Misty

Posted on July 21, 2010 at 8:18 am

If you can’t make it to Virginia today for the annual swimming of the ponies, take a look at this faithful adaptation of the classic (and fact-based) children’s book Misty of Chincoteague, by Marguerite Henry. It is the story of two children who fall in love with a wild horse, descended from the Spanish ponies who escaped from a sinking ship and swam to Asateague, an island off the coast of Virginia. The children are Paul and Maureen, who live with their grandparents on Chincoteague, a neighboring island. Once a year, the residents of Chincoteague go to Asateague to capture ponies.

There is a very nice presentation of the challenge of teaching the foal independence, how hard it is for her, but how much love it shows. Paul learns this when he has to let the Phantom, Misty’s mother, go back to Asateague. He tells Misty to go, too, but Misty stays and runs after the children. Her home is with them, now. This movie provides a good opportunity to talk about showing love by letting go. The brother and sister have a very good, supportive relationship. And their grandfather (Arthur O’Connell) is strict and proud but understanding, as shown by his reaction when Paul goes off to Asateague alone.

Questions for Kids:

Why is it important for Misty to learn to be independent? What is a good way to teach her?

Does she know that her mother loves her even though she is trying to teach her to do things for herself?

Why does Misty want to stay with the children? Why doesn’t the Phantom want to stay?

How does Paul know?

Connections: David Ladd is the son of 40s star Alan Ladd (“Shane”).

Activities: Children will enjoy Misty of Chincoteague and its sequels. See if they can find the island of Chincoteague on a map, and look for information about the annual auction. Take the kids to a pony ride, or to a place where they can feed and pet some horses.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Posted on July 5, 2010 at 9:49 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent content including rape, grisly images, sexual material, nudity, and language
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and disturbing violence including rape
Diversity Issues:	Strong female character, character with possible Asperger syndrome
Date Released to Theaters:	November 7, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	July 6, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B003FBNJ4U

If you have not read any of the Millennium trilogy of novels by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, someone near you has. A worldwide sensation published after the death of the author, the books follow the title character, Lisbeth Salandar, a slight but tough and determined young woman who is a genius with computers but possibly Aspergian in her inability to connect to other people.

This film, based on the first of the books, comes out on DVD just as the second film with the same cast is released in theaters and the third book has been published in the US. It won the Swedish equivalent of the Oscar for best film and best actress for Noomi Rapace as Salander.

They are already working on an American version, but it is hard to imagine that it could match this superb adaptation, utterly true to the book and yet completely cinematic. As the story begins, a character much like Larsson takes center stage. He is Mikael Blomkvist (superbly played by Michael Nyqvist), a journalist in disgrace and about to go to jail for publishing false information about a powerful businessman. As he waits to begin to serve his term, he is offered an intriguing opportunity — a wealthy man hires him to investigate the disappearance of his favorite niece, forty years ago. Salander finds out what he is doing and begins to help him, at first anonymously, and then more directly. Together, they get tangled up in a world where every rule is violated, every promise broken, every loyalty betrayed.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Posted on June 22, 2010 at 8:45 am

A teenager feels like he doesn’t fit in anywhere. It all comes together when he finds out that he has inherited some special powers from the father he last saw when he was seven months old. And he soon finds himself in a special school with other kids like him, where they can learn to make the most of their powers.Sound familiar? It does have something in common with Harry Potter, including a successful series of books now made into a movie. They even share a director; Chris Columbus did the first two Harry Potter films, and so he is an old hand at translating a beloved series of novels about kids with special powers on screen. Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) loves his mom (Catherine Keener) but his step-father is obnoxious and abusive. He has a loyal friend named Grover, but he is dyslexic and has ADHD so school is difficult. He is most happy and comfortable in the pool. On a field trip, the gray-haired substitute teacher turns out to be a fury. As in a shrieking flying monster. And the teacher in the wheelchair (Pierce Brosnan)? He turns out to be a centaur, half man, half horse. Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who walks with crutches, is a satyr (goat-legs) assigned to protect him. And Percy is the son of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. He is to water like Popeye is to spinach, and then some. Water gives him strength and healing powers and he can also control it. Someone has stolen the lightning bolt from Zeus (Sean Bean). And he suspects his two brothers, the gods of the sea and the underworld. He thinks Percy is hiding the bolt — and so do a number of other creatures. Percy has to find the bolt and return it to Zeus before the summer solstice. He gets a bit of training at demigod boot camp and is soon off on his quest with a shield from the son of Hermes, and a pen from the centaur, accompanied by Grover and Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), the swashbuckling daughter of Athena. Writer Rick Riordan is not in J.K. Rowling’s league when it comes to inventiveness, intricacy, imagination, or heart. But he has a good sense of the way a young teenager sees the world. I like the way that the things that bother Percy most in his old life turn out to be strengths in his new life. He is dyslexic with English because his brain is hard-wired to read classic Greek. He is ADHD because he has the reflexes of a warrior. And his mother stuck with the odious step-father because, well, I’ll just say because it was the best way to keep Percy hidden. I like the overlay of Greek mythology. But the attempts to bring a modern sensibility to the adventures sometimes feel forced and awkward. Lerman is a bit bland, leaving Grover to capture much of our attention and interest.But the main thing this movie seems to be missing is classically trained British actors. Brosnan is nicely majestic in a brief role and Steve Coogan brightens things up considerably as Hades. But we realize how much the Harry Potter movies benefited from top performers like Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon. Uma Thurman re-creates her all-time weakest performance by making Medusa into a snake-headed version of Poison Ivy and the usually-terrific Rosario Dawson seems lost as Persephone. We need a bit more “Clash of the Titans” and a bit less of “Circus of the Stars.” (more…)

Shutter Island

Posted on June 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

Dennis Lehane, author of gritty crime novels like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone and one of the writers of “The Wire,” and director Martin Scorsese, best known for movies like “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” about wiseguys, hitmen, and omertas, have come together for “Shutter Island.” While it is less a crime story than a horror-tinged psychological mystery, this, too, is about murder and madness, the difficulty of separating truth from lies, about twisted motives and anguished fears, and about the devastating consequences of unthinkable pain and loss.

Set in 1954, it begins when a murderer confined to a hospital for the criminally insane has not just escaped; she has disappeared. She was in a locked cell and then she was gone.

In the midst of a huge, gusting rainstorm, two federal marshals investigate, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo). The hospital, once a Civil War fort, is on an island off the coast of Massachusetts and when the storm knocks out all power and phone lines they are completely isolated. The marshals get soaked in the rain so they change into the only dry clothes available — orderly uniforms. They begin to look as though they belong there.

The hospital is eerie. The doctors are smooth but uncooperative, with an unsettling way of diagnosing not just the patients but the marshals — they seem to think that they are the ones who are asking questions. The patients cannot be trusted. But can anyone?

To say any more about what happens would be to spoil it. So, I’ll just write a bit about about some of what goes on around what is happening to the characters.

The first is just the pure pleasure of seeing a master film-maker showing us everything in his power after a lifetime of watching and making movies. No one in history has ever been more passionate about film than Martin Scorsese and that is clear in every placement of the camera, every cut from his full partner in film-making, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and every element of the set from his “Casino” production designer Dante Ferretti. The camera tracks through the dank corridors, the blade-like steps of the circular staircase, the driving rain and sheer cliff, telling us just what Scorsese wants us to know and no more. Each shot keeps us inside Teddy’s thoughts and the shifts between the objective and subjective are handled with a consummate understanding of the language of cinema.

Next is the choice of the setting, not just the island but the era. We see Teddy frequently thinking back to his traumatic experience at the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau. Teddy and the doctors are very much of their time a crucial one in the development of psychiatric theories as three camps — surgical, pharmaceutical, and talk therapies competed with each other and this adds another layer of interest to the proceedings.

Finally, this is a movie where everything feels like a metaphor, a clue, or both at once and every single detail is a part of the story. The intricacy of the story reaches a meta-level about the power of stories — to harm and to heal. It is an expert thriller with plenty of chills and jumps and goosebumps but finally it is the questions it raises about our ability to trust the characters and our own conclusions that will haunt us.

Related Tags:

Based on a book Drama Thriller

Alice in Wonderland

Posted on June 1, 2010 at 8:00 am

Almost 150 years ago Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson published his wildly imaginative story about Alice’s adventures down a rabbit hole. And now the wildly imaginative director Tim Burton has brought Wonderland to the 3D movie screen. It is less faithful to the original story than many of the previous dozen or so movie versions, but I think Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, would approve of Burton’s bringing his own take to the classic characters.

He brings his own story as well. Carroll’s Alice is a little girl bored by her sister’s dull book, and her journey is episodic and filled with wordplay and references to Victorian society that fill the annotated edition of the book with witty footnotes.

To make the story more cinematic, Burton tells us that all of that has already happened in what young Alice thought was a dream. This is her return visit. Alice is 18 years old and has just been proposed to by a dull but wealthy lord with no chin and bad digestion. As she meets up with the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter, she is not the only one who is confused. Characters seem puzzled and unsure about whether she is the real Alice. The Mad Hatter peers at her perplexedly. She may be Alice, and yet not quite completely the Alice they are looking for. “You were once muchier,” he tells her. “You’ve lost your muchiness.” In Burton’s version, Alice’s adventures are about her finding her “muchiness.” Her visit to Wonderland is a chance for her to understand what she is capable of and how much she will lose if she makes her decisions based on what people expect from her. As in the Carroll story, she is constantly changing size, and Burton shows us that she is really finding her place. She believes she is once again in a dream but increasingly learns that it is one she can control. By the time she faces the Jabberwock, she knows that she is in control — and that her courage and determination can create the opportunity she needs to follow her heart.

Johnny Depp brings a depth, even a poignance to the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter is utterly delicious as the peppery red queen, hilariously furious over her stolen tarts. There’s a thrilling battle, the visuals are dazzling, with references to classic book illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and the 3D effects will have you feeling as though you are falling down the rabbit hole yourself. The frame story bookending the Wonderland/Underland adventure is tedious and, oddly, less believable than the disappearing cat and frog footmen. But Burton’s re-interpretation of the classic story is filled with muchiness and the result is pretty darn frabjuous.