Posted on July 14, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Happy Bastille Day! This is a great time to watch the classic “A Tale of Two Cities,” based on the book about the French Revolution by Charles Dickens.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJXrkhnn3BQ
Posted on July 10, 2014 at 6:00 pm
All hail Caesar!
The intelligence-enhanced ape from Rise of the Planet of the Apes takes center stage in this sequel, which begins ten years after the last film. The virus we saw infecting the human population has now wiped out almost all human life. The assorted apes, led by Caesar, have asserted their primacy over other animals. In the opening scene, we see them hunting with spears they have crafted, killing a bear, and riding on horses. They live in homes they have constructed from logs, communicate — mostly via sign language — teach their children the alphabet in school, and have an organized society, with Caesar as their leader. They demonstrate loyalty and tenderness. They adorn themselves; Caesar’s mate wears a small crown.
Ceasar is played by the brilliant motion-capture actor/artist Andy Serkis and the CGI work of the geniuses at Weta Digital. The seamless integration of the CGI characters and the human characters and the subtlety of the apes’ eyes and facial expressions brings us straight into the story, underscored by the immersive 3D. It is dramatic, not stuntish, with the possible exception of some spear-throwing toward the screen.
The film recalls old-school cowboys-and-Indians westerns, with the apes riding into battle on horses and the humans and their armory holed up in the ruins of San Francisco like it is Fort Apache. Then the apes get the guns, and everything escalates fast. The film wisely gives both groups of primates a range of characters, some wise and trustworthy, some bigoted and angry. Both species have to learn that respect has to be based on character and actions, not on genetics. The division is not between man and ape but between those who can envision a future with cooperation and trust and those who cannot.
There are some thoughtful details. The destroyed city tells the story of a decade of unthinkable loss and also of great courage. A dropped sketchbook conveys information that in a world without mass communications is revelatory. A long-unheard CD plays The Band and we see the humans react, thinking of where they were the last time they heard it and what access to electricity could mean for them now. The humans have the advantage of knowing how to create and use power; they also have the disadvantage of needing it.
In the midst of the battle, there is a quiet moment when a small mixed group hides out together in a location with a lot of resonance from the previous film. It lends a solemnity to the story, even a majesty, that gives it weight. Even those who seem from our perspective to be making decisions that are disastrously wrong do so for reasons we can understand. The action is compelling but it is the ideas behind them that hold us.
Parents should know that this film includes constant peril and violence, post-apocalyptic themes and images, many characters injured and killed, guns, fire, drinking, smoking, and some strong language.
Family discussion: Why were there so many different opinions within both the ape and the human communities? How did they choose their governing structure? Why didn’t Carver want to listen to Ellie’s explanation of the source of the virus?
If you like this, try: the original “Apes” movies to compare not just the stories but the technology used by the filmmakers
Posted on June 19, 2014 at 6:00 pm
Winston Churchill famously said that history is written by the victors. In movie terms, that means that when you see the names of just two of the original Four Seasons listed as the film’s producers, it is clear we are going to get their side of the story.
This film, like the Tony Award-winning musical, is the “VH1 Behind the Music”-style story of four guys from the scrappy streets of New Jersey who grow up with only three possible career paths: the military, the mob, and somehow achieving fame. The first two have a high risk of getting killed. The last seems unobtainable. But the four guys, brought together in part by a fifth guy who took the fame option, Oscar-winner Joe Pesci (played in the film by Joseph Russo), became one of the most successful pop acts of all time, with number one hits through the 60’s-70’s.
Clint Eastwood, a composer himself, who made a fine musical biopic about Charlie Parker (“Bird”), has taken on this story, beautifully performed, but too focused on the lives of the group’s members, with very little about what it was that made them stars, or even what the music meant to them aside from a way to get out of New Jersey and support their families.
Tony Award-winner John Lloyd Young plays the undisputed star of The Four Seasons, Frankie Valli, whose pure-toned, remarkably elastic three-octave range was the pure aural joy amidst the sweet harmonies of the Four Seasons sound. It was that voice that persuaded 15-year-old Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), already the composer of a hit single (“Who Wears Short Shorts”), to join the group. A handshake deal between Gaudio and Valli continues to this day.
Eastwood and cinematographer Tom Stern give the movie a bleached-out look that gives the skin tones of the cast the consistency of putty. This is intended to express the grittiness of the New Jersey community, but it just looks drab. And it undermines the points that Eastwood and the Jersey boys themselves try to make about their rough-and-tumble environment when the kindly cop knows everyone in the community so well he remembers Frankie’s curfew. Even the mob boss (a deliciously droll performance by Christopher Walken) is so cute and cuddly that he cries openly when Frankie sings a sentimental number. And he’s there to step in when another mob guy is less understanding.
The predictable temptations and stresses of life on the road are predictably laid before us. Some day, I hope someone will make a movie about a famous guy that won’t have the screaming fight with the wife about how he’s never home. This is not that film. And there are the struggles for leadership, the poor judgment with money, also resolved the Jersey way. We briefly see decisions that led to iconic details. After several other names, the group picked “The Four Seasons” from a sign at a bowling alley that would not hire them to perform. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” came from a Billy Wilder movie they saw on television. But we never get a real sense of the era, of how they fit into the culture musically, how they interacted with the fans, how they were affected by experiencing the world outside of New Jersey.
It is absorbing, largely because of excellent performances by all four of the Jersey Boys, but uneven, largely because the script assumes that we will be as fascinated with the relationships of the four men as they are themselves. At the end, Frankie says that for him the high point was finding their sound, just four guys harmonizing under a street light. That’s a moment we never get to experience. The only time we feel their pleasure in performing is in what has to be seen as the curtain call number, an odd piece of theatricality that, after two and a half hours of running time, finally shows us what made the Four Seasons so thrilling to experience.
Parents should know that this film has very strong language including crude sexual references, a non-explicit sexual situation, smoking, drinking, off-screen drug abuse, and references to mob activity.
Family discussion: Why does Frankie take responsibility for what Tony did? Why did he leave his daughter with her mother? What do you think was their high point and why did Frankie pick the one he did?
If you like this, try: other musician biopics like “Ray” and “Walk the Line” and the music of the Four Seasons. And to get a glimpse of Frankie Valli today, look for him in a small role in Rob Reiner’s “And So It Goes” with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton.
Posted on June 10, 2014 at 8:00 am
B-| Lowest Recommended Age: | High School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for language and brief drug use |
| Profanity: | Very strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Alcohol abuse, smoking, brief drug use |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Very sad themes of illness and loss |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | June 13, 2014 |
An outstanding cast, a weighty subject, and the sincerest of intentions are almost enough to make up for an undercooked, stuntish, and stagey script in this story about a man who decides to die and the family he leaves behind.
The always-brilliant Richard Jenkins plays Robert, who has been fighting cancer for twelve years, eleven and a half longer than his doctors expected. We get a glimpse of him in a flashback, superbly confident and capable as he crisply guides a boardroom through the details of a complicated transaction and then leaves them behind to take his adored and adoring 14-year-old son Jonathan to lunch.
Garrett Hedlund plays Jonathan at 26 and we first see him getting in trouble on an airplane for smoking in the lavatory, and then persuading a flight attendant not to have him arrested with charm — and a request for sympathy because he is on his way to be with his dying father. He is on his way to be with his dying father, but we get the idea that he has been using that as an excuse for a long time.
This visit is different, though. While Jonathan and his mother Rachel (the lovely Anne Archer) and lawyer sister (“Downton Abbey’s” Jessica Brown-Findlay) tell Robert that he can get through this as he has so many times before. But he says, “I fought for 12 years. I’ve got nothing.” He wants to be taken off the drugs so he can see his family clearly. And then he wants them to let him go.
He has a surprise for them. He has given away his money. “I love you both and I raised a couple of spoiled brats,” he tells them.
It takes about a day to sort this all out, and a lot happens. Some of it is touching, as when Hedlund explains why he has stayed away: “It’s hard to love someone with an expiration date stamped on his forehead.” And he did not want to come home until he could be proud of what he had accomplished. Jonathan has to admit that he is the one who is not ready. Rachel is devoted but shows some asperity when no one acknowledges the challenges she faces as the caretaker.
But too much seems artificial. Jessica Barden, like many of the other actors, does far more than it is fair to expect with an underwritten role. In her case it is the plucky dying teenager who just wants to know what one of the normal pleasures of adolescence might feel like, which gives Jonathan an opportunity to duck out on his family as a personal Make-A-Wish, with a chorus of cute sick kids cheering him on. There is a sort of seder in the hospital chapel and an impassioned oral argument. Amy Adams shows up as Jonathan’s ex and Terrence Howard and Jennifer Hudson are the doctor and nurse. All three are sensitive performances in underwritten parts. Issues and hostilities between family members appear and disappear without the underlying emotional heft necessary to provide a reason for the changes. When Robert says he is proud of Jonathan, it is hard to understand why. And yet Jenkins and Hedlund find something in the moment that makes it matter. Writer/director Andrew Levitas shows promise, but he needs to trust his audience a little more.
Parents should know that this film deals with issues of death and dying, including assisted suicide, and it includes smoking, drinking, drugs, sexual references, and strong language.
Family discussion: Who should decide when someone should be allowed to die? Have you discussed your wishes with your family?
If you like this, try: Two Weeks
Posted on June 5, 2014 at 6:00 pm
John Green’s best-selling novel, The Fault in Our Stars
Remember the hospital scene in “Terms of Endearment?” This one will make you cry more. But it is sad, not depressing.
Woodley plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, whose lungs have been badly compromised and who cannot breathe without a nasal cannula attached to an oxygen tank. Pushed by her mother to attend a support group that meets “literally in the heart of Jesus,” with a guitar-strumming leader who is well-intentioned but unwilling to acknowledge the direness of the circumstances, Hazel catches the eye of lanky Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort, and yes, he played her brother in “Divergent”).
She’s the nerdy girl, he’s the basketball-player and cool guy, which is the classic high school movie romantic setup for opposite attraction except in this case what they have in common is more important than what table they would sit at in the school cafeteria. He is not playing basketball anymore because his leg was amputated due to cancer. What brings them together is not the cancer but the shared worldview they developed as a result of the cancer, with few illusions but an openness to hope, if not hope for a longer life, at least hope for a better life. Hazel worries that she is “a grenade,” that the most significant impact her life will have is the devastating grief she leaves behind.
Hazel and Augustus exchange favorite books. His is a novelization of a video game. Hers is an ambitious, literary novel by a reclusive author named Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe, superb in a tricky role). The book ends abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, when its main character dies, and Hazel is overcome with curiosity about what happens to the characters she left behind. For all they have lost, they still have “cancer perqs,” privileges that come with the combination of pity and guilt felt by people around them. Augustus takes advantage of his to help Hazel meet Van Houten. But it is in the other parts of the journey that they find more important answers and better questions as well.
The characters in the movie like to say, “it’s a metaphor,” but their own story is a metaphor about the issues we all grapple with. Watching people whose biggest problem should be what to wear to the prom confront the problem of making sense of life, finding meaning, risking intimacy is a heightened version for dramatic purposes. But these are the core challenges for all of us, whether our lives will last for 16 years or 116. These teenagers just do not have the luxury the rest of us do of being in denial about how little time there is.
Elgort is marvelous, but then he gets to say swoon-worthy lines like “You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.” On the other hand, he has the challenge of grandiloquent lines like. “It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you,” and he says them beautifully. Woodley is in every way (except literally) the heart of the film, and once again delivers a performance of endless sensitivity, even with a cannula in her nose. Fans of the book will find key scenes like the egging of a car and the ultimate romantic restaurant date exactly as they envisioned it. Even the trip to the Anne Frank house, which could have been heavy-handed, is handled well. Anne Frank is, in a way, the spiritual sister of Hazel and Augustus. Like them, she had to find meaning in the midst of devastation. As they walk through the hidden annex where she lived, her words of hope come out of tinny display speakers. And Hazel’s climb up the steep steps to see it is itself a “shout into the void.”
I like the way they call each other by their full names. Even though their time is limited, addressing each other with a touch of formality and grandeur is too important for short cuts. I like the intensity and honesty of their talks; anything less they know they do not have time for. The title comes from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The nobleman Cassius says to Brutus: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He is saying that it is we who determine how we live. But the line that I think of when I see this film is from poet Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote, “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
Parents should know that the theme of the film is teenagers with cancer. Many characters are very ill and there is a very sad death, as well as brief strong language, sexual references and situation, teen drinking and adult alcohol abuse.
Family discussion: What questions would you like to ask an author about a book you like? How should you choose who will hurt you? What makes some infinities larger than others?
If you like this, try: the book by John Green and the films “Harold and Maude” and “Restless”
