Posted on October 17, 2011 at 8:34 am
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | 4th - 6th Grades |
| MPAA Rating: | NR |
| Profanity: | None |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | None |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Spooky Halloween themes |
| Diversity Issues: | None |
| Date Released to Theaters: | 1986 |
| Date Released to DVD: | October 16, 2011 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B0002JP5EK |
Thanks to my godson, Theo Leiss, for reminding me of this Halloween treat! The Worst Witch
Posted on October 13, 2011 at 6:31 pm
“The Big Year” would be a lot better if it didn’t try so hard to be The Big Movie. This over-Hollywood-ized take on the real-life story of passionate-to-obsessed birders (don’t say “bird-watchers”) makes us wish for a documentary instead. Everything they do to make it “mainstream” and “accessible” and appealing to a mass audience just erodes the specificity that makes this world intriguing. And the trailer misrepresents the movie, making it look like the usual wild comedy we associate with Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson when instead it is mostly a drama with a few awkwardly inserted moments of slapstick. Just about the only comic moment not highlighted in the trailer is when a newlywed couple we see only once arrives on a remote island, his not having told her that what she thinks is going to be a romantic honeymoon is in a place where they will be staying in a barracks with no electricity or running water so he can see some birds.
Each year, extreme birders compete to see who can see the most birds from January 1 to December 31 by doing what they call “a big year.” Winning requires expert knowledge because they have to be able to instantly identify hundreds of species, often based only on a quick glimpse from a long distance or even just from hearing a trill. It requires absolute, unquestionable integrity. No refs, no umps, no certifiers from the Guinness Book of World Records. It is on the honor system. And most of all, like all world-class endeavors, it requires a level of ambition, determination, and focus that can cause serious damage to friendships, marriages and careers.
Martin plays a very successful corporate executive who has postponed retirement twice. His company begs him to stay, but he knows he cannot delay any longer if he wants to give the big year a try. With the warm-hearted support of his wife and grown son, he decides to give it everything he has. Black plays a software engineer at a nuclear power plant who continues to work full-time while he tries to break the all-time record set by Bostick (Wilson), a builder on his third marriage, to a wife who is trying to get pregnant. Bostick promises he will not do another big year, but when it seems that the other two are closing in on his record, he can’t stand it any more. And all three of them are off on a literal wild goose chase.
The scenery is gorgeous. The birds (at least the less obviously CGI birds) are lovely. But the personal lives of the three men are predictable and not very compelling. Screenwriter Howard Franklin zigs where he should have zagged, sticking with the real stories when he should have been shaping a more involving story arc, and failing to convey the real heart of the story, what it is that makes these people so passionate. We get a moment or two when a character explains why one species is his favorite and when all three of the main characters are briefly so transfixed by the sight of eagles mating that for a moment they forget all about competing and record-setting. We never know what makes us want to watch birds. But we do know what makes us want to watch movies and this one does not have enough of it.
Posted on October 6, 2011 at 5:59 pm
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Not rated |
| Profanity: | Some strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, smoking |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Sad death of parent |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters, |
| Date Released to Theaters: | October 7, 2011 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B004UFA0RE |
“Being normal is overrated,” a young boy’s friend assures him. “You’ll probably turn out to be very interesting.”
He was right. British chef and food writer Nigel Slater tells his own story in “Toast”
This film was produced for BBC television and it assumes a familiarity with British dialect and culture that may be confusing for American audiences, even the Masterpiece Theatre-loving Anglophiles. And some family members have disputed the accuracy of Slater’s portrayal. It spends too much time on the early part of Slater’s life (played as a child by Oscar Kennedy) and not enough on his teen years (played by Freddie Highmore). The tone keeps it engaging, though, because Slater’s point of view does not get maudlin. When his stepmother is portrayed as a grasping shrew we understand that it is through his eyes as an unforgiving teenager and, as the last scene makes clear, that he recognizes that living well is the best revenge. Except for maybe being the one to tell the story.
Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:02 pm
A-| Lowest Recommended Age: | Middle School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG-13 for some strong language |
| Profanity: | Some strong language (much less than the book) |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Chewing tobacco, alcohol |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Tense family situations, sad references to injuries and letting players go |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | September 23, 2011 |
| Date Released to DVD: | January 9, 2012 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B0060ZJ7BC |
Brad Pitt is underrated as an actor. But he is the best there is when it comes to calibrating the deployment of his onscreen star power, which he uses as expertly as Meryl Streep does accents. Pitt can dial it down to one when he wants to play character actor and make it work. But here he dials it back up to eleven, giving the role of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane a shot of pure movie magic in this real-life story about the man who turned baseball upside down by using computer formulas to select “undervalued” players.
The Oakland A’s feel like “a farm team for the New York Yankees.” They make players great and then lose them to the teams with budgets more than three times as large. All that money makes the playing field anything but level. “We’re a small market team and you’re a small market GM. I’m asking you to be okay spending the money we have,” the owner tells Beane. “There are rich teams and there are poor teams and then 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us,” is Beane’s frank appraisal.
The A’s cultivate and train players who leave for the teams that can pay the most. A game that is supposed to be about skill and drive seems to be just about money. And then Beane, in the midst of a negotiation with another team that is not going well, notices a nerdy-looking guy in the corner who seems to have some influence. After the meeting, that nerdy guy becomes Beane’s first draft pick.
He is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a shy wonk who comes to work for Beane and together they pursue a different direction. Instead of the century-old system of watching players hit, catch, throw, and run and try to figure out if that means they will be able to perform in the big leagues — a system that failed badly when Beane himself was recruited right out of high school — they will look at computer algorithms about what produces wins. Brand and Beane develop a roster like Warren Buffett puts together a stock portfolio. They look at fundamentals to figure out unrecognized value. Sort of a grown-up Bad News Bears. Or, as Brand puts it, an Island of Misfit Toys.
The script from two of the best screenwriters in history, Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steven Zallain (“Schindler’s List”) is well-structured and filled with smart talk. The scenes of Beane’s own pro career are too long and too distracting. But scenes with Beane visiting his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and her new husband and especially those with Beane and his daughter add warmth and urgency to the story. But it is Pitt who is in every way the heart of the movie, his natural confidence and grace a lovely balance to the formulas with Greek letters and the endless statistics. It is nice to see baseball, that most number-centric game, get upended by numbers. And yet it succeeds because it is that most cherished of traditions, the come-from-behind underdog story.
Posted on September 16, 2011 at 8:21 am
This film takes the most wrenching and universal dilemma of family life and turns it into a sitcom-y love letter to Sarah Jessica Parker. Not the character she plays, the whippet-thin, stiletto-wearing financial whiz with the adorably mussed hair, but the actress herself, whose appeal as a performer continues to diminish in direct proportion to her increasing need to make us love her and expectation that we must. Carrie has been very bad for SJP.
Parker plays Kate Reddy (the names are thuddingly on the nose here), a Boston mom of two, married to an architect (winningly played by Greg Kinnear), and trying hard to cope with both the intensely competitive professionals at the office (Olivia Munn and “SNL’s” Seth Meyers play work-obsessed underminers) and the even more intensely competitive stay-at-home moms (one asks plaintively whether a birthday cake is made with organic flour and another sighs sweetly and explains that she just couldn’t allow anyone else to raise her children as she spends all day at the gym). These are cheap shot caricatures with little wit and less heart. If the film had a smidgen of sympathy for anyone else in the story or any convincing moment with Kate and her children when they were awake it would not ring so hollow. It’s hard to connect to a character who is feeling judged when her point of view is itself so petty and judgmental. Even Kate’s one friend (a dishy Christina Hendricks) cannot be permitted to be at Kate’s level. She’s a single working mother, so points off for her.
Kate and her husband both get their professional opportunities of a lifetime and shift into higher gear, missing their son’s first haircut and neglecting his delayed speech and a dangerous hole in the carpet on the stairs. Up all night making lists that never end, Kate promises everything to everyone and discovers that sometimes jugglers drop all the balls at once. Sometimes you get a call to fly out of town for a big meeting in the middle of Thanksgiving. And sometimes you get the message that your child has lice just as you walk into the big meeting. Infestation turns out to be just an opportunity to dish at the delousing salon with a friend (compare that to the more realistic hazmat treatment of the same problem in last year’s “The Change-Up”), another example of the gap between the way this film makes everything about Parker, I mean Kate.
I understand that motherhood seems fresh and new and unfairly not communicated about properly for each new generation of women who wonder how they got from the snarky authenticity of their post-college years to searching for a presentable outfit that (1) has no spills or spit-up on it and (2) fits (this is a problem grey-hound thin and beginning to look stringy SJP does not have). It will feel a bit stale to anyone who has either lived through it or seen any sitcom or family comedy of the last decade. Even the derided “Motherhood” with Uma Thurman felt more authentic than this. A mis-sent email with a crude joke? That’s so 2008. And when Kate’s colleague (Pierce Brosnan) starts signing his emails “XO” and, despite her denials, Kate just manages to keep all those balls in the air to the breathless admiration of even those who once failed to appreciate her, we can’t help feeling that we do know that in fact she doesn’t do it very well.
