Trailer — The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

Posted on January 23, 2015 at 8:00 am

This looks adorable. In theaters February 6, 2015.

The Equalizer

Posted on September 25, 2014 at 5:59 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs and drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended and very graphic violence, with many characters injured and killed and graphic and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 26, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	December 29, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00NX6WZIS

THE-EQUALIZER — Copyright 2014 Columbia Pictures

The only thing nicer than having a real-life friend who could circumvent any obstacle of power or law or, you know, logic to deliver the roughest but most just of rough justice would be to have that friend be Denzel Washington. And that’s the story of “The Equalizer,” very loosely based on television series starring Edward Woodward, but in theme and character closer to a superhero saga.

Washington plays Bob McCall, a kind and quiet inventory clerk at a big box store, but we can tell right away that he has seen some stuff and knows even more stuff. His alarm clock goes off in a room so spare it might be occupied by a monk. But the bed has not been slept in. Bob prepares for the day, serious, precise, and methodical. He does one thing at a time. At work, he eats his bag lunch and gently but firmly coaches his young colleague Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis) on losing weight and working on the skills he will need to pass the test for security guard. And at night, he brings a book to the diner (Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea), sits at a table, unwrapping the tea bag he brought with him, and exchanges a few words with Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young “escort.” “The old man met his adversary just when he thought that part of his life was over,” Bob tells Teri. “The old man got to be the old man. The fish got to be the fish. Got to be what you are in this world.” But what is Bob? And what is Teri?

We do not know Bob’s past, but we know he has one (especially if we’ve seen the trailer). If, as Spider-Man learns, with great power comes great responsibility, then with great power come some wrenching conflicts as well. When Ralphie and Terri get in trouble, Bob will step in, risking escalation, retribution, and blowing whatever cover he has worked very hard to create. On the other hand, if he does not step in, it will not be much of a movie. And if you have any question, his next choice of classic literature will make it clear: Don Quixote, who “lives in a world where knights don’t exist anymore.” In his own way, Bob is a Knight of Rueful Countenance. But unlike Don Quixote, Bob does not tilt at windmills. He takes on very bad people and he is very, very good at it. “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why,” the film tells us at the beginning, quoting Mark Twain. Bob was not born to haul sacks of gravel.

A superhero movie has to have a character with power, whether it is money plus gymnastics and cool toys (Batman) or extra strength and speed (pretty much all of the Avengers). But we usually like them to have a secret or at least downtime identity — Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Tony Stark. There’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing them take down the bad guys. But there is even more satisfaction in what I call the “who is that chef?” moments (a reference to Under Siege). It’s not enough to kick the butt of the bad guy, you have to have the vast, immense, profound satisfaction of letting him know just how massively he has underestimated you. I mean Bob.

We get a lot of both in this film as Bob takes on bigger, meaner, and tougher bad guys in bigger, meaner, tougher confrontations. Bob likes to set his stopwatch so we know he is setting himself against more than the bad guys; he is still in some competition with, what? His abilities when he was younger? Or, as he says, “progress, not perfection” — is he moving toward some goal that is still just out of his reach?

Basically, this is a slow burn movie, with a build-up to introduce us to the characters and then a series of action sequences, all well staged but very, very violent, as to be expected from director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”). The bad guys are very, very, very bad. The good guy is very, very, very, very good. Denzel Washington is as good as it gets.

And a sequel is in the works.

Parents should know that this movie is extremely violent, with many characters injured and killed and many explicit and disturbing images. Characters use strong language. Bad guys use every possible kind of weapon and engage in every possible kind of criminal behavior including sex trafficking, extortion and arson, and drug dealing.

Family discussion: Why did Bob go to see his former colleague? What did he learn from the classic books he read?

If you like this, try: “Training Day”

Contest: Arthur Goes Back to School

Posted on August 11, 2014 at 8:00 am

Eight-year-old Arthur the aardvark has four adventures in this new DVD, available tomorrow, August 12, 2014. This is the perfect back-to-school treat, as Arthur and his friends find out that a candy bar may not be as appetizing as they thought, learn how to handle a big test without getting too stressed out, and work hard to be better at baseball. And is “Brain’s Biggest Blunder” trying to turn Buster into a math whiz? The DVD has printable coloring pages and activities.

I have a copy to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Arthur in the subject line and tell me your favorite part of school. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only.) I’ll pick a winner at random on August 16. Good luck!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Posted on August 7, 2014 at 5:59 pm

Dear Michael Bay,
Just because you were able to turn one Saturday cartoon series for children into a PG-13 blockbuster, based on nostalgia on the part of its now-teen and 20-something audience and some world class special effects, does not mean that you can do the same with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is less “Transformer” and more “Yogi Bear” or “Scooby-Doo.” In other words, step away from “Shirt Tales” and “The Wuzzles.” Please, just stop. Sincerely, The Movie Mom

Before it wore or, or, more accurately, wore down its welcome, the original “Transformers” was a refreshing surprise that kept the spirit of the original series. But even as a cartoon show, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were meta and self-referential and cutesy. I mean, just look at the concept: they’re turtles. And ninjas. And teenagers. You can blow them up into CGI behemoths, but they still can’t make a movie work, even by bringing back the original star of the first “Transformers” movie, Megan Fox.

Fox plays April O’Neil, a would-be investigative reporter relegated by her condescending colleagues to cutesy stories like exercising on mini-trampolines in Times Square. She would much rather be reporting on a powerful and merciless gang of criminals known as the Foot Clan. No one believes her when she says she saw a super-strong vigilante in the shadows, fighting the Foot Clan, including her editor (a “what is she doing in this movie?” Whoopi Goldberg). It turns out she has a connection to this mysterious crime-fighter. Her father was a scientist who died in a tragic lab accident as he was working on a special strength-giving serum by injecting it into four young turtles. The night the lab burned down, April rescued the turtles and a rat by letting them escape into the sewer.

A handy martial arts manual found in the sewer gives the rat, known as Splinter (voice of “Monk’s” Tony Shaloub) the chance to train the young turtles, and the effects of the injections make them grow up to be large, muscular, and able to stand upright. Each of the four has a different color mask and a Smurf-like individual personality quirk. But they all love pizza.

The action scenes are well-staged, especially a snowy chase scene, though I have no idea where the snow came from as we only see snow outside the city. But the script is lame and the violence is too intense for anyone old enough to be interested. A slumming William Fitchner plays an industrialist who is not as philanthropic as he seems. And the scenes with an even-more slumming Will Arnett (what happened to his career?), whose two functions are to drive April around and be generally skeezy about his interest in her, are just painful. April strives to be taken seriously as a journalist. Fox, sadly, fails to be taken seriously as an actress (which she really is — see “This is 40”).

And the title characters are under-used as well. For a movie about the TMNTs, they just don’t have enough to do beyond loving pizza and kicking bad guys. Whatever charm existed in the original cartoons is trampled by this over-blown bore.

Parents should know that this film includes cartoon-style action, peril, and violence, sad off-screen death of a parent, some brief disturbing images, some crude humor and a brief potty joke.

Family discussion: Why didn’t anyone take April seriously? Which turtle is your favorite and why?

If you like this, try: the TMNT cartoon series and the earlier films

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Posted on June 26, 2014 at 5:59 pm

The script for the new Transformers movie is basically: Noise. Explosions. Chases. Guy-on-guy fighting. Transformer-on-Transformer fighting. Brief pauses for father-teenage daughter conflict, father-boyfriend of the teenage daughter conflict, paranoia-inducing rogue government operatives, paranoia-inducing megalomaniacal one-percenter, and a flicker of a robot existential crisis. Then back to the noise, explosions, and massive PG-13 destruction, meaning more damage to buildings than people or giant robots, though one of the human characters does get incinerated early on. Repeat. Repeat again.

Yes, this movie is nearly three hours long. That’s a lot of robots. It is long, and it is loud. The primary focus is the special effects, including the use of the first-ever IMAX 3D camera (though the credits reveal some post-production 3D work as well). The depth of the frame is impressive.

That’s expected and it is fine. The special effects are better than the non-special effects moments, which come down to 1. Exposition, which makes very little sense, 2. Banter, which is weak, and 3. In-jokes about sequels and product placement.

The special effects are excellent. And I can’t help it, I still love to see cars turn into robots and robots turn into cars. This time there are even Transformer dinosaurs!

Somewhere among the robots, there’s an all-new human cast in this fourth Transformers movie, again inspired by the Hasbro toys and the animated television series. Mark Wahlberg takes over the lead as Cade Yeager, broke inventor and overprotective widowed dad of a 17-year-old daughter (Nicola Peltz as Tessa). His specialty is “making junk into different junk,” and he has a barn that serves as his lab/repair shop. He buys a beat-up old truck that turns out to be none other than alpha-bot Optimus Prime (again with the deep and resonant voice of Peter Cullen). The problem is that since the massive destruction of Chicago in the last movie, which we recall as Cade drives by billboards that say “Remember Chicago,” the consensus in the human population is that all Transformers have to be eliminated.

A government operative named Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) is leading a black ops program to rid the planet of all Transformers, regardless of whether they are autobots or decepticons. He refuses to give any information to a clueless and ineffectual White House Chief of Staff (Thomas Lennon). And he plots with one-percenter Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), an inventor/multi-billionaire sort of cross between Tony Stark and Donald Trump.

So the injured Optimus Prime and his friends are the target of attacks by a business mogul, a government agency, a sort of bounty hunter, and the decepticons, including a sort of re-animator version of Megatron. That means a lot of collateral damage back in Chicago and in China as well, though the cities are not as well differentiated as the robots and that is not saying much. While there seem to be references to current debates about immigration and terrorism, the themes are less overtly political (or dramatic) than a random assortment of words selected for their emotional charge.

Notoriously unreconstructed Michael Bay directs as though it is the first iteration of the Transformers, back in the 1980’s. The racial and gender stereotyping is only slightly less clunky than in earlier installments, which means that the autobots represent various ethnic caricatures for no particular reason and Cade calls his daughter’s Irish boyfriend “Lucky Charms.” It also means that despite the almost infinite budget for the film, apparently there was not enough to pay for enough material to clothe teenage Tessa. No matter what she wears, for some reason there is always a lot of skin showing. There are various sexist comments (jellyfish are compared to women because they are “erotic and dangerous”) and an ooky discussion of why it is not statutory rape when a 20 year old has sex with a 17 year old (the 20 year old in question helpfully carries a copy of the Texas “Romeo and Juliet” law in his wallet, along, I hope, with other protection as well). The politics of the movie are as incoherent as the fight scenes; in both, it is not always clear who the good guys are supposed to be. Basically, everyone is bad except the autobots and their human friends. And the movie is bad except for the robots.

Parents should know that this film includes strong language (s-words, b-words, one f-word), suggestive discussion of teen sex and teen pregnancy, extensive sci-fi action-style violence, constant peril and chases, some characters injured and killed (one burned to a crisp) and widespread destruction and explosions, references to genocide, some disturbing images and scary creatures, some ethnic stereotyping and alcohol (intrusive, if self-mocking, product placement).

Family discussion: What mistakes have turned out well for you? Why was it important to Cade to turn junk into something useful? Why did Attinger insist that all Transformers were bad?

If you like this, try: the other “Transformers” movies and the television series, and “The Iron Giant”