 5:20 pm

When Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reviewed the book that inspired “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” the memoir of journalist Kim Barker about her days covering US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, she wrote:

What’s remarkable about “The Taliban Shuffle” is that its author, Kim Barker — a reporter at ProPublica and the South Asia bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009 — has written an account of her experiences covering Afghanistan and Pakistan that manages to be hilarious and harrowing, witty and illuminating, all at the same time.

It’s not just that Ms. Barker is adept at dramatizing her own adventures as a reporter — though she develops the chops of a veteran foreign correspondent, she depicts herself as a sort of Tina Fey character, who unexpectedly finds herself addicted to the adrenaline rush of war.

And now that book is a movie, and the role of Ms. Barker is being played by non-other than Tina Fey, who also co-produced. As always, her work is whip-smart and original. This is not Liz Lemon goes to war, it is an impressively sensitive dramatic performance.

But Barker’s story has been movie-ized, giving it the “inspired by” rather than “based on” designation, and removing the “r” from the character’s name to create some space. The real Barker was a print journalist, but making her a television correspondent to make it more cinematic. And the various love interests are fictional. It is disappointing that the movie makes the impetus for the assignment a combination of professional and romantic ennui. Barker was a dedicated journalist looking for a big story.

But much of the essence of it is the real deal, starting with Barker/Baker’s plan to spend three months in Afghanistan that turned into three years, and the ramped-up intensity of spending days embedded with the military, frantically editing the story, and then trying to obliterate memory and consciousness with some hard-core partying, only to start over again. Baker is inexperienced but dedicated and smart. She quickly impresses the cynical General (Billy Bob Thornton) who sees embedded journalists as a bother and a risk. And she quickly bonds with the other woman reporter (Margot Robbie), who shows her the ropes and asks very politely if she can sleep with Baker’s hunky security guy.

Alfred Molina is excellent, as always, as an Afghani official, though we should be past the time when European actors are cast as Middle Eastern characters. And maybe we do not need any more stories of Western characters discovering the mysteries of the other side of the world, with illuminating life lessons from exotic people. We don’t want this to be “Under the Tuscan Sun” but with war instead of sun-ripened Italian tomatoes, and it gets uncomfortably close at times. But the thoughtful script from longtime Fey collaborator Robert Carlock keeps the film from making war be just a growth experience for a reporter looking to shake up her life a bit, and the contrast between what the war does to the people trying to tell the story, knowing that the people back home just change the channel anyway give the story a sobering weight.

Parents should know that this movie has constant very strong, crude, and colorful language, drinking, drugs, smoking, wartime violence with some graphic images, characters injured and killed, sexual references and situations, and nudity.

Family discussion: What was the most important story Kim Baker reported? What did she mean when she said it “started to feel normal?”

If you like this, try: The book that inspired this film, The Taliban Shuffle, and the film “The Year of Living Dangerously”