Meet Me in St. Louis

Posted on October 27, 2008 at 8:00 am

This episodic story of the Smith family in the St. Louis of 1903 is based on the memoirs of Sally Benson. Its pleasures are in the period detail, the glorious songs (including standards “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) and the loving and nostalgic look at a time of innocence and optimism, where a long-distance call was almost as thrilling as having the World’s Fair come to your very own city. We see the family over the course of a year, celebrating Halloween and Christmas, riding the ice truck in the summer and building snowmen in the winter. They face the prospect of having to leave St. Louis so that Mr. Smith can accept a promotion. They wonder whether the older girl’s two boyfriends will propose. They treat each other with great loyalty and affectionate tolerance. And then they live happily ever after.

The Smith’s older daughters are Rose (Lucille Bremer) and Esther (Judy Garland). Rose is attracted to Warren Sheffield, and a bit impatient because he has not proposed. Esther has decided to marry “the boy next door,” John Pruitt (Tom Drake), even though they have not yet met. When the girls have a party, their two little sisters (Joan Carroll and Margaret O’Brien as Agnes and Tootie Smith) creep downstairs. Tootie is allowed to do one song with Esther (the cakewalk “Under the Bamboo Tree”) before being sent back to bed. Esther asks John to help her turn out the gas lights before he leaves, to have some time alone with him. The next day, he joins her as she and her friends ride on the trolley, and when he catches up with them, she sings “The Trolly Song.” Later, Warren escorts a visiting out-of-town girl (June Lockhart) to another party, and Esther and Rose conspire to fill her dance card with the least appealing partners at the dance. When she is revealed to be so friendly and tactful that she gets Rose and Warren back together, Esther has to take all of her dances. Tootie is heartbroken about moving to New York, and while the rest of the family tries to hide it, they are, too. Mr. Smith gives up, they stay in St. Louis, and when the fair opens, they are there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ2Q8_P_msg

One of the movie’s most evocative scenes is Halloween, celebrated very differently in those days, but like today the one night of the year where children have the power to frighten the grown-ups. Agnes and Tootie dress up in rags and “kill” the people who answer the door by throwing flour at them. Director Minnelli skillfully shows how spooky and at the same time thrilling it is for the girls to be out after dark. When Tootie is successful at “killing” the grouchy neighbor, she is heralded by the other kids, and blissfully announces, “I’m the most horrible! I’m the most horrible!”

This is one of the most loving of all movie families. Everyone in it treats all of the other members with trust and affection, even, when it comes to Tootie, indulgence. They are interested in each other and take each other’s concerns seriously, whether it is the seasoning of a sauce or choice of a future spouse. Only the poor father is rather left out. He is not told about the long distance call, and no one is pleased with his promotion. But in a way, that is just a reflection of the family’s devotion to him and to the life they have together in St. Louis. And the lovely duet he sings with his wife, “You and I,” shows that it is their relationship that is the foundation of the family.

Minnelli began as an art director and designer, and his use of color is always fresh and fun — there isn’t another director in history who would have thought to put Esther in purple gloves for the trolley ride, but once you see it, you can’t imagine any other color.

Nim’s Island

Posted on August 6, 2008 at 8:00 am

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for mild adventure action and brief language.
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril, reference to loss of a parent, character who is scared of everything
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	April 4, 2008
Date Released to DVD:	August 4, 2008
Amazon.com ASIN:	B001APZMJI

A pair of heroines on opposite sides of the world team up in an eye-filling and heart-warming story from Walden Media, the latest in its series of fine films based on popular children’s literature.

Eleven year old Nim (Abigail Breslin of “Little Miss Sunshine”) and her marine biologist father, Jack (Gerard Butler), are the only human residents of a remote but idyllic South Pacific island. While Jack studies nanoplankton, Nim makes the entire island her school, with the animals as her teachers and her friends. Every few months, a supply boat brings another book by her favorite author, Alex Rover, an international man of adventure.
But Alex is really Alexandra (Jodie Foster), a writer so terrified of just about everything that she lives on canned soup, constantly sanitizes her hands, and cannot get far enough outside her front door to retrieve the mail. Alexandra has created a hero who is everything she is not – fearless and always eager to go where he has never been and try what he has never tried.

To get information for her new book, Alexandra emails Jack for details about a volcano he described in an article for National Geographic. But he is away for two days obtaining plankton samples, so Nim answers, thinking she is corresponding with the dashing Alex (also played by Butler , as envisioned by both Alexandra and Nim). By the time Alexandra realizes she is writing to an eleven-year-old, Jack is missing and Nim is alone on the island. And the woman who was terrified to walk four feet to the mailbox must go halfway around the world to help her new friend.
Husband and wife directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, seamlessly combine adventure, drama, comedy, and fantasy as Jack, Nim, and Alexandra have to confront their separate but often parallel fears and challenges. As Nim tightens the rope around her waist so that she can climb the volcano, Alexandra is tightening the belt of her robe and gathering her resolve to walk out the front door. All three of them find their determination tested and creativity challenged. And all find assistance from unexpected friends.

Nim is an enormously appealing heroine and it is especially welcome to have a story about a resourceful and courageous young girl. The film wisely makes her the center of the story in a way that young audiences will find empowering and Breslin’s unaffected interactions with the creatures and natural screen presence are a pleasure to watch.

Of the three characters, Nim is closest to the imaginary Alex Rover, confident and capable. She navigates the island by gliding on zip wires like a modern-day Tarzan. She not only swims with the sea lion; she teaches it to play soccer and boogie. She can fix the solar panels on the roof to get the electricity and satellite uplink back in working order, protect the newborn baby turtles from predators, rappel down the side of a volcano, and make a dinner out of mung beans and meal worms. When the island is invaded by a pirate-themed cruise ship bearing pina coladas, beach chairs, port-a-potties, and chubby Australian tourists, Nim and her animal friends set up a “Home Alone”-style series of booby-traps to scare them away.

Butler is fine as Nim’s fond, if distracted father and as the heroic Alex. And it is a treat to see Foster enjoying a comic turn in her first film for families since her Disney days, when she was Nim’s age, and shared the screen with an Oscar-winning star, Helen Hayes in “Candleshoe.” Here’s hoping when it is time for Breslin to pass on the torch to a young actress 30 years from now it will be in a movie as good as this one.

Parents should know that this film features a child and adults in peril, a brief image of a wound, some gross-out humor, and a reference to loss of a parent. There is also some intrusive product placement.

Families who see this movie should discuss why Alexandra created such a brave hero when she was so afraid of everything? Would you like to live like Nim? What would be the best part? What would you miss?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Shipwrecked and the book that inspired this movie. They will also enjoy seeing Foster and Helen Hayes in Candleshoe.

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Posted on April 1, 2008 at 8:00 am

Novelty songwriter Ross Bagdasarian noticed that speeding up the audio recordings creatd a high-pitched sound in 1958, and used that technique in his song “The Witch Doctor.” It was a hit. And so, he created the singing chipmunks, Simon, Theodore, and AAAAAlvin. Their record-breaking Christmas song sold four and a half million records in seven weeks — a record not broken until the Beatles — and won two Grammy awards. The high pitch of the voices was the novelty, but what made the record a hit was the relationship between Bagdasarian, who chose the stage name Dave Seville after the Spanish town he had been stationed in during the second World War, and the chipmunks, scholarly Simon, cheery Theodore, and especially mischievous Alvin. It became a franchise, with more records, an animated television series, product endorsements, and “appearances” with real-life rock stars. What was left? A feature-length movie, inspired by the origin story. But any charm in the original idea has been diluted and all that remains is packaging. It is 9/10 product placement, 1/10 filler.

Interview with Hugh Welchman of “Peter and the Wolf”

Posted on March 23, 2008 at 2:00 pm

Peter and the Wolf,” this year’s Oscar-winner for best short animated film will be shown on PBS this Wednesday from 8-9 Eastern Time. It is a brilliantly imaginative film and well worth setting aside some family time to watch it together.
“Peter and the Wolf” was originally written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 as a way to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. A brief narration tells the story of the little boy who goes into the forest with his pet duck and cat. They meet up with a little bird and have an encounter with a scary wolf. Each character in the story is represented by a different instrument.
Bird: flute
Duck: oboe
Cat: clarinet
Grandfather: bassoon
Wolf: French horns
Hunters: percussion
Peter: strings
There have been many film versions of the story. Perhaps the most famous is a Disney animated cartoon made in 1946. This latest version, produced by Hugh Welchman of Breakthru Films, dispenses with the narration, which only takes up three minutes of the half-hour-long musical composition, but creates a complex and involving story with a contemporary setting that remains very true to the themes of the original. I spoke to Welchman about the challenges of creating Peter’s world for the painstaking stop-motion animation to create the film.
How big was the set?
“We were working at a one in five ratio. That’s the normal scale for stop-motion animation. The set was truly enormous. The forest had 1700 trees, each 6 feet high. The set was 80 feet long; it was like going into Wonderland. We also did all the close-ups at 1 in 3 . The grandfather puppet was 3 1/2 feet high. With that size, you get so much more detail. The grandfather’s hands were incredibly detailed which gave it a real different quality and makes it much more real.
The set was built in Poland and they worked amazingly quickly to build it. That was one of the fastest part of the process; making the models took much, much longer. We wanted it set in modern Russia and so we went there to take photographs. On a playground somewhere they found Peter. And they were arrested by the KGB for taking photographs of a power station! The Russian police didn’t really know what to do with these two women. They thought they were eco-terrorists. So, they wiped their photos.
But the Russians are very knowledgeable about film, especially animation.
Yes, they’ve got a heritage with stop-motion.

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Enchanted

Posted on March 18, 2008 at 8:00 am

Fairy tales and modern-day Manhattan find a way to live happily ever after in this adorable Disney story about the adventures of a prince, an almost-princess, and an evil queen in New York City.

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