Courageous

Posted on January 16, 2012 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some violence and drug content
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs, drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Some violence, teen killed in an accident, shoot-out
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 30, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	January 16, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0062NAVXA

Courageous is the story of men who confront danger every day as law officers but who discover that it is a bigger challenge to be good fathers and family men.

Sherwood Pictures, the faith-based film production company behind “Facing the Giants” and “Fireproof,” gets closer with each film to matching its skill to its vision. “Courageous,” written by brothers Stephen (co-producer) and Alex (co-star and director) Kendrick. It is the story of four cops in Albany, Georgia. At work, they work to stop a drug smuggling ring. But the sheriff reminds them that drugs can appear appealing to people who are vulnerable because they do not have the support and attention of their fathers. It is their task as crime-fighters and as men, he explains, to be involved as fathers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9qd1xw7uvg

Adam Mitchell (Alex Kendrick) adores his daughter but has a hard time connecting to his son. And he is too often “too busy” to be there for both of them. Nathan Heyes (Ken Bevel) loves his children and moved them away from the city to keep them away from bad influences. But his son is intrigued by a new friend with a flashy car and his strict rules have made his teenage daughter pull away from him. He is adopted and never knew his own biological father. Shane Fuller (Kevin Downes) is divorced and shares custody of his son with his ex-wife. He makes up for their limited time and his own hurt about his parents divorce by acting more like a pal than a dad. And David Thomson (Ben Davies) has never acknowledged or supported his daughter by an ex-girlfriend. He left when she refused to have an abortion. The men befriend Javier Martinez (Robert Amaya), an immigrant who is having a difficult time providing for his family.

When Mitchell’s family suffers a devastating loss, Heyes’ adoptive father brings the men together for a formal ceremony to commit to a “Resolution” to honor God in every aspect of their family lives and then they bring it to their church, calling on other fathers to join them. When one of them makes a terrible mistake that separates him from his son, the fellowship of his brother officers helps him accept responsibility and seek forgiveness. The men also take on father duties for teenage boys who need their guidance.

The sincerity of this series of films and their willingness to present flawed characters in a spirit of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness make up for some predictability and inconsistency in experience in acting and filmmaking. It is a tribute to their vision and dedication that their movies have found such enthusiastic support and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

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Joyful Noise

Posted on January 12, 2012 at 7:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for language including a sexual reference
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family confrontations, bullies, brief fight, gun, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters including disabled character
Date Released to Theaters:	January 13, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	April 30, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B007HHWJSA

Joyful indeed — this movie is pure cinematic sunshine, guaranteed to brighten the heart and gladden the spirit. Super-divas Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah play rival gospel choir leaders in an inspiring and heart-warming story filled with love, laughter, music, and praise.

G.G. (Parton) is still mourning the loss of her husband Bernard (Kris Kristofferson) when she receives another blow. She expected to take over his duties as choir leader but the church council picks Vi Rose (Queen Latifah) and her more traditional approach instead. Vi Rose’s husband is in the military and out of contact. She has to take on extra work to support Olivia and her son Walter (Dexter Darden), who has Asperger’s syndrome that makes social interaction difficult. She is devoted to the choir, a source of stability and connection for her. She wants it to be competitive but it is more important to her that it be clear that the focus is on the music as worship, not performance. When they get a chance at the national title — and a budding romance between G.G.’s grandson Randy (Broadway star Jeremy Jordan) and Vi Rose’s daughter Olivia (Keke Palmer of Akeelah and the Bee) — G.G. and Vi Rose will have to find a way to work together harmoniously. And that, after all, is what a choir is about.

Writer/director Todd Graff demonstrated in the underrated Camp and Bandslam that he understands teenagers as characters and works well with them as performers. His sincere and sympathetic appreciation for their stage of life is a pleasure to experience. Graff also understands the passion of those who love to perform before a live audience and the challenges they face. As an experienced theater nerd himself he knows how to stage musical numbers. And he is remarkably adept at managing a lot of characters and story lines gracefully, giving each element of the story its own dignity and spirit and sensitively evoking a touching sense of a small-town Georgia community hit hard by the economic upheavals of the past five years. I would have excised a not-very-comic sub-plot about one choir member’s difficulty finding a date after a man dies following their first night together. But the rest is skillfully blended with some sharp dialog. “You’re so country you’ve been married three times and have the same in-laws,” one character teases another. “Your train of thought makes all local stops,” says another.

Queen Latifah gives her best performance to date because Vi Rose is the most complex character she has played to date, giving her a chance to show her confidence, her humor, and her warmth. She shines in a terrific speech about what incandescent beauty really means and sings a moving “Fix Me, Jesus.”

Parton makes a welcome return to feature films after nearly two decades in a role as tailor-made for her as her fitted choir robes. G.G. is flashy and outspoken. But she, too, is trying to hold on in difficult times. She is estranged from her daughter and trying to care for her grandson. In a scene of piercing sweetness, she remembers her life with her husband in a tender duet that gently evolves into a trio.

Jordan and Palmer are enormously appealing, with a quiet chemistry that lights up the screen.

Parton’s three tuneful new songs are mixed with raise-the-roof adaptations of gospelized classics Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” and Michael Jackson’s “The Man in the Mirror.” On stage and off, Graff shows us the characters’ kindness and sense of connection even when they frustrate each other and it feels very genuine. There is a lot of heart in the musical numbers that deepens our pleasure in seeing the characters find what the harmony they are looking for.

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The Iron Lady

Posted on January 12, 2012 at 6:43 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some violent images and brief nudity
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some violent images including war and terrorism
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the film
Date Released to Theaters:	January 13, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0059XTUVI

A performance by Meryl Streep of endless intelligence, skill, and sensitivity cannot keep this impressionistic portrait of Baroness Margaret Thatcher from being exactly the sort of sentimental nonsense she spent her career trying to avoid. “People don’t think anymore; they feel,” she says in this movie, with infinite disdain. “It used to be about trying to do something,” she says in an earlier scene. “Now it is about trying to be someone.” This film recognizes her point of view but then comes down on the side of feelings and of being rather than doing.

Margaret Thatcher was one of the most influential and polarizing figures of the last half-century. She was the first woman to serve as the British Prime Minister and she held the position for an extraordinary and transformational decade that included highly controversial privatization initiatives, major reductions in the power of unions, and a brief war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

Based on this film, however, one would conclude that she is a dotty old lady who was once fierce, peremptory, and ambitious, but now cannot quite remember what it was all about. It is always a relief to be spared the usual biopic structure of highlighted anecdotes as a shorthand explanation for the person’s motives and fears, followed by assorted personal and professional high and low points, all conveniently assembled to create the illusion that lives can be neatly dissected. But, as with “J. Edgar” a few months ago, this film goes too far in the other direction, leaving us with an unreliable, subjective approach. A movie about a real life should not pretend to be definitive, but it should be illuminating.

Streep is truly magnificent, creating a vibrant character of passion and strength and her scenes with Jim Broadbent as Thatcher’s supportive husband are touching. But without some sense of what made her so passionate and how she formed her ideas about economics and foreign policy it’s just a less glamorous version of “My Fair Lady.” A young woman is literally groomed for success, her hair shellacked into an intimidatingly immobile helmet, her voice lowered, her accent raised. Without a “why,” though, it’s just a trip to the ball. It is a shame that a film produced and directed by women takes such a diminished view of Thatcher, reducing the scope of any doubts or regrets she might have at the end of her life to house and home and overlooking the fierce engagement with ideas that was truly her core.

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Carnage

Posted on January 12, 2012 at 6:23 pm

Some boys are arguing in a park but we are too far away to hear what it is about. One of them whacks another in the face with a stick.

And then we are in a spacious apartment as the parents of the two boys are at the computer, finishing up a joint statement about what happened. The parents of the boy with the stick are Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), who have come to the home of the boy who was hit, Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) for a civilized conversation about what happened. Everyone is polite, even gracious. The Longstreets have decorated for guests with a vase of tulips and offer homemade cobbler. The Cowans compliment their hosts. There ar social smiles and reassuring comments all around. The Cowans walk toward the elevator to go home.

And then — they don’t whack each other in the face with sticks. It’s much worse than that.

Based on the Tony award-winning play by French playwright Yasmina Reza and scripted by Reza and director Roman Polanski, this is a sly and ultimately devastating story about the thin veneer of civilization and its uneasy co-existence with the savage spirit within us all. If things had gone well, the Cowans might have made it to the elevator and as soon as its doors closed both couples would have immediately started talking about how impossible the other couple was and how superior their own child was. But the Cowans just can not let that last statement go, so they march back into the Longstreets’ apartment to begin to attack, first with thinly veiled digs, then with stark, direct statements, then with insults, then with chaos.

This is not just about the social hypocrisy of privileged New Yorkers. The play was originally French and the director is originally Polish and famously living outside the United States to avoid imprisonment for statutory rape. Its treatment of its characters is as brutal as their treatment of each other. Every shred of pretense is stripped away — the pretense of a loving relationship, of being good parents, of concern for the injured child, of concern for each other and for the world at large. Everything politely overlooked in the first half hour (Alan’s constant interruptions to answer his cell phone to defend a drug in litigation over the adverse side effects, a cherished item, the tulips, the merits of the cobbler) comes back up (literally and graphically, in the case of the cobbler). The Longstreets bring out the hard liquor and cigars and alliances shift from couples-based to gender-based to everyone for his and her self. Reza makes it about more than the fatuous insularity of upper-class New Yorkers but does not go overboard. When Michael trashes Penelope’s concern for the deprivations and injustice in Africa, both are portrayed as insular and unhelpful. And a hopeful note in a coda shows her to be gentler with her characters than they are with each other.

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Based on a play Comedy Drama

The Artist

Posted on January 3, 2012 at 6:14 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for a disturbing image and a crude gesture
Profanity:	No bad language, someone gives the finger
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Fire
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 3, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	June 25, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0059XTUMC

“We didn’t need dialogue,” said Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) unforgettably in Billy Wilder’s classic, “Sunset Boulevard.” “We had faces!” Swanson herself had been a silent film star, but she is best remembered for playing the actress driven mad by being made obsolete when the talkies shifted the spotlight from faces to a snappy way with a wisecrack. Of course, “Sunset Boulevard” is a talkie, filled with brilliant dialogue from Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman, Jr. (“You used to be big in pictures.” “I’m still big. It’s the pictures that got small.”) But Desmond was right about the faces. Partly because they were silent for the first decades of film-making, the movies invented a new vocabulary of story-telling and new techniques of acting. When D.W. Griffith pioneered the close-up, the declamatory, projecting to the back of the theater style of acting on the stage began to evolve into the subtle, intimate evocation of thought and emotion the way we see it in real life, with a flicker of an eyelid, the trembling of the corner of the mouth, more eloquent than the most lyrical and evocative words.

“The Artist” is a new film from French writer/director Michel Hazanavicius that evokes this classic era of Hollywood in form and content, set in the moment of transition to talkies, black and white and almost completely silent, with references to “Singin’ in the Rain,” “A Star is Born,” and even “Citizen Kane,” but very much of our moment, and so fresh and inventive that color and sound seem superfluous.

Jean Dujardin plays handsome silent film superstar Georges Valentin. He appears at the opening of his latest film with his favorite co-star, his Jack Russell terrier, dancing, bowing, and basking in the adoration of the audience — and hogging the spotlight to annoy his human co-star (Missy Pyle). Outside the theater, when an enthusiastic fan falls into his path, he laughs good-heartedly. The next morning, a photo of Valentin and his fan appears in the paper and his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) does not find it amusing. The charming whimsy and dazzling smile that work so well on screen do not mollify her.

The fan is a would-be actress named Peppy Miller (the very appealing Argentine actress Bérénice Bejo, wife of Hazanavicius). She gets her first break as a dancer on Valentin’s new film. In a captivating scene, they have to do repeated takes of a scene where they dance together because they keep getting distracted by their immediate sense of connection. In the film within a film, he is a star and she is an extra. But in their real story, it is clear she is a lead.

The sound era arrives and Miller becomes a star while Valentin, stubbornly insisting on making a new silent film, loses his wife, his money, and finally, at auction, everything he owns, including his dinner jacket and portrait. Can there be a happy ending? Well, it’s a movie!

There’s a bit of a backlash to this film, following its rapturous reception in Cannes and year-end awards, with some complaints that it plays to the affections of critics and movie insiders and that it is a nice enough film that benefits from being a valentine to cinema rather than on its own stand-alone merits. That is unfair to the intelligence behind the film and the subtle qualities beyond the quaint settings. Hazanavicius shifted the frames-per-second to be closer to the slightly jerky silent movie standard to invite us back into that world. But it is not just a re-creation of an archaic technique. The characters are real, vivid, and affecting. As shown by its final moment, the movie transcends its story to be more than a tribute to a simpler time. It is a lesson on the power of movies to re-invent a visual vocabulary for the universal language that goes beyond the borders of countries and cultures.

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