Kingsman: The Secret Service

Posted on February 12, 2015 at 5:55 pm

“James Bond? Jason Bourne?” Our hero is being asked for the inspiration for naming his dog JB. “No,” he explains, “Jack Bauer.”

This is a cheeky, nasty, meta, po-mo update of the spy genre, self-aware enough to name-check not just Bond, Bourne, and “24,” but also “Nikita,” “Trading Places,” “Pretty Woman,” and “My Fair Lady.” I also caught a reference to the 60’s television show “The Man from UNCLE,” about to get its own big-screen reboot later this year.

Some of the core elements of the sophisticated spy story are here, from the elegant suits to the very specific cocktail order, as well as the super-cool weapons and gadgets we will have the fun of seeing deployed later on. And the villain has an assassin/sidekick who goes one, or maybe two better than iconic characters like Oddjob and Jaws. Spanish dancer Sofia Boutella plays the acrobatic Gazelle, who runs on Oscar Pistorius-style blades as sharp as scalpels. She can slice a man in half lengthwise with one slash of her leg. And does.

Other aspects of the usual spy story are tweaked or outright upended. That old favorite, the talking villain, who has such a profound need to explain the genius of his nefarious plan that it gives Our Hero time to thwart him, is explicitly disposed of. The look of the film is as sleek and sophisticated as the score from Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson.

Colin Firth is sleekly perfect as Harry, also known as Galahad, part of an elegant, upper-class cadre of international gentleman spies operating in total secrecy and using pseudonyms based on King Arthur and his knights. Their made to order suits are both exquisitely tailored and bulletproof.

He points to a wall of framed newspaper headlines about triviality — political squabbles and celebrity scandals — explaining that while these things were going on, he and his fellow Kingsmen were repeatedly saving the world. The person he is explaining it to is Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a possible new recruit. Eggsy is a smart, tough, brash kid who grew up in what the British call council houses and we call the projects, the son of a widow whose second husband is an abusive thug. Eggsy’s late father sacrificed himself to save Harry and other members of the team, so Harry feels a sense of responsibility — and a suspicion that Eggsy might have inherited his father’s courage and sense of honor.

While they had previously limited themselves to the wealthy upper class, Harry persuades the Kingsman’s leader (Michael Caine as Arthur) to allow Eggsy to compete for a spot on the team. The competition is tough and the tasks are tougher, the most imaginative and entertaining section of the movie. Then of course comes our supervillain, Samuel L. Jackson as Valentine, a lisping technology billionaire whose frustration with the failure of the world to reckon with global warming has led him to devise some drastic plans. Once he gets involved, the self-aware air quotes get less interesting and so does the storyline. “Bond films are only as good as the villain,” he says. True, and he is no Goldfinger.

In the last half hour, things really go off the rails. The carnage is balletic and portrayed as darkly comic but it is still disturbing, particularly the involvement of a specific real-life world leader. The humor is not just dark; it is crude for the sake of being crude and seems rather desperate. A film that began with a confident sense of sophistication, wit, and edge knows what it is not (“This is not that kind of movie”) but not what it is.

Parents should know that this movie is extremely violent, with hundreds of characters injured and killed and many exploding heads. Characters use very strong language and drink alcohol. There are explicit and crude sexual references and brief nudity.

Family discussion: Which of the tests would have been the hardest for you? What did they prove about the candidates?

If you like this, try: the James Bond films

Annie

Posted on December 18, 2014 at 5:59 pm

The story of the plucky little Depression-era orphan with the curly red hair has been not just re-booted but re-imagined into the world of rent-a-bikes, viral videos, DNA tests, YOLO, corporate privacy invasions, and Katy Perry tweets. There are some nice shout-outs to the original version, with a character named for Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray and a music group named the Leapin’ Lizards after the redhead’s favorite way to express surprise.

A cheeky opening briskly bridges the decades. It begins with a red-headed girl named Annie giving a school report, concluding with a tap dance. She looks like the Annie we remember. But then the teacher calls on another Annie, and we meet our Annie, played by “Beasts of the Southern Wild’s” Quvenzhané Wallis. She gives a rollicking report about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal that sounds like a call to action from Occupy Wall Street. The whole classroom bangs on their desks along with her. Annie is all about the 99 percent. (The famously very right-wing Gray would be horrified.)

And, as she repeatedly reminds us, she is not an orphan. She is a foster kid. Every Friday evening, she waits outside the restaurant where her parents were last seen, in hopes that they will return. She was four when they left her with a note and half of a locket, and since then she has gone from foster home to foster home, now living with Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz), a bitter, abusive, alcoholic woman who once sang with C&C Music Factory and was almost a Blowfish. She resents the girls who are her only source of income, and makes them do all the work in the apartment.

Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx) is a cell phone company billionaire running for mayor of New York. (That’s “Stacks” as in “stacks of money,” with “Warbucks” a bit too on the nose for our more euphemistic times.) When he grabs Annie to save her from getting hit by a truck, his approval numbers spike, and his aides encourage him to spend some time with her to give him a more relatable image. Grace (Rose Byrne) is his all-purpose, super-efficient second-in-command and Guy (Bobby Cannavale) is his whatever-it-takes spin-master campaign advisor. Annie, about to be thrown out by Miss Hannigan, persuades Stacks to let her stay in his mega-luxurious apartment, promising that her “game face” will get him good press, combating his image as “a rich elitist who can’t relate to regular people.”

It works for a while until some unscrupulous people hire a couple to pose as Annie’s real parents.

Some of the updates work well, and there is a nice energy in the opening scenes as Annie uses the last ten minutes of a bike share to navigate the city, passing street performers riffing on the well-known score. Co-writer/director Will Gluck keeps things bright and bouncy, but his filming of the dance numbers is clumsy to the point of incompetence, undermining even the nearly unkillable numbers like “It’s a Hard Knock Life” with angles and edits that take the energy out of the songs instead of boosting it.

Wallis is inconsistent, occasionally appearing checked out of the scene. She is better in the few scenes with the other girls, but she has very little chemistry with Byrne or Foxx. And one barfing scene is bad, but four? Plus a spit take? And a hooker joke? There is a movie-within-the-movie that is very cute, but the cameos are a distraction. The tweaking of the script works better in individual scenes than in the overall plot, which feels slapped together and unsatisfying. Ah, well, the sun will come out tomorrow, so maybe next time they’ll get it right.

Parents should know that this movie has themes of child abandonment and abuse, a character abuses alcohol and there is a joke about alcoholism, and there is some mild peril and potty humor.

Family discussion: What did Annie mean when she said Stacks did not know he was good yet? How is Annie different from the other girls?

If you like this, try: the other musical versions and “Game Plan”

Little Orphan Annie: From Comic Strip to Radio, Broadway, Television, and Two Movies

Posted on December 18, 2014 at 8:00 am

Copyright Harold Gray and Tribune Syndicate

The spunky little girl with the curly red hair and a dog named Sandy began as Little Orphan Annie in 1924, created by Harold Gray. Her pluck, self-sufficiency, and resilience caught the imagination of the Depression-era audience in the 30’s, and soon she was everywhere. You could buy books, dolls, jewelry, even dishes showing Annie with her iconic red dress and pupil-free eyes. There was a popular radio program (remember Ralphie and his Little Orphan Annie decoder disappointment in A Christmas Story. After Gray’s death, the strip was continued by the brilliant Leonard Starr (Mary Perkins On Stage).

In 1977, the Broadway musical version became one of the biggest hits in history. Here is the original star, Andrea McArdle, singing “Tomorrow.”

Dozens of young girls appeared in the play, including Sarah Jessica Parker. The documentary Life After Tomorrow has interviews with many of them about the stress of auditions and performing and how it affected their feelings about growing up. And in 2013, PBS aired another documentary about the casting of a revival of the stage show.

The 1982 movie musical version starred Albert Finney, Aileen Quinn, Carol Burnett, and Bernadette Peters and was directed by John Houston.

In 1999, a version made for television starred Alan Cumming, Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Kathy Bates, Victor Garber, and Alicia Morton.

All of those versions kept the 1930’s setting — they even feature a rousing musical number with Franklin Roosevelt and his Cabinet. But this week’s release, produced by Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Jay-Z, updates the story to the era of Instagram and Twitter. It stars Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Rose Byrne, and, as Annie, “Beast of the Southern Wild’s” Oscar-nominated Quvenzhané Wallis.

Wonder Woman’s Amazing Secret History

Posted on November 20, 2014 at 8:00 am

Historian Jill Lepore is one of my favorite writers and I am also a Comic-Con-attending fangirl, so I was thrilled to get a chance to hear Professor Lepore speak at the Smithsonian about her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

There are only three superheroes who have appeared for decades without any interruptions: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. But like Superman and Batman, she has taken on many forms and cultural signifiers over the decades. She was way ahead of her time as a feminist symbol. She was from a matriarchal culture and exemplified independence and courage. But she was only permitted to join the Justice Society after a poll of comics readers, and, once she joined, she served as its secretary, sitting primly and taking notes.

Lepore’s focus was less on Wonder Woman as a character, a symbol, or a work of art but as the creation of an historic figure, one who was well known for his scholarship and invention, but who led a life of secrets that were reflected in his most famous creation.

Lepore considers her the “missing link” between feminism in the first half of the 20th century (women’s suffrage to Rosie the Riveter) and the second half (the rise of the women’s movement in the 70’s and the broader opportunities for women following the Equal Rights Act).

Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, a remarkably accomplished man who had both a law degree and a PhD in psychology from Harvard. Lepore described details of his life which were reflected in the Wonder Woman character and storylines. Marston was one of the inventors of the polygraph lie detector test, probably the inspiration for Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth. Those captured by her magic rope cannot lie. Marston was also a committed feminist. While some Wonder Woman fans have have noted the superheroine’s frequent appearance in bondage, Lepore is the first to connect this directly to the images used by early 20th century feminists in their pursuit of the vote, birth control, and other rights for women. Marston also lived with and had children with two women, his wife and a kind of “sister-wife,” who was the niece of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. This arrangement allowed his wife to pursue her career while the children were cared for by the “other mother.”

Marston believed that comics had a great power to communicate and explicitly intended Wonder Woman to carry his message of female empowerment. A story published in 1943 had her becoming President — a thousand years in the future.

Big Hero 6

Posted on November 6, 2014 at 5:59 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for action and peril, some rude humor, and thematic elements
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Cartoon-style peril and violence, sad death, grieving parent becomes destructive
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	November 7, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	February 23, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00O4ZC57

Hiro (Ryan Potter) is a super-smart kid who likes to hustle underground robot fighters with his deceptively cute-looking little bot. He has no interest in going to school until the older brother he adores (Daniel Henney as Tadashi) brings him to the robot lab at the university he attends. When Hiro sees all of the lovable nerds (and one non-nerdy slacker named Fred who dresses as the school mascot) making awesomely cool creations, he gets very excited about joining them. He has to invent something spectacular to get admitted, and so he gets to work and comes up with something extraordinary, a system of tiny bots who can form themselves into almost anything.

But then Tadeshi is killed trying to rescue his professor from a fire. Hiro is devastated. The brothers were orphans. While their aunt (Maya Rudolph) does her best, Hiro and Tadeshi were all that was left of their family, and now Hiro is devastated at being alone. He refuses to go anywhere or talk to anyone.

But Tadeshi left someone behind. It turns out he was working on developing a robot called Baymax, designed to be a kind, reassuring, gentle healer. Baymax is equipped with extensive diagnostic and treatment capacity but his look is intended to be non-threatening. He looks like a big, white balloon, or, as one character says, like a marshmallow man. He is as far from a weapon or fighter as it is possible to be. But when Hiro and the robotics nerds find out that Hiro’s invention has been stolen and will be used for destructive purposes, they get together to use their skills, their courage, and, most of all, their sense of what is right to save the day.

The film, loosely inspired by Marvel’s comic book, is filled with engaging characters and imaginative touches. The setting is “San Fransokyo,” a California/Japan mash-up that seems familiar and real but also intriguingly foreign. It is a pleasure to see Disney’s most diverse set of protagonists ever, race, gender, and even economic. The bending of stereotypes is done with an effortless flair. And it is great to see a movie for the family that acknowledges the fun and excitement of being smart and working hard. We get a lot of movies for kids about the importance of friends and family, following your dreams, and being yourself, and all of that is here, too. But we don’t get many about solving problems through study and experimentation. It’s very nice to see a film that recognizes that it is cool to be smart.

NOTE: Please stay all the way through the credits for an extra scene that is a lot of fun, especially if you are a Marvel fan. And be sure to get there on time as the Oscar-nominated pre-feature short film “Feast,” about a hungry puppy, is completely charming, hilarious, and sweet.

Parents should know that this film includes cartoon-style action, peril, and violence, very sad sibling death (off-camera), other characters apparently killed, grieving parent who becomes destructive, and brief potty humor.

Family discussion: What kind of robot would you like to build? Which of the characters is most like you?

If you like this, try: “The Iron Giant,” “Wreck-It Ralph,” and “Bolt”