The Zookeeper’s Wife

Posted on March 30, 2017 at 3:47 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Preschool
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, violence, brief sexuality, nudity and smoking
Profanity:	Some strong and bigoted language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Wartime and holocaust violence involving humans and animals, characters injured and killed, rape of a young girl (off-camera), sexual abuse
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	March 30, 2017

Jessica Chastain is luminous in the real-life story of Antonina Zabinski, a Warsaw zookeeper, who, with her husband and son, saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. Director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider”) brings her love of the natural world and her gift for telling stories of courage and triumph over bigotry to give us a timely reminder that the direst circumstances can inspire the greatest acts of courage and generosity. It also reminds us that there are still new stories to be discovered, even in a period of history that has inspired hundreds of films and thousands of books.

The movie opens on scenes of Edenic paradise. Antonina looks lovingly at her sleeping son — and at the baby lions sleeping beside him. She leans over and holds his foot, but it is the lion cubs she nuzzles. We then see her opening the zoo for the day, riding her bicycle through the magnificent Belle Epoque zoo, with the young camel loping along behind her, lovingly greeting each of the creatures. We will later learn that she is a refugee from Russia, and her childhood hardships left her more willing to trust animals than people. Animals trust her, too. Her skill at “whispering” even the most frightened and frightening wild thing will prove essential once Germany invades Poland.

Antonina is married to Jan (the Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh), and the zoo is in every way their home. They live on the premises, but it is more than that. There is no distinction between the rooms they live in and the rest of the zoo. Animals wander in and out of the house and Antonina feels that the animals are her treasured guests — that is the term she uses.

And then Germany invades Poland, and the zoo is destroyed. A German zookeeper, Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl of “Rush” and “Captain America: Civil War”) offers to take the best of the surviving animals to his zoo in Berlin, promising to care for them and return them after the war. Later, as an officer in the German army, he returns to shoot the animals left behind. The Jews of Warsaw are moved into the Warsaw ghetto. Antonina and Jan figure out a way to smuggle some of them out of the ghetto, and soon they are living in underground cages once used to house animals. Once again, Antonina refers to them as her guests, and each night, after the patrol has gone home, she has music and serves food on elegant trays to remind them that there is still civilization in the midst of madness and kindness and courage in the midst of brutality and terror.

It would be easy to mistake the gentleness of Caro’s approach as not sufficiently harrowing to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, especially after the Oscar-winning “Son of Saul.” But that would be wrong. Caro, who made a film about sexual predation in “North Country,” understands that an unwanted touch of a hand or coming a few millimeters too close can feel soul-destroying, especially when it is misunderstood by someone whose trust and respect mean everything. She understands that a drawing, a bunny, a chance to create, a moment of sympathy can begin to heal a ravaged heart, and she presents Antonina’s story with as much grace and humanity as Antonina showed her guests.

Parents should know that this movie takes place during WWII and the Holocaust, and there are disturbing and violent images including scenes of bombing, the Warsaw uprising, and execution of Jews. A young girl is raped (off-screen) and a woman faces a sexual predator. There is some bigoted language and human and animal characters are injured and killed.

Family discussion: How did Antonina’s love of animals help her in taking care of her “guests?” Why was it important to her to treat her “guests” to gracious entertainment in the evenings? What should she have said to her husband about Heck?

If you like this, try: the book by Diane Ackerman

The Shack

Posted on March 2, 2017 at 5:57 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic material including some violence
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcoholic parent
Violence/ Scariness:	Tragic murder of a child, domestic and child abuse, gun, possible attempted suicide
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	March 3, 2017

“The Shack,” based on the best-seller by William P.Young seeks to provide comfort and healing for those struggling with a terrible loss and with something even worse — the fear that tragedy has no purpose and the doubt that pain engenders about whether life makes sense. Can there be meaning in a world of senseless tragedy, where the innocent suffer? The book‘s subtitle is Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity, and it is somewhere between a parable, a fantasy, and a story about a man devastated by grief who spends a week in a shack in the woods, talking to God.

While some people, including some Christians, will find the theology of this story questionable, it presents an accessible and comforting notion of God’s love and the healing power of forgiveness.

Sam Worthington plays Mackenzie, a loving husband and father of three children who still struggles with his memories of his abusive father, a man of “calloused hand, rigid rules” and alcoholism. “Pain has a way of twisting us up inside and making us do the unthinkable,” and “the secrets we keep have a way of clawing themselves up to the surface.” (It is not clear exactly what the most painful secrets are but it seems possible he murdered his abusive dad?)

Mack takes his children on a camping trip, where his youngest daughter Missy is kidnapped and brutally murdered while he is rescuing his son, trapped under an overturned canoe. Mac, who had always been surprised and touched by Missy’s simple faith in a God she felt close enough to that she referred to Him as Papa, is shattered by guilt and grief. Even though he sees the pressure it puts on his family, he cannot break out of his isolation.

When his family is away, Mack finds a note in his mailbox, though there are no footprints in the snow. The note is signed “Papa” and it invites him to come to the woods, to the very shack where Missy’s bloody dress was found. Although he dreads returning to the place of his crushing pain, he goes, and it is there he meets the Trinity. God, known as Elousia, I Am, or Papa, is in the form of an African-American woman who was a kind neighbor in his childhood and who wears Ma Griffe, the perfume he mother loved (Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer). She says he will be most open to her in the form of a mother, and apparently one who loves Neil Young.

God’s Son is in the form of a young carpenter who can walk on water and run on it, too (Avraham Aviv Alush), and the Spirit is known as Sarayu (Sumire Matsubara).

They live in a Kinkade-like Eden, filled with warmth, light, nature, good food, and laughter. Very gently, they guide him to an understanding that God’s love does not mean freedom from pain, but a sharing of that pain that can help him forgive and help make his spirit whole.

Some believers will dismiss this as “comfort food Christianity.” The Son actually says that religion is too much work. “I don’t want slaves; I want friends,” and he himself is “not exactly a Christian.” Papa tells him, “I can work incredible goodness out of unspeakable tragedy, but that does not mean I orchestrate the tragedies.”

But its idea that God loves us enough to reach out to every one of us in our the way we are best able to understand is genuinely touching. The insights Sam reaches about forgiveness and healing could be arrived at via psychotherapy or a number of other ways, but for this man — and this audience, the message is meaningful and touching, and a good reminder that patience and forgiveness are always worth making time for, and that every act of kindness changes the universe.

Parents should know that this movie concerns the brutal kidnapping and murder of a child, with images of her bloodied dress and dead body, a gun and possible attempted suicide, as well as depictions of wife and child abuse and alcoholism.

Family discussion: Why is it important to learn to forgive, even when the transgression is evil? How did each member of the Trinity teach Mack a different lesson?

If you like this, try: “What Dreams May Come” and “Henry Poole is Here”

Before I Fall

Posted on March 2, 2017 at 5:53 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving drinking, sexuality, bullying, some violent images, and language - all involving teens
Profanity:	Some strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Fatal accident, suicide
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 3, 2017

Who would not like to go back in time to correct a mistake? Can you correct a mistake without making it worse?

Lauren Oliver’s debut novel Before I Fall is a bittersweet “Groundhog Day” story about a pretty, popular high school senior named Sam (“Everybody Wants Some!!’s” Zoey Deutch) who lives her last day over and over until she figures out why.

Sam wakes up on “Cupid Day” (her school’s version of Valentine’s Day), happy, confident, and looking forward to the day ahead. Her best friend Lindsay (“Paper Towns'” Halston Sage) is picking her up and at school she is expecting her boyfriend Rob to have red roses delivered to her in class. And that evening, she and Rob have planned to have sex for the first time. Everything seems to be coming together just as she wants it.

She barely acknowledges her parents (yes, that is “Flashdance’s” Jennifer Beals as her mother) as she flies out the door. When her little sister runs after Sam with her gloves, instead of thanking her, Sam barks, “Don’t touch my things!” Lindsay picks up their other two friends, and the movie really captures the wild swings between professing total love and devotion and mildly trashing and topping each other that is teengirlspeak.

At school, the lesson is about the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to keep pushing a huge rock up a hill, never getting it over the top before it rolls back down. But no one is really paying attention and the class is interrupted by the delivery of the Cupid’s Day roses. She receives the red roses Rob sent her — after she reminded him — with a note that is more jaunty than romantic. And then there is a special rose from an old friend, who tells her he is having a party that night. She barely acknowledges him. And she does not even notice a sad and angry girl named Juliet (Elena Kampouris) intently working on a charcoal drawing until they are all in the cafeteria, when Lindsay taunts her. “Remind me why we hate Juliet?” Sam asks, but does not really pay attention to the answer. She is more bored by it than ashamed of it.

She does end up at the party, where Rob gets sloppy drunk and Juliet confronts the girls who have been mean to her, including Sam. Later that night, they learn that Juliet has committed suicide. And then Sam wakes up and it is Cupid Day all over again.

At first, she is frustrated and angry at reliving the same day over and over and over. She exploits the freedom from consequences but it is not fun; it is empty. Finally, she begins to pay attention to the people around her and begins to understand what she has to do.

Deutch ably handles her most challenging role so far, showing us Sam’s thoughtfulness, even in her most self-absorbed moments. The small details of her different approaches to each day keep us aware of exactly where she is on her path to greater understanding. Each day may seem the same to Sam, but for us Deutch makes them different as she passes through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She makes us share her sense of loss, but also her understanding as a reminder of a time she was a hero makes her willing to locate that in herself once more.

Parents should know that this movie includes teen drinking, bullying, strong language including crude sexual references, suicide, and a fatal accident.

Family discussion: If you could live today over again, what would you change? Why didn’t Sam pay attention to Kent and Juliet before? Who is your hero? Whose hero are you?

If you like this, try: “If I Stay,” “About Time,” and “Restless”

The Sense of an Ending

Posted on February 27, 2017 at 8:27 am

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Preschool
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, a violent image, sexuality and brief strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Suicides
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 10, 2017

Life is messy. Stories are our way of cleaning it up to help us try to make sense of it. Some of those stories are in books or movies, but most of those stories are just the editing each of us does all the time in telling ourselves and others who we are. Whether it is explaining to a traffic cop why you should not get a ticket or the difference between the “how we met” story of a couple who are still together and one who has split up, or living in a version of Lake Woebegone, “where all the children are above average,” all of us burnish the truth a little to make ourselves feel better and look better.

Julian Barnes’ award-winning novel The Sense of an Ending is the story of a older man who has to rethink the stories he has told himself and realign his understanding of his life. On screen, the delicacy of the performances stands in for the lyricism of his prose.

Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) is semi-retired, the owner of a store that sells vintage cameras, and kind of semi-married, with a warm, companionable relationship with his lawyer ex-wife, Margaret (Harriet Walter, with a voice like a dry martini). Their daughter Susie (“Downton Abbey’s” Michelle Dockery) loves her dad, but finds him exasperating. She is pregnant, and says that her child will call him “Mudge,” for curmudgeon.

The camera store is significant. The vintage cameras are superbly crafted and in some ways better than digital cameras, but they are expensive and complicated and considered obsolete by most people. Tony identifies with the underappreciated quality of the instruments of precision and gets some satisfaction with being out of step with modern technology and mores.

But his romanticized view of the past is put into sharper focus (those cameras again) when he gets a letter about a bequest from a woman he had not seen since he was in his 20’s, when he was dating a woman named Veronica, and visited her family. After he and Veronica broke up, she dated his close friend Adrian, who later committed suicide. Now Veronica’s mother has left him Adrian’s journal, but that raises many questions: Why did she want him to have it? Where did she get it?

And where is it? Her letter says it is enclosed, but it is not. Tony could let it go, but he stubbornly insists on seeing what it is, without considering where it might lead.

We go back in time, the moments and even the gestures mirroring the present as Tony explores the past and reconsiders many of his most fundamental assumptions about how he has lived his life. Veronica (now played with quiet fury by Charlotte Rampling) will not let him to have the journal. Instead she gives him something else, a letter that will make Tony confront one of his most painful and shameful experiences and open up to his ex-wife as he never has before.

The honesty of story’s portrayal of the foolish and selfish mistakes we make and the hurt they can inflict on people around us is tempered by the film’s tenderness toward its characters and the sensitivity of the performances, especially Broadbent and Walter. It judges them less than Tony is pushed to judge himself, and that is why it is so touching.

Parents should know that this movie includes two suicides, some violence, strong language, sexual references and a situation, and tense confrontations.

Family discussion: Why did Victoria’s mother want Tony to have Adrian’s journal? Why was Tony wrong about Victoria’s brother? Why did he forget about the letter?

If you like this, try: “The Remains of the Day”

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Based on a book Drama Movies -- format

Fifty Shades Darker

Posted on February 9, 2017 at 5:19 pm

Ibsen had it right in “A Doll’s House.” When his heroine walked out and slammed the door at the end of the play, he left it there. She didn’t come back in two sequels. Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, wearing bangs, the universal signifier of adorkability), despite her name, is not that resolute. In “Fifty Shades of Gray” she was a shy college student introduced to the Red Room of Pain and the world of bondage and submission by fabulously handsome and fabulously wealthy and fabulously troubled Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). As he explains to her, it is the submissive who has the power in the relationship. The dominant inflicts pain but the submissive sets the limits. Ana set the ultimate limit by walking out on Christian at the end of the first film. But just days later, he comes to a photography show featuring six huge portraits of Ana, buys them all because he doesn’t want other people gawking at her. The woman who just left him nevertheless consents to let him take her to dinner (“because I’m hungry”), and then invites him to dinner. After first insisting there would be no sex and then that they need to take it slowly, of course they end up having sex, and pretty soon he’s spanking her again, but only after she asks for it.

Maybe if you turned off the sound, it all might seem less dull and silly, like the kind of high-end perfume commercials they only show before Christmas and Valentine’s Day. With the sound on, it alternates between syrupy pop songs and clunky dialogue. Fans of the books may enjoy seeing the characters on screen but those unfamiliar with what I will generously call the storyline will find it more like a random series of what I will generously call events. Putting the book on screen reveals its essential flimsiness, its origins as “Twilight” fan fiction showing through. As with “Twilight,” this is the story of a girl whose purity of heart is so powerful she is able to tame the ultimate predator. Like “Twilight,” he is surrounded by a large, complicated, powerful family, most of whose members should have been jettisoned for the movie version because they do not add anything. Unlike “Twilight,” which was explicitly envisioned as a romance without sex (until it wasn’t), this is a shipper, with lots and lots of sex. While there is much talk about a “vanilla” sex life, there is also a lot of naughty stuff with fancy lingerie (where did it disappear to between the apartment and the party?) and sex toys (“That is NOT going in my butt!” Ana says merrily at the sight of a pretty set of Ben Wa balls).

While both Ana and Christian are supposed to be driven for professional achievement, they do not spend much time actually working. Ana loves her job as an assistant to Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson) the head of fiction for a small independent publisher. About half an hour after we realize he is a scummy guy who is trying to have sex with her, she realizes he is a scummy guy who is trying to have sex with her. So of course Christian has him fired and Ana gets his job. Seriously, I have seen six year olds playing with Barbies who came up with more believable workplace storylines.

Meanwhile Ana is bothered by Christian’s past, including an abused drug addict mother who died of an overdose, a suicidal ex-sub who is obsessed with him, and the older woman who seduced him when he was 15 and introduced him to the pleasures of pain (Kim Basinger, herself a pioneer of pretty, soft-focus soft-core S&M in “9 1/2 Weeks”). And Ana is trying to get Christian to tell her about his past, which begins with her drawing a line with red lipstick around his scarred but super-jacked chest to delineate what she should and should not touch. She apparently redraws it on him every day because it is still there days later, no smudges.

Sam Taylor-Johnson brought some humor and a woman’s perspective to the first chapter. She also streamlined it to remove irrelevant and distracting details, left in here for no reason. How does Ana not know Christian’s housekeeper and why is there a scene of their first meeting? Also, there are a lot of lacy little underpants in this movie, mostly being removed. There is also a situation where a lot of misery would have been avoided with a phone call or text message and yet it doesn’t happen, for no reason other than prolonging the agony.

This sequel, reportedly with more involvement by the author, is lackluster fan service. I’d even call it vanilla.

NOTE: Stay through the beginning of the credits for a teaser of part three, coming out in time for Valentine’s Day 2018.

Parents should know that this movie includes very explicit sexual references and situations, sexual harassment, extensive nudity, sex toys and issues of bondage and submission, very strong language, peril including a gun and a helicopter crash, and spouse and child abuse.

Family discussion: Why did Christian tell Ana not to touch his chest? Why did Ana care so much about her job?

If you like this, try; “Fifty Shades of Gray” and “9 1/2 Weeks”