The Family Stone

Posted on December 21, 2005 at 2:56 pm

If you believe the previews or have seen the poster of an aggressively extended and bejeweled ring finger, then you might presume that “The Family Stone” is going to be a light-hearted romp of a comedy. Boy brings home uptight girl to meet his kooky and free-spirited family, amusing and embarrassing behavior follows, family and girl all learn important lessons about one another, then the movie ends on a wacky but upbeat note.

No, nope and not even.

There are embarrassments, humorous moments and lessons here as well as some physical gags, but the movie is a much more ambitious work that jumps all over the emotional spectrum before settling on quirky tear-jerker.


Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker), as tightly wrapped as her hair and as annoying as the constant ringing of her cell phone, tries to hide her insecurities behind a brittle facade of confidence but ends up broadcasting every thought and perceived offense. That might be fine when she is in her element but going to the Stone home for Christmas as the girlfriend of beloved-son Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) makes her the square peg in this close-knit family circle. What Meredith doesn’t know is that Stone matriarch Sybil (Diane Keaton, who chomps through this role like it was cotton candy) is ill and that the interloper will make a handy punching-bag on which the family can take out their frustrations.


Stoner and truth-speaker Ben (Luke Owen), bitter Amy (Rachel McAdams), distracted mom Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) and sunny, deaf Thad (Tyrone Giordano) round out the Stone siblings collected around the catalogue-perfect living room and mellowed by relaxed dad Kelly (Craig T. Nelson). When Meredith manages to offend nearly everyone in the liberal household, she calls in back-up in the form of lovely little sister Julie (Claire Danes who glows sufficiently to compensate for not having much in the way of a character to inhabit).


The strengths of this movie are top-notch performances, several more-than-a-bundle-of-quirks believable characters and plenty of space for the audience to have their own thoughts. Relative newcomer director Thomas Bezucha does a good job framing Diane Keaton’s scene-devouring energy and using an understated Luke Owen as the emotional anchor onscreen. However, these two cannot compensate for the movie’s lack of self-knowledge and forced sentimentality. Like the character of Meredith, the film’s bravado cannot mask a messy soul but should be given respect for showing up and sticking it out.


Parents should know that this movie has mature themes, including the illness of a family member, the projection of anger from something that causes pain to someone on the outside and the hypocrisy implicit in embracing acceptance but rejecting someone who does not think like you. A tender and committed interracial gay couple adopts, leading to discussions of race and sexual orientation that include some remarks interpreted as bigotry. Brothers tussle and try to hurt each other. An emotional character gets into a fender-bender off-screen. A character’s illness is the elephant in the room, about which nobody will speak. A character gets drunk and loses inhibitions, social drinking and references to pot smoking. There is brief profanity.


Families might wish to discuss the different ways the characters have of showing support and understanding, from Sybil’s discussions with Everett related to her mother’s ring to the scenes where Kelly and Sybil are alone. How is your family like — or not like — to the Stones and how would you react to a newcomer to the family who seemed different?


Families looking for more movies that highlight messy familial tensions around holidays might wish to watch the thoughtful Pieces of April, What’s Cooking or Home for the Holidays. Those who wish to see Diane Keaton demonstrating her comedic chops should watch Something’s Gotta Give or Annie Hall.


Thanks to guest critic AME.

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Comedy Drama Romance

Rumor Has It

Posted on December 20, 2005 at 3:42 pm

F+
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content, crude humor and a drug reference.
Profanity: Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking, characters get drunk
Violence/ Scariness: Reference to sad death
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: 2005
Date Released to DVD: 2006
Amazon.com ASIN: B000EMGICS

In the savage satire The Player, actor/screenwriter Buck Henry makes a hilarious pitch for a sequel to The Graduate, something of a savage satire itself, though cloaked in the garb of a romantic fantasy of rebellion and authenticity. The thing about Henry’s pitch is that no one wants to see a squel to The Graduate; it is such a patently stupid idea that it is funny to see him try to pitch it.


I would love to see a movie of the pitch that got this sort-of-sequel made, one of the very worst ideas for a movie since they decided to try to make a horror movie about rabbits.


So, here’s the pitch — a young woman named Sarah (Jennifer Anniston) discovers on the eve of her sister’s wedding that the movie The Graduate was inspired by her own family. Before her parents got married, her mother briefly ran away with a young man in her class at school named Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) who had had an affair with her mother (Sarah’s grandmother, played with bite by Shirley Maclaine). Sarah decides that Beau must be her biological father, so she flies to San Francisco to meet him. When it turns out he was not her father, she becomes the third generation in her family to sleep with him. And when her fiance (Mark Ruffalo) finds out about this, he is not happy.


I want to take a shower just writing those words. I wanted to take two showers watching it on the screen.


In other words: Ew.


Ew. Ew. Ew.


There is actually something very twisted about all of this and perhaps John Waters could make it work, but Rob Reiner directs it as though it was a very traditional light romantic comedy, albeit one with overtones of incest and jokes about testicular injuries.


Plus, it has a lot of annoying logical inconsistencies. For example, Sarah, a journalist, instantly recognizes the very obscure name of the author of the book The Graduate (Charles Webb) but registers nothing about the name of one of the wealthiest dot.com entrepreneurs at the height of the boom era? The movie is also set in the 1990’s (to make the timing work with the publication of the book), but makes no use whatsoever of the era except to put in random details like big cell phones and television clips of President Clinton. A character has an anxiety attack on an airplane for no purpose other than to have her back home again and then, as soon as we no longer need her, she is somehow all better. No one behaves in a way that makes any sense, even within the genre of farce, which means no one is worth caring about. It’s a terrible shame to waste some of the most talented light-comedy performers in Hollywood on a script that is not just not funny, not just not engaging, but downright gross.


Parents should know that this is a movie that presents a man’s sexual encounters with three generations of women in the same family as material, including infidelity to a husband and two fiances as material for a light-hearted comedy. Characters use some strong language. They drink (including getting drunk) and there is a reference to drug use.


Families who see this movie should talk about why Sarah did not feel more connected to her father and sister and what Jeff saw in Sarah that made him want to be with her.

Families who enjoy this movie should watch The Graduate. They might also enjoy 40 Carats.

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Comedy Drama Movies -- format Romance

Brokeback Mountain

Posted on December 15, 2005 at 3:54 pm

B+
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for sexuality, nudity, language and some violence.
Profanity: Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking and smoking, character drinks too much, marijuana, chewing tobacco
Violence/ Scariness: Brief graphic violence, character killed
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: 2005
Date Released to DVD: 2006
Amazon.com ASIN: B00005JOFQ

Director Ang Lee is a master of repressed love whether between young Taiwanese men in The Wedding Banquet, Jane Austen’s class-conscious Brits in Sense & Sensibility, duty-bound warriors in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or even monsters and scientists in The Hulk. Lee’s delicate touch and poetic cinematography take Annie Proulx’s 30-page story about cowboys who fall into a crevasse of tragic forbidden love, and expands it into a hauntingly bittersweet two-hour-plus visual feast of lingering melancholy and fragile snapshots of happiness against the lonely backdrop of despair.


As in the short story, the main character, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger in a pitch perfect spot-on performance) scrounges up work one summer by herding sheep for a dismissive rancher (Randy Quaid) up at the spectacular vistas of Brokeback Mountain. He is sent out to this task with another poor cowboy, the aspiring rodeo competitor Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) whose easy companionship is a salve for orphaned Ennis’ isolation. When they unexpectedly become much more than friends, they build the foundations of a life-long love that will haunt and change them both forever.


The film lingers over that first summer in 1963 and their passionate reunion four years later, then it speeds by 20 years of their respective life signposts including marriages, children, divorce, jobs, in-laws, relationships; ordinary lives punctuated by their semi-annual weeklong “fishing” trips into the mountains.

Ennis is dragged down by duty as he attempts to make ends meet and to keep together the pretense of a marriage and then of a bachelorhood. In near total emotional isolation, he keeps a white-knuckled lock on his feelings, which bubble up in tenderness towards his daughters and threaten to erupt in violence against anyone else.

Jack, meanwhile, is the more needy heart, stumbling into a marriage to a cowboy princess with a wealthy father. It takes him from the adrenaline highs of rodeo-riding to the confining job of a combine salesman. It is he who cannot comprehend Ennis’ inability to see a world where they could be together. Where Ennis gives all he can, Jack wants so much more. The results tear them up inside and the bitterness ripples through both their lives to a final, moving conclusion.


While groundbreaking and beautiful, this movie falters a step when its slow and deliberate pace nevertheless fails to take the audience into an admittedly very private love beyond their time together on the mountain. Jack is a complicated character and, with the exception of the scene where he confronts his father-in-law, his character development later in the film seems uneven and his hold on Ennis less tenable, perhaps because Lee leaves so much to be said in the silences. We see him going to Mexico to cruise for sex, but we do not see him unguarded with his parents, Ennis or even with wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) to give us the understanding that we get from Ennis’ scenes with his wife (Michelle Williams) and their daughters.


The depth of all the characters, it should be said, is one of the movie’s many strengths: there is not a person here who does not easily deserve his or her story to be told, especially Lureen (Anne Hathaway), Alma (Michelle Williams), Mrs. Twist (Roberta Maxwell) and Alma Junior (Kate Mara).


And another strength is the simplicity and strong symbolism of the way the story is told. Up on Brokeback Mountain, Jack and Ennis make the rules. At first they do what the rancher told them, camping out near the sheep in violation of the law. But then they understand that they may not own the place or the sheep, but they are in charge and can decide what is right for them — until they have to come down from the mountain and abide by the rules of society. The story-telling is so plain and straightforward that, like the characters’ feelings for one another, at first you do not realize how powerful it is. But by the conclusion, with its definitive, heart-wrenching portrayal of what will always be divided and what can never be, audiences will realize that the story has entered its souls.
This movie benefits from world-class talent as Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Larry McMurtry, keeps the cowboy feel authentic while adapting the screenplay from fellow Pulitzer-winner Proulx’s short story, all under the direction of Oscar winner Lee. With fine performances by all and an Oscar-worthy scope, “Brokeback Mountain” is a solid addition to the canon of tragic loves and it is an immensely moving portrait of joy begetting sadness, pain and fleetingly a small and fragile ray of hope.


Parents should know that the movie deals with mature issues, including bigotry, homosexuality, and adultery. There is nudity, sex between committed couples, adultery, references to prostitution. Characters use frequent profanity, they drink and smoke, in one scene they use drugs. Characters drink to excess, they get violent, and they brawl. There is the frequent threat of brutality and a brief scene of a bloody murder. A character gives an explicit account of torture and murder. There are angry and violent fight scenes between couples.


Families who see this movie should talk about the hope and despair that follow in the wake of a life-changing encounter. When Ennis describes how this one relationship had made him who he was, how might he imagine that he would have been different if he had never gone up on to Brokeback Mountain? In the scene in the trailer with “Junior”, how is Ennis different and what might this foretell about his future? Why is the question Ennis asks her so important? Do you think Ennis and Jack’s story would change today versus when the story is taking place?


Visual cues in this movie are very important and families might talk about these subtle touches, such as the way Ennis’ life shrinks as seen by ever smaller interior spaces, about the smiles -few and far between–and who they are between, and about eye contact, which Ennis in his isolation uses sparingly and Jack in his recklessness uses often.


Families looking for more of Lee’s elegant storytelling and atmospheric beauty will enjoy his early Taiwanese movies, especially Eat Drink Man Woman and the aforementioned Wedding Banquet. For those looking for more big sky, cowboy stories, McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a splendid read and the miniseries is very well done.


A partial list of other films on the theme of socially unacceptable loves and the emotional wreckage that can ensue would include: the moving Boys Don’t Cry, the multi-tissue infidelity study Breaking the Waves, the lifelong affair of Same Time Next Year, or the inter-racial/homosexual loves in Far from Heaven. All of these movies have mature themes and are not for the very young or more sensitive viewers.


Thanks to guest critic AME.

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Drama Movies -- format Romance

King Kong

Posted on December 13, 2005 at 12:43 pm

B+
Lowest Recommended Age: Middle School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for frightening adventure violence and some disturbing images.
Profanity: Brief crude language and swearing
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking
Violence/ Scariness: Very intense and graphic violence, many characters injured or killed, reference to suicide
Diversity Issues: Strong female and minority characters
Date Released to Theaters: 2005
Date Released to DVD: 2006
Amazon.com ASIN: B001KZVQJI

This is not just one of the most thrilling action movies ever made – it is more like five or six of the most thrilling action movies ever made. It is not quite twice as long as the usual movie, but it is packed with enough edge-of-your-seat/did-I-just-see-that/goose-bumpy popcorn pleasure for a year’s worth of blockbusters.

We’ve got zombies. We’ve got stampeding dinosaurs. We’ve got very oooky bugs and creatures that look like alimentary canals with lots and lots of teeth. We have hubris, big time. We have tender love stories. We have a lovely damsel in distress — repeatedly — and heroic men who will risk their lives – repeatedly -– to save her.

And we have a really really really big gorilla. It takes almost an hour into the movie before we meet him, but he is worth waiting for.

Peter Jackson showed us with The Lord of the Rings that he knows how to make movies that give us the grandest special-effects-laden spectacle but never let us lose sight of the characters who make it more than pretty pictures. In this remake of the classic that first inspired him to become a director, Jackson has created a masterful mix of story and splendor and hold-your-breath adventure.

The film opens with shots of wild animals, and then realize they are in cages, in a New York zoo. And then we see people, in a sort of cage, too — the Depression has everyone feeling trapped.

Then we meet our characters and soon they are on their way to the uncharted Skull Island to make a movie. There they run into every possible kind of jungle peril, including a gigantic, dinosaur-bashing gorilla who captures — and then is captured by actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). They bring him back to New York and put him on stage in a silly show with bright lights and loud noises and people in evening clothes laughing and applauding. And then he escapes.

Jackson’s staging of the big action scenes is sensational, especially a dinosaur stampede and what I can only describe as a massive and meticulously timed stunt involving a lot of vines. But what is even more impressive is his sensitivity in the small, tender moments, including a breathtakingly exquisite scene on an ice skating rink. Kong himself, a combination of computer effects and the gestures and movements of actor Andy Serkis (who also provided the same services for Golum in the “Lord of the Rings” movies) gives what can only be called a performance, and a beautifully calibrated and expressive one.

The script manages the trick of being true to the source without any ironic winks or post-modern spins but also without taking itself too seriously. A clever little shout-out to Fay Wray, star of the original, sets the tone.

And a great deal of credit has to go to the actors, who more than hold their own in front of all of the special effects. Jack Black (School of Rock) plays movie producer/director Carl Denham, something of a towering monster himself. While Kong appreciates beauty and demonstrates honor, even some humility, Denham cares only about his movie and will lie, cheat, steal, and sacrifice anyone around him to get the movie made. Naomi Watts is Ann Darrow, a hard-luck vaudevillian let down by everyone she ever trusted who wants to be an actress and accepts a part in Denham’s movie, to be filmed on location in a mysterious uncharted place called Skull Island.

Adrian Brody (The Pianist) is playwright/screenwriter Jack Driscoll, who involuntarily comes along for the ride when Denham insists that the boat take off before Driscoll can leave — and before the police can stop them.

This is an old-fashioned wow of a they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-anymore movie movie with thrills and heart and romance. And a very big gorilla. Who could ask for anything more?

Parents should know that this film has a great deal of very intense peril and violence, including guns and spears. There are zombie characters who are quite creepy and scary animals — both enormous and small, and grisly images. Many characters are injured or killed and there is a reference to suicide. Characters drink and there are some romantic kisses. Characters use some crude language and some swearing.

Families who see this movie should talk about the question one of the characters asks about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Why do people “keep going down the river?”

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the original and read this history of King Kong’s movies, but should skip the campy 1976 version starring Jessica Lange. The World of Kong is a guide to Skull Island produced by the people who designed this movie.

(more…)

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Action/Adventure Drama Movies -- format Romance

Last Holiday

Posted on December 11, 2005 at 12:57 pm

B-
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some sexual reference.
Profanity: Some strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking
Violence/ Scariness: Comic peril, theme of fatal illness
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters: 2005
Date Released to DVD: 2006
Amazon.com ASIN: B000ERVJJK

Every night, Georgia Bird (Queen Latifah) cooks a spectacular meal, arranges everything perfectly, takes a picture of it for her “possibilities” scrapbook and then feeds it to the boy who lives next door while she microwaves a frozen diet dinner for herself. She works at a store where she meekly goes along with whatever her nasty boss tells her and she can barely speak when dreamboat Sean (LL Cool J) walks by.


Then she finds out that she has a serious condition and only three weeks to live. So she takes all of her money out of the bank and decides to blow it all on a trip to a fabulous resort. The woman who has been so careful for so long has no reason to be careful anymore. The woman who has been saving everything for someday decides that the time has come to spend.


Queen Latifah has a warm and lovely screen presence and it is a pleasure to see her light up as Georgia comes alive. We are immediately on her side as the caterpillar and we can’t help thrilling as she begins to kick up her heels and spread her wings as a butterfly. Yes, there will be a trying-on-fancy-clothes-montage when Georgia decides to replace her drab wardrobe. Yes, Georgia will run into her hero, the resort’s French chef (Gerard Depardieu) and the mega-millionaire who owns the store she works in, visiting the resort to hobnob with bigwigs. And yes, everyone will assume she’s a bigwig, too (why else would she be throwing so much money around) and yes, everyone will be charmed by her freshness and honesty. And yes, Georgia will wonder why it took dying to teach her how to live.


And yes, we enjoy seeing it all unfold. The script is pure formula, but Queen Latifah is having such a ball that we are happy to be invited along. At times it feels like an extended trailer for itself with silly set-pieces (Georgia base-jumps! Georgia cooks with the chef!), but we are on her side all the way and when the happily-ever-ending arrives, we’re as happy as she is.

Parents should know that the movie has an extremely crude joke about oral sex for a PG-13 movie. There is some comic peril, some strong language, and some social drinking. The theme of a fatal disease may be disturbing to some audience members.


Families who see this movie should talk about what they might put in their own “possiblities” books — and what they can do to make those possibilities into realities. Why did it take a diagnosis of a serious disease to make Georgia brave enough to try out her dreams?


Families who appreciate this movie will also appreciate Queen Latifah’s fine performances in Chicago and Living out Loud (both with mature material). They might enjoy the original version of this movie, starring Alec Guiness (the original Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.

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Action/Adventure Comedy Drama Movies -- format
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