Flightplan

Posted on September 19, 2005 at 8:13 pm

It’s always a bad sign in a thriller when the big reveal is greeted by hoots of derisive laughter, and that’s what happened at this movie. It’s an even worse sign when two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster is out-acted by a child who is missing or unconscious for most of the movie, but that happened, too.

Just-widowed Kyle Pratt (Foster) is flying from Berlin to New York with her 6-year-old, Julia (Marlene Lawston), taking her husband’s casket home to be buried. They are exhausted and shaken, so they find some empty rows in the back of the plane and go to sleep. When Kyle wakes up, Julia is gone. As she searches the plane, getting more and more worried, the attitude of the flight attendants shifts from helpful to wary to hostile. It seems there is no evidence that Julia ever boarded the plane. A federal air marshall travelling undercover believes Kyle is delusional, and so does the captain. Kyle starts to wonder if they could be right.

Then it all veers into a level of preposterousness that would be too silly to go into even if it didn’t contain spoilers. There are some tense moments, but unlike the other recent airplane thriller, “Red Eye,” this one never creates a sense of claustrophobic containment. Kyle, an engineer who helped to design this aircraft, the largest ever, understands the blueprints well enough to know where to look, and as she keeps exploring new places, some of which appear positively cavernous, it dissipates the tension. So do the below-par one-note performances from Foster, Sarsgaard, and Sean Bean (as the pilot). This film may be called “Flightplan,” but it never takes flight and there is nothing that rises to the dignity of a plan of any kind. Discuss. But don’t bother with the movie.

Parents should know that this movie has intense peril and violence, including shooting, explosions, and references to murder, suicide, kidnapping, and molestation. There is some strong language, though less than average for a PG-13. A strength of the movie is its portrayal of a strong woman and the way it raises the issue of bigotry when some passengers assume that the Middle Eastern men on the airplane must be untrustworthy.

Families who see this movie should talk about how national security issues have affected the way people feel about air travel. They should also talk about the various arguments Kyle used and which ones were most persuasive.

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy some of the far-better disappearing person classics, especially The Lady Vanishes (from which this film lifts one of its key clues), Bunny Lake is Missing, and So Long at the Fair, as well as Foster’s last Mother Courage performance in Panic Room all of which have vastly more satisfying conclusions than this one.

Related Tags:

 

“Gothika Rule” Action/Adventure Drama

G

Posted on August 30, 2005 at 3:21 pm

Audacious, ambitious, and provocative but uneven and ultimately unsatisfying, this long-delayed film adapts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of class, love, and power, The Great Gatsby, to the present. Instead of Jay Gatsby, the gangster who can’t forget the girl he lost, we have Summer G, the gangsta, the head of a successful hip-hop recording label.

Richard T. Jones is commanding as Summer G, whose college romance with Skye (Chenoa Maxwell) ended when she married Chip Hightower (Blair Underwood), heir to a publishing dynasty. He has taken a house in the Hamptons not far from where the Hightowers have a home.

When Skye’s cousin Tre (Andre Royo) comes to interview Summer G, Chip asks him to cover for him so that he can see his girlfriend without Skye’s finding out. Tre refuses, until Chip reminds him that the magazine Tre works for is owned by Chip’s father.

Summer G then puts the same kind of pressure on Tre. He will not cooperate with the interview unless Tre helps him see Skye. Again, Tre refuses at first, then reluctantly agrees.

Summer G’s recording artists are staying with him. One who has not had a hit for a while becomes increasingly dependent on his girlfriend, who goes away for what she says will be just a few days and then stops returning his calls. Another becomes bitter and manipulative when she believes Summer G is not giving her the chance she deserves.

The Fitzgerald novel has plenty of material for an update that raises some contemporary issues of race and class and culture, but this film falters and misses the point and butchers the metaphors, turning a brilliant story into a soapy love triangle.

Jones has a commanding presence and Underwood does what he can with a cardboard cad of a character. But Royo is weak and Maxwell is hopelessly bad and the uneven, bumpy narrative and long delay between completion and release support the rumor that the movie has been recut following unssuccessful test screenings. Fitzgerald famously placed a green light on the dock in this novel. This review is intended to place a red light on any plan to see this film.

Parents should know that this movie has extremely strong language (including the n-word), drinking, smoking, drug references, sexual references and situations, and violence, including guns, with characters injured and killed.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Skye decided to stay with Chip instead of Summer G and how the movie differs from the original book.

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy the earlier film versions of “The Great Gatsby,” especially the with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and a television miniseries.

Related Tags:

 

Based on a book Drama

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Posted on May 31, 2005 at 12:58 pm

This is a story about one summer in the life of four friends, told with sincerity, heart, and a little bit of magic — the very same qualities that made the original book and its sequels a “you have to read this” classic for young girls.

Four 16-year-olds, friends since before birth, when their mothers met in a prenatal exercise class, are about to be separated for the summer for the first time ever. Just before they leave, they find a mysterious pair of blue jeans that somehow fit each of them perfectly, even though their sizes as shapes are as different as their personalities. They decide to share the pants as a way of sharing their experiences over the summer. As they mail the pants back and forth to each other, the jeans will help them share their stories and stay connected.

The first to wear the pants is shy artist Lena (Alexis Bledel of television’s Gilmore Girls) goes to Greece to visit her grandparents. On the island of Santorini she meets Kostas. Despite a multi-generation feud between their families — and a promise never to see him again, Lena and Kostas fall in love.

Outgoing and athletic Bridget (Blake Lively) goes to soccer camp. She thinks a romance with her handsome coach is what she needs to make up for the emptiness that she has felt since her mother died.

traveling pants.jpgAspiring writer Carmen (America Ferrera of Real Women Have Curves) goes to South Carolina to see her father (Bradley Whitford), who did not tell her that he was living with a woman (Nancy Travis) with two children and planning to get married.

And rebellious would-be film-maker Tibby (Amber Tamblyn of television’s Joan of Arcadia) stays home, working at a huge discount store called Wallman’s and trying to make a movie about how bleak and meaningless everything is. She meets a girl named Bailey (Jenna Boyd) who becomes her film crew.

Each of the girls wears the pants and sends them on to the next with a letter. As they all try on new experiences and emotions and feel a little lost and vulnerable, the pants and their friendship keeps them feeling close and supported.

What takes this above the level of the average something-for-everyone collection of stories with a group hug at the end is its willingness to keep things a little complicated and messy instead of tying everything up neatly into the TV-style resolutions most people think are required in stories for young audiences.

Characters make real mistakes, not cute flubs that are either quickly corrected or happy accidents that work out even better than the original plan. Some characters learn lessons and change their minds or their behavior, but others do not. Some wounds are healed and some of what is lost is found, but some not. This is more reassuring, rather than less, because in our hearts even kids know that is true; all endings are not happy. It is good to see how people handle that — and can even be enlarged by it.

The film benefits, too, from sensitive and committed performances by its five young stars (including the precociously centered Boyd, a real presence on screen here as she was in the otherwise awful Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star). They make us believe in the connection between very different characters. It’s almost possible to think of them as different aspects of the same adolescent — shy and bold, thoughtful and impulsive, cynical and hopeful. Together, like the movie itself and like those magical Levis, they are more than the sum of their parts.

Parents should know that there is a subtle reference to a sexual encounter that one of the characters initiates but later considers a mistake. This is handled sensitively and responsibly. The same is true of other difficult issues the characters must face, including the suicide of a parent, a difficult adjustment to a divorced parent’s re-marriage, and a very sad death.

Families who see this movie should talk about what makes such different girls such loyal and devoted friends? What are the most important lessons each one of them learns over the summer? Why don’t the pants fit Bailey? Families should talk about why this movie does not try to give everyone a happy ending or even an ending at all. Why was Bridget so wrong about what she thought would make her feel less lonely? How did her mistake help her to share her feelings with her friends in a way she could not before? What could Carmen have done to try to get to know her father’s new family better?

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy The Baby Sitters Club. And, of course, they should read the bookand its sequels. They might also enjoy a different kind of story about a magical piece of clothing shared by a disparate group of people in a life-changing series of adventures, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.

Related Tags:

 

Based on a book Comedy Drama Series/Sequel

Crash

Posted on April 29, 2005 at 4:32 pm

Everyone is angry. Everyone is scared. They all feel that something that belongs to them has been taken away and they don’t know how to get it back.

And in this movie, they say so.

“Crash,” the winner of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar, is an ensemble film with several intersecting stories, all of them about people who can’t quite seem to understand how things turned out the way they did or how they themselves turned out the way they did. Most of them find out, in the course of the movie, that they are capable of more — or less — than they thought they were.

Paul Haggis, the screenwriter for Million Dollar Baby has co-written and directed a devastating movie about people who are very much like us, with one important difference. It’s as though the drinking water in Los Angeles has been spiked with some mild de-inhibitor that makes people say what they are thinking. In this film, everyone says the most horrifyingly virulent things to everyone else: family members, people in business, employees, and strangers, reflecting a range of prejudice on the basis of class, gender, and, above all, race.

These comments are sometimes made angrily, sometimes carelessly or thoughtlessly, but often, and more unsettlingly, matter-of-factly. As vicious as the insults are, the part that hurts the most is that people don’t care enough, don’t pay attention closely enough, to know the people they are insulting. “When did Persians become Arab?” asks an Iranian, who cannot understand how people can hate him without taking the time to know who he is. A Hispanic woman explains to a man she is sleeping with that she is not Mexican. Her parents are from El Salvador and Puerto Rico. He tells her that it doesn’t matter because they all leave cars on their lawns anyway.

The movie is intricately constructed, going back and forth between the characters and back and forth in time.  There are small moments that create a mosaic in which we see the pattern before the characters do. The movie has big shocks but it also has small glimpses and moments of great subtlety. A black woman looks at her white boss while he talks to his wife on a cell phone and we can tell there is more to their relationship than we have seen. The daughter of immigrants we have only seen in one context shows up in another and we see that her professional life is very different from what we might have imagined, reminding us that racism may be inextricably intertwined with America, but so is opportunity.

Every character is three-dimensional, utterly real and heartbreakingly sympathetic. The characters keep surprising themselves and each other, for better and for worse.

A white upper class couple gets carjacked. He’s a politician (Brendan Fraser) concerned about how it will look. She (Sandra Bullock) is terrified and angry. She doesn’t trust the man who has come to change their locks because he looks like a gang member. A black detective (co-producer Don Cheadle) tells his Latina partner and sometimes girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito) that “in LA, nobody touches you. We miss that so much, we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

A black actress (Thandie Newton) tells her black television director husband (Terrence Howard) that “The closest you ever came to being black was watching ‘The Cosby Show.'” The white producer of a television sit-com (Tony Danza) tells that same director to re-shoot a scene because “Jamal is talking a little less black.” A character in an overturned car is caught in a safety belt, hanging upside down. A pair of black carjackers believe that what they do is acceptable because they are not robbing black people. One of the tenderest father-daughter scenes in years is the set-up for an explosive emotional pay-off later on.

The brilliance of the movie is the way it makes each character both symbol and individual. As a whole, the cast is neatly aligned along a continuum of prejudice, and yet each character is complete and complex and real. Just when we think we know who they are, they surprise us. We find ourselves sympathetic to those we thought we hated and disturbed by those we thought we understood. Just when we think we know what bigotry is, it, too, surprises us by being more about fear and loss and feeling powerless than about hatred and ignorance. The characters confront their assumptions about each other and they make us confront our own about them and about ourselves.

(more…)

Related Tags:

 

Crime Drama

Bloody Sunday

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:18 am

On January 30, 1972, thousands of civil rights demonstrators in Derry (Londonderry), Ireland, held a rally to protest the British Government’s use of internment without due process in Northern Ireland. British military forces were ordered into the unarmed crowd to capture some of the rowdier youths. What followed has been the subject of great debate and a well-known U2 song, but amidst the confusion, the army opened fire on the protestors, killing thirteen and wounding fourteen others. The day became a turning point for the Northern Irish “Troubles” and is attributed with inspiring thousands of new volunteers to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

As far as subject matter is concerned, many people are more familiar with the U2 song than they are with the actual event or the factors that led to the day. This movie takes a turn at correcting this imbalance by recounting what happened on Bloody Sunday in a powerfully realistic half- drama, half-documentary.

Five characters represent the major forces of the day: a reluctant protest organizer and popular local –Protestant—politician, Ivan Cooper (a mesmerizing performance by James Nesbitt); a seventeen year old Catholic boy, just out of jail and torn between protesting and staying out of trouble, Gerry Donaghy (Declan Duddly); the radioman whose shock and disgust with his fellow soldiers is pitted against his loyalty to the unit, Soldier 027 (Mike Edwards); the dutiful but sympathetically human Brigadier, Patrick MacLellan (Nicholas Farrell); and, the unbending imperialist with the order to end the unrest, Major General Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith). However, it is in the faces of those around these characters where so much of the event is framed: the subtle shift of expression on the face of the Captain of the local police force as the Major General orders soldiers into position; the desperate grimace of an unnamed man as he rushes to resuscitate a corpse; the vacant eyed shock of a man learning of the death of a loved one beneath iridescent hospital lights.

Director Paul Greengrass does an excellent job at crafting a documentary feel for the story, complete with grainy film, jumpy shots, wavering sound and naturally gray light. Reportedly, Greengrass sought out people who were there on January 30th –those who lost loved ones as well as soldiers and bystanders—casting them as extras to add to the verisimilitude. The dialogue might be hard to follow between strong accents and a shifting aural perspective but the result is so realistic that the abrupt ringing of the phone or the crack of gun fire makes you flinch.

Not allowing the viewer to be passive, the movie catches us up in this pivotal day in Ireland’s history. Greengrass chooses not to review events leading to Bloody Sunday beyond passing references, however the moment itself is caught with a moving clarity: whether you agree with Greengrass’ portrayal of controversial events or not, he does a good job of capturing the feel of a society in flux during the early 1970’s and portraying the plight of Derry’s denizens. And, yes, they do play U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as the credits roll.

Parents should know that this movie depicts a tragic, violent event. The graphic shooting of unarmed protestors is very disturbing and the ensuing images including mayhem and grieving are likely to terrify younger children. Young adults accustomed to Hollywood’s comic book portrayal of violence are likely to be disturbed by the events so realistically framed on 35mm film.

Families who see this film could be discussing it for days. First, from a historical perspective, families might wish to talk about how this movie relates to current news stories about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Both the Major General and the protest organizers work as much as possible with the media. How is the debate being presented to the court of public opinion? How has this changed since Bloody Sunday? When Ivan says that the IRA scored its biggest victory on Bloody Sunday, what does he mean?

Second, families may wish to discuss the ramifications of having military forces in populations that are predominately civilian. For some historical perspective, the paratrooper unit responsible for firing on the crowd –the First Battalion Parachute Regiment—was created in 1940 by Sir Winston Churchill, gaining the nickname “Red Devils” during fighting in Northern Africa, Sicily and France during WWII. In the years before being stationed in Northern Ireland, they were stationed in the Middle East, Aden, Cyprus and other hotspots. With a respected history in combat, the First Battalion considered themselves part of Britain’s fighting elite. Why would this group –trained to face armed enemies—be given a peacekeeping role in Ireland? What friction exists between the Regiment and the local police? What are their respective goals and responsibilities? What lessons might there be for us regarding troops in other urban situations, such as the Balkans or the Middle East?

Greengrass has chosen to film this account with a distinctly “documentary” camera style, intended to make an audience feel like they are there as a witness to history. As a brief notice in the credits mentions, the movie is based on events that did occur, however many of the conversations and characters were created for the purpose of the story. Is it important to the story that the audience think of this film as a documentary? If so, what issues might this raise for Greengrass or other filmmakers when they are presenting stories based on controversial events?

Families who are interested in seeing more on non-violent protest and the difficulties of maintaining peaceful demonstrations in the face of force might wish to watch “Gandhi” (1982). For those who are interested in the theme of mismatch between military units and the political objectives asked of them, “Black Hawk Down” (2001) might be of interest. Those who are interested in seeing more on the Irish Troubles might be interested in director Jim Sheridan’s 1990’s trilogy (“In the Name of the Father”; “Some Mother’s Son”; and, “The Boxer”) or Neil Jordan’s “Michael Collins” (1996). For families who wish to see James Nesbitt in a vastly different role, “Waking Ned Devine” is a lighthearted look at an isolated Irish town far away from Bloody Sunday and, indeed, from any troubles at all.

Related Tags:

 

Based on a true story Drama
THE MOVIE MOM® is a registered trademark of Nell Minow. Use of the mark without express consent from Nell Minow constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition in violation of federal and state laws. All material © Nell Minow 1995-2024, all rights reserved, and no use or republication is permitted without explicit permission. This site hosts Nell Minow’s Movie Mom® archive, with material that originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies, Beliefnet, and other sources. Much of her new material can be found at Rogerebert.com, Huffington Post, and WheretoWatch. Her books include The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies and 101 Must-See Movie Moments, and she can be heard each week on radio stations across the country.

Website Designed by Max LaZebnik