Laggies

Posted on October 30, 2014 at 5:58 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, some sexual material and teen partying
Profanity:	Strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Adult and teen drinking and drunkenness, drunk driving
Violence/ Scariness:	Car crash, tense emotional confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 31, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00OUNNWPS

Lynn Shelton is known for writing and directing small, intimate, independent films with a lot of improvised dialogue (“Humpday,””My Sister’s Sister,” “Touchy Feely”), often using the same small group of actors. With “Laggies,” she moves seamlessly to working with a more conventional screenplay, written by someone else (novelist Andrea Seigel), and with a higher-profile Hollywood cast, but the film maintains a nice indie sensibility that lets the characters speak for themselves. For example, the only time the word “laggie” is used, it is not directed at any of the main characters and it is never explained, but we get the point. The laggie is Megan (Keira Knightley), who has lagged behind her close-knit group of friends from high school. Ten years later, all of them are established in careers and relationships. You can tell they all have mortgages and 401(k)s. But Megan, who has an MA in counseling, is currently working as a “sign girl” for her accountant father (Jeff Garlin), standing on the sidewalk twirling an arrow sign advertising his firm. She is living with Anthony (Mark Webber), the boyfriend she has been with since sophomore year of high school.

At a bridal shower for her friend Allison (Ellie Kemper), her friends find her joking immature and she finds them stuffy. And at Allison’s wedding (with a hilariously pretentious First Dance), two developments shake Megan badly. Anthony proposes. And Megan sees her father kissing (and more) Allison’s mother. Megan leaves the wedding and meets four teenagers hanging out in front of a convenience store. They ask her to buy some booze for them and she reasons that since someone did it for her, she should do it for them. “It’s a rite of passage,” she reassures herself.

With no interest in returning to her messy life, she spends some time with the kids. They think she is cool, and she likes being thought of that way. Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) gives her a phone and asks her to stay in touch. When Megan gets back to her apartment, she accepts Anthony’s proposal and agrees to elope with him in a week. Before they go, she tells him, she wants to attend the week-long personal development seminar that made such a difference to him (he learned that his spirit animal was a shark and that made him realize he had to start making decisions in his life because if a shark doesn’t move, it dies).

She has no intention of attending the seminar. She just needs time to think. And then Annika calls and asks her to pretend to be her mother for a parent conference at school. Megan puts up her hair and fakes her way through. And then she asks Annika if she can stay at her house for a week without her father finding out. One of the many nice touches in this movie is that of course he finds out immediately. This is not a sitcom. The set-up may be artificial, but the characters have real-life reactions.

Annika’s father is Craig (Sam Rockwell), a divorce lawyer and single dad. Annika’s mother left them years ago and he spends his days working with unhappy, angry couples. Annika thought she could hide Megan because Sam was supposed to be at a mixer, but he comes home early. I loved the detail that his name tag was on his arm and his conversation with Megan about how women at mixers like that tap him on the arm to show that they are listening. There are lies, and excruciating confessions, and lessons learned, but the progress is organic as everyone from the school counselor who thinks Megan is Annika’s mother to the real mother (the always-excellent Gretchen Moll) to Megan’s old friends from high school and even Craig seem to be carrying a message about growing up even though you don’t have it all figured out. Shelton has enough confidence in the story, the characters, and her outstanding performers to avoid the easy exaggerations of the genre and show us real people who are essentially decent struggling to find the courage to move forward, even when they don’t know where that will take them.

Parents should know that this film includes strong language, drinking by adults and teenagers, drunk driving, car crash, sexual references, some crude, and non-explicit situations, and infidelity.

Family discussion: What animal would you pick to represent your spirit? How can you tell when you’ve outgrown your friends?

If you like this, try: “Girl Most Likely” and Sam Rockwell films like “Galaxy Quest” and “The Way Way Back”

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Drama Movies -- format

Birdman (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Posted on October 23, 2014 at 5:59 pm

Filmed as though it was almost entirely one long, stunning, audacious, breathless and breathtaking shot, “Birdman” (subtitled “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”) explodes with ideas and visions, adopting the language of dreams to explore and upend the very idea of storytelling.

Michael Keaton plays a character in superficial ways like Keaton himself. He is Riggan, an actor who has undertaken at least three impossible tasks at once. He has adapted the acclaimed but notoriously difficult and difficult to adapt Raymond Carver collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, into a Broadway play. The translation of stories whose art is in the spareness and lyricism of the prose into a theatrical production is at best ambitious, at worst impossible. But Riggan is not just the writer. He is also the director and star. He has put his last dime into the show. If it fails, he loses everything. And there is more. His estranged and angry daughter Sam (Emma Stone), just out of rehab, is working as his assistant so he can keep an eye on her and perhaps repair their relationship. One of the actresses (Andrea Riseborough), may be pregnant with his child. And a piece of equipment has just fallen on the head of one of the actors. They are about to go into previews and he cannot perform.

Riggan and Jake, his best friend/lawyer/producer (a slimmed down and pitch-perfect Zach Galifianakis), throw out (real-life) names of possible actor replacements. The best of their generation: Michael Fassbender, Jeremy Renner, Robert Downey, Jr — but they are all in Hollywood playing superheroes. Riggan knows something about that. He played a superhero called Birdman in a series of wildly popular films. He had money, fame, success, and the kind of power all of that brings. But now he has an ex-wife (Amy Ryan), an angry daughter, a possible new child on the way, and he is risking his future on the longest of longshots, a serious play in the high-pressure world of Broadway theater, between the vicious barbs of dyspeptic, despotic critics and audiences who would rather be at the latest musical based on a movie.

Riggan and Jake argue about what to do next. The understudy? No! “It’s not like the perfect actor is just going to knock on the door!” Cue knock on the door. It is Lesley, the non-possibly pregnant actress in the show (Naomi Watts), volunteering her boyfriend, Michael (Edward Norton), who is available (he just got fired or quit or both) and wants to do it. He is a Broadway darling, a Serious Actor with a lot of fans. Jake is ecstatic. This will sell a lot of tickets.

Michael shows up with the script already memorized and able to give a dazzling performance that pushes Riggan to do his best. But Michael is also narcissistic and arrogant. His relationship with Lesley is deteriorating and he is hitting on Sam. Worse, he is sending her mixed signals, making her feel even more insecure and putting her recovery at risk. Riggan is under even more pressure externally and internally as a voice — his Birdman persona? His younger self? His future self? — is urging him, taunting him, distracting him.

It is a high wire act, the endless, dreamlike take festooned with farce-style slamming doors, fantasy interludes with monsters and explosions, sharp satire, poignant drama, and across the board performances of superb precision. As sheer, no-net, bravura filmmaking it is pure wonder, and if it raises more questions than it answers, at least they are the big questions of meaning, identity, work, love, art, and, of course, superheroes.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, explicit sexual references and situation, gun violence, drinking, smoking, and drug use.

Family discussion: How much of what we see in this film is “real” and how can you tell? What do you think is happening in the final scene?

If you like this, try: “All That Jazz” and Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories”

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Fury

Posted on October 16, 2014 at 5:58 pm

History, Winston Churchill reminds us, is written by the victors. But sometimes those victors have some second thoughts, more complex thoughts, about the nature of heroism, patriotism, and the spoils (in both senses) of war. And sometimes people want to comment on contemporary conflicts but find that it is more compelling in an historical framework. That is how we get “Fury,” a fictional story set in the last days of WWII, with Brad Pitt as “Wardaddy” (everyone gets a “war name”), the leader of a tank team pushing through an increasingly desperate Germany.

“Fury” is what is painted on the gun barrel of the tank. Death, both German and Allied Forces, is everywhere. Our forces, we are told at the beginning, are “outgunned and out-armored,” with “staggering losses.”

The first person we see looks like a cowboy hero, a lone figure on a horse, silhouetted against the sun. He is not a cowboy and he is not a hero. He is about to be killed, and not in a Hollywood, glamorized, bang bang way.

“It will end, soon,” Wardaddy tells Norman (Logan Lerman), his fresh-faced and terrified new driver, a kid fresh from the typing pool who has never been in a tank or fired a gun in combat. “But before it does, a lot more people have to die.”

I’m in favor of movies that show war as brutal, morally compromised, and horrific. Ultimately, though, it has to have more to say than that. It is a movie, a work of drama, and if it is not going to be about something bigger than how terrible war is, it runs the risk of making the very horrors it depicts turn into entertainment and have exactly the opposite impact from the original intention. Steven Spielberg did it with “Saving Private Ryan,” making both the personal story of the individual characters and the larger story about sacrifice and honor compelling and meaningful.

But writer/director David Ayer, whose previous films included the pulpish law-and-order “SWAT,” “Sabotage,” and “End of Watch,” is no Spielberg (though this film borrows a lot from “Saving Private Ryan”). This film tells us very little about history, war, or the human experience.

Parents should know that this film includes very intense and graphic wartime violence with many characters injured and killed, executions, disturbing images, sexual assault, looting, constant very strong and crude language, drinking, smoking

Family discussion: How does this differ from other portrayals of WWII combat? What are the different ways the men in this movie cope with the moral compromises of war? Why did the men choose “war names” and what did they signify?

If you like this, try: WWII dramas “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Big Red One” and the Israeli film “Beaufort”

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Action/Adventure Drama War

St. Vincent

Posted on October 16, 2014 at 5:29 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 For mature thematic material including sexual content, alcohol and tobacco use, and for language
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, alcohol abuse
Violence/ Scariness:	Car accident, stroke, sad death, bullies, fighting
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 17, 2014

A crude, inconsiderate, bitter slacker — Bill Murray could play that in his sleep. And it would be pretty good. But he doesn’t. Bill Murray gives a beautiful, wise, complex performance as Vincent, an angry old man who drinks too much, smokes too much, gambles too much, pays a pregnant stripper for sex, and seems to get his only enjoyment from trying to make the rest of the world as miserable as he is.

Just as Vincent runs out of money, new neighbors move in next door. It is Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), a single mom, and her son Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher). Maggie, who just left her husband and is working double shifts to pay for Oliver’s private school, is so desperate she is willing to pay Vincent to be Oliver’s babysitter. He is completely inappropriate in every way, taking Oliver to the racetrack and a bar and introducing him to a “lady of the night,” pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts as Daka). And yet, he is able to provide Oliver with support he does not get anywhere else, especially when it comes to dealing with the school bully (Dario Barosso). Vincent’s acerbic take on the world is a bracing change of pace from the chaos and sadness in Oliver’s family and the feeling of being an outsider he gets from being a Jew in a Catholic school, even one with a sympathetic priest for a teacher (Chris O’Dowd) and classmates that include a Buddhist and an atheist. Oliver is in many ways the only real adult in the story, wise and unflappable as the grown-ups around him fail him and each other.

Writer-director Ted Melfi spend the first half of the movie showing us the pressure Vincent is under and his inability to deal with it. He is overdrawn at the bank and he owes money to a bookie (Terrence Howard). His house and car are falling apart and he is, too. He is callous, selfish, and rude. But then we begin to learn that he is capable of great kindness and devotion. He makes regular visits to Sandy (an exquisite performance by Donna Mitchell). She is a beautiful woman with loss of memory who lives in an assisted living facility. He does her laundry and dons a white jacket and stethoscope because she is comfortable thinking he is a doctor. Clearly, he is much more to her, but she does not remember and he does not want to rattle her. He also has a large white cat and seems to be very fond of it.

Meanwhile, Maggie is under a lot of pressure, too. When she gets called into the school after Oliver uses his new lessons from Vincent to hit the bully in the nose, she dissolves into tears. And Oliver’s father is suing her for custody, made much more difficult when he gives the court evidence of Vincent’s poor judgment as a babysitter.

It all comes together a little too sweetly. Even the bully and the grouchy stripper get happy endings. Oliver, while beautifully played by Lieberher, is too good to be true. But Murray’s performance, especially as Vincent recovers from an illness, is never anything less than real, brave, and beautifully observed, and McCarthy, in a largely dramatic role, is outstanding as well. This is a promising debut from Melfi and a quiet little gem.

Parents should know that this film is the story of a man who subjects a child to inappropriate behavior and experiences. It includes very strong and crude language for a PG-13, a stripper and prostitute, an explicit sexual situation, a child exposed to drinking, gambling, and sex work, and a custody battle with references to infidelity.

Family discussion: Who would you pick as your “saint?” Why was Vincent so nice to Sandy and so mean to everyone else?

If you like this, try: “Little Miss Sunshine”

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Drama Movies -- format

Dear White People

Posted on October 16, 2014 at 5:25 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, sexual content and drug use
Profanity:	Very strong language including racist terms
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 17, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	February 2, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00OMCCJIS

Before I turn to whitesplaining this film, I will begin by suggesting that you read what Aisha Harris at Slate and what my friends and fellow critics Travis Hopson and Stephen Boone have to say first. If I did not have enough humility before seeing the film about my ability to provide some insight into a movie about racism, the best evidence of the power of the film’s message is that I have more now — and that I recognize it might still not be be enough. I liked the film very much and want to encourage people to see it, so I am going to weigh in with some thoughts and hope that if they come across as disrespectful or ignorant, it will lead to some good conversations and, I hope, to greater understanding.

The focus is on four African-American students at an Ivy League school called Winchester University. Sam White (a biting but layered performance by standout Tessa Thompson) is the host of “Dear White People,” a controversial radio program with stinging, provocative commentary along the lines of “Dear white people: The official number of black friends you are required to have has now been raised to two. And your weed man does not count.” Coco (Teyonah Parris) is an ambitious woman who wants to be selected for a new reality TV series, even if that means creating a fabricated backstory and becoming more confrontational. Troy (Brandon P Bell) is the handsome, accomplished BMOC (and son of the dean) who says he has never experienced prejudice and is under a lot of pressure from his father to succeed. And Lionel (Tyler James Williams) is something of a loner because he feels he does not fit in with any of the rigid categories of the campus hierarchical taxonomy. He is invited by the editor of the school newspaper to go undercover to write about race relations at the school.

Each of these characters’ identities and conflicts is represented in their hair. Sam has tight, controlled coils. Coco has long, straight hair. Troy’s hair is cut very close to the bone. And Lionel’s hair is a marvel of untamed frizz that seems to be a character of its own. Each of the characters will face challenges to his or her carefully constructed identity, and all will be reflected in changes of hairstyle.

The dorm that had previously been all-black is now integrated following a race-blind room assignment policy. Sam takes on Troy in an election for head of house, never anticipating that she might win. But she does. This leads to some changes, including a confrontation with the arrogant frat-bro Kurt (Kyle Gallner), son of the white President of the university and leader of the school’s prestigious humor publication. Kurt is the kind of guy who expects to be allowed to eat wherever he likes, even if he is not a member of the house. He also explains that we live in a post-racial world because Obama is President. And he thinks it is a great idea to plan a “ghetto” party, with white students dressing up as gangsta caricatures.

Just to remind us that, while the movie may have a heightened sensibility for satirical purposes, it is not outside the realm of reality, the closing credits feature a sobering series of photos from real “ghetto” parties held on campuses across the country.

It is refreshing, provocative, and powerfully topical, respecting and updating the tradition of “School Daze” and “Higher Learning.” It deals not only with questions of race but with broader questions of gender, class, identity, and the way we construct our personas, especially in our late teens and early 20’s. Writer/director Justin Simien has created a sharp satire with an unexpectedly tender heart.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language including racial epithets, sexual references and situations, drinking, drug use, and tense confrontations about race, class, and gender.

Family discussion: Where do the people in this movie get their ideas about race, gender, and class? Which character surprised you the most and why? Do you agree with what Sam said about racism?

If you like this, try: “School Daze” and “Higher Learning”