The Angry Birds Movie

Posted on May 19, 2016 at 5:50 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for rude humor and action
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Cartoon action-style peril and violence, no one hurt
Date Released to Theaters:	May 20, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	August 15, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01EK44M64

Like the wildly addictive Finnish app/game/toys that inspired it, the Angry Birds movie is colorful, with some silly humor and imaginative settings. And like the many, many attempts to make games into movies that have gone before it, this one has strong visuals, game talent, and yet never quite sustains itself as a story. It’s a rare movie for kids that endorses legitimate anger, but in these touchy times, it is peculiarly xenophobic.

Bird island is something of a flightless bird sanctuary, with no predators and a mostly happy, companionable community. Red (a perfectly cast Jason Sudeikis) is a bright red bird with Eugene Levy eyebrows, a tendency to defensiveness and snark, and a serious anger management problem.

Red is late to a “hatch-day” party he was supposed to work at as an entertainer. He insults the young bird’s parents and is accidentally standing in the wrong place when their new chick hatches, so that the baby imprints on Red instead of his parents. Red has an angry outburst leading to a court appearance presided over by Judge Peckinpah (Keegan-Michael Key), who sentences him to anger management classes conducted by the New Age-y Matilda (Maya Rudolph), where his classmates include the explosive Bomb (Danny McBride) and excitable Chuck (Josh Gad).

A ship arrives at Bird Island, carrying a cheerful pig named Leonard (Bill Hader), who oozes charm and promises friendship and merriment. He even puts on a show, in order to both pad and juice up the storyline.

Red is skeptical, but he is always skeptical. The other birds embrace their new friend, even after Red tells them Leonard has lied about coming alone. He has lied about his purpose, too. The pigs want the eggs. And…now the game part comes in: the birds need to get angry so they can get the eggs back. The whole part about foreigners/those different from us being evil and scary and wanting to eat our progeny, that’s pretty much glossed over as all in good fun, mingled with shout-outs to The Eagles (get it) and Rick Astley (because why not; it’s an easy laugh).

The birds have a possibly mythical leader, Mighty Eagle, the only bird on the island who can fly. Red, Bomb, and Chuck ascend to ME’s aerie and find that he is not as heroic as they hoped. If anyone is going to save the day, it will be the intrepid trio themselves. They have to find a way to get to the pigs’ island and get the eggs back.

It’s all bright and cheerful, but under-plotted and overproduced. Stunt-casting Oscar winner Sean Penn for a few grunts, throwing in pop songs and faux swearing to amuse the parents and bird poop humor to amuse the kids left me feeling a bit angry myself.

Parents should know that this film includes a lot of cartoon-style action and peril, with no serious injuries, some schoolyard language, and some bodily function/gross-out/crotch hit humor.

Family discussion: When is it helpful to be angry? How can you make the best use of anger?

If you like this, try: “The LEGO Movie”

Tale of Tales

Posted on April 28, 2016 at 5:15 pm

Who ever said that fairy tales were for children?

The visually striking “Tale of Tales” is based on three stories from Giambattista Basile that go back a hundred years before the Brothers Grimm. Basile, whose book was subtitled “entertainment for little ones” was the first person to write down these folk tales, including early versions of Cinderella, Rapunzel, and other classic stories. The three tales here, inspired by Basile’s stories, have fairy tale elements — wishes, magic, monsters, a princess to be won by whoever gives the right answer, a queen who will do anything to have a child. And there are lush, gorgeous, and wildly imaginative images. But these are not for children. These are straight out of the primordial ooze of the collective unconscious. These are not so much stories about enchantment as they are about desire, hubris, terror, all of the the deepest and most untamed emotions. Don’t expect anyone to live happily ever after.

The Queen of Longtrellis (Salma Hayek) is inconsolable. She wants a child. A wizard offers her a solution. If she eats the heart of a sea monster, prepared for her by a virgin, she will become pregnant, but it will be at the cost of a life. She agrees. And her husband, the king (John C. Reilly) is killed capturing the monster. The virgin prepares the heart, and the queen devours it. She and the virgin both become pregnant and deliver identical sons.

The King of Strongcliff (Vincent Cassel) is a libertine. He hears the voice of an old woman singing (Hayley Carmichael) and, believing her to be young and beautiful, tries to get her to agree to sleep with him. She agrees, provided that they keep the lights off. But he peeks and horrified by her appearance, has her thrown out of the window.

And the King of Highhills (Toby Jones) has a beautiful and devoted daughter, Violet (Bebe Cave). She prepares a song to show her love for her father but as she performs, he is distracted by a flea on his hand, which fascinates him so much that he keeps it for a pet, feeding it and fattening it up until it is the size of a pig. When it dies, he has it skinned and offers Violet’s hand in marriage to the first one who can correctly identify the animal it came from. But the one who knows the answer is an ogre.

Each of these stories explores issues of pride, selfishness, and greed. The Queen wants more than a child; she wants all of his love. The old woman wants superficial beauty and the power it can bring and the lecherous king wants sex and a beautiful wife. A woman is consumed — literally — with jealousy. Another king can’t see the love of his daughter because he is preoccupied with his grotesque pet. Director Matteo Garrone, with his first English language film, gives the stories a hallucinatory quality with rapturous images on the brink between dream and nightmare.

Parents should know that this film includes nudity, sexual references and situations, monsters, fairy tale violence and explicit and disturbing images.

Family discussion: How do these fairy tales differ from the ones more familiar to modern audiences? How do each of these stories deal with the theme of pride?

If you like this, try: “The Brothers Grimm” and “Time Bandits”

Related Tags:

Based on a book Fantasy

The Huntsman: Winter’s War

Posted on April 21, 2016 at 5:11 pm

With a storyline as awkward and unfocused as its unwieldy title, “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” is like a mashup of “Frozen,” “Lord of the Rings,” and the Narnia movies, without any of the heart or imagination of any of them.

It’s both a prequel and a sequel to a movie no one was all that eager to see, with only 48 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes and one of those counted as positive didn’t muster much enthusiasm: “This Snow White may not be the fairest of them all, but sometimes, especially during the heat of summer, fair-to-middling does just fine.” This one is more middling than fair.

In the first film, the evil Ravenna (Charlize Theron) bewitched a king, killed him on their wedding night, and locked his daughter in a tower. Then, when she grew up to be Kristen Stewart and threatened to challenge Ravenna’s status as the fairest of them all, Ravenna ordered the Huntsman with no name to kill Snow White and bring back her heart so Ravenna could eat it and achieve permanent fairness.

In this film, we see Ravenna murder her husband, the king, over a game of chess, and we meet her sister, Freya (Emily Blunt), who is in love and pregnant. Her sister is the one with the magical powers. Freya has none — or so she thinks. But when she is faced with the ultimate loss and betrayal, all of a sudden she discovers her power, or, should I say, she lets it go. Yes, she is the queen of cold and ice. So, she leaves and takes over her own queendom, where her primary occupation is stealing children, telling them that love is illegal, and turning them into fighting machines, with freezing things a close second. Two children grow up to be world-class fighters and to be Chris Hemsworth (this time he gets a name: Eric) and Jessica Chastain as Sara. They break the big rule, and Freya punishes them terribly. Eventually, Eric ends up trying to find the magic mirror, complicated because it was stolen by goblins and because it exerts an evil “Fellowship of the Ring”-style power over anyone who looks into it. He is accompanied by two dwarves, played by Nick Frost and “The Trip’s” Rob Brydon, when, as I pointed out before, little people characters should be played by little people actors. They come across two female dwarves. One is played by Sheridan Smith, who, with Colleen Atwood’s gorgeous costumes, provides the movie’s few bright moments.

The storyline makes even less sense than the first one, with (SPOILER ALERT) repeated reliance on that weakest of plot twists, the character you are supposed to think is dead who turns out to be still alive. Blunt and Theron are game but given little to do but strut and declaim. Chris Hemsworth manages to bring his character to life and there are some striking visuals, but that can’t make up for a dreary mess.

Parents should know that this film features extended fantasy peril and violence, characters injured and killed including an infant, monster, some disturbing images, sexual references and situation, some strong language and crude comments.

Family discussion: What happened when Eric looked in the mirror? Why were so many of the huntsmen loyal to Freya?

If you like this, try: “Stardust” and “Jack the Giant Slayer”

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Fantasy Romance

Trailer: The BFG

Posted on April 17, 2016 at 8:00 am

Roald Dahl’s book The BFG is about a Big Friendly Giant and a girl named Sophie. But not all giants are friendly. This trailer for the upcoming movie directed by Steven Spielberg looks every bit as magical as the story should be.

The Jungle Book

Posted on April 14, 2016 at 5:32 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some sequences of scary action and peril
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended peril and violence including bees, a tiger, a snake, and fire
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the film
Date Released to Theaters:	April 15, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	August 29, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01CTNDO58

The camera swoops behind the familiar Disney castle logo to take us to that magical place — you know, like the one that is found second star to the right and straight on ’til morning or through the wardrobe in the attic, down a rabbit hole, or via a house swept up in a Kansas tornado. Just a moment past the castle we are deep, 3D IMAX deep, in the midst of of a lush and luscious jungle, where a mop-headed, big-eyed boy in a red loincloth is running for his life.

The wolves are after him. No, the wolves are with him and a sleek black panther is after him. No, he catches him. No, they are friends. It is Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi) and the Bagheera (Sir Ben Kingsley), the panther who discovered him as a toddler and delivered him to the best mother he knew, the wolf Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o) who raised him lovingly along with her other cubs. While he matures more slowly and cannot do some of the things they can to stay safe, he can climb and use tools. Although Raksha tells him not to use “tricks” like pulleys, knots, and scoops, he feels very much a part of the wolf pack and solemnly recites along with the others:

Now this is the Law of the Jungle —
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

When the rainy season ends, a dry spell shrinks the river so that the “peace rock” is showing. According to the well-established rules of the jungle, as long as they can see that rock, everyone may drink together in peace, meaning the predators cannot attack their usual prey. The one-eyed tiger with burn scars named Shere Khan (Idris Elba) sees Mowgli and warns the others that as soon as the rock is submerged again and the truce has ended, he will come for the boy and will do whatever it takes to kill him. Raksha reluctantly agrees to let Bagheera take him to the town, where Mowgli can be with other people. On the way, they have encounters with Kaa the mesmerizing snake (Scarlett Johansson), Baloo the easy-going bear (Bill Murray), and King Louis (Christopher Walken), an enormous ape (based on the extinct Gigantopithecus) who presides over an orangutan kingdom living in an ancient temple.

Fans of the Disney animated musical version will be happy to find some familiar moments within the superb score from John Debney.

But this is very much its own film, with stunning integration of the digital animals and the real-life boy. (Disneyphiles may think of Walt’s earliest short films featuring a real-life girl interacting with hand-drawn characters.) The world of the jungle is enchanting and vital, a Rousseauian dream of an Edenic natural world (in this PG film, while there is peril and some characters are injured and killed, any carnivore behavior happens off-screen). Sethi has an engagingly natural quality that is as important in bringing the digital characters to life as the brilliant work of the many, many artists and technicians whose names appear in the credits.

So does the storyline’s respect for this world and its inhabitants. Mowgli does not have many of the physical gifts of his wolf family or his friends in the forest. He does have some skills they do not, and it is heartwarming to see him develop simple tools like a stone ax and a pulley because they are not presented as superior or used to establish dominance, but to help his jungle community and to give thanks for all they have given him. This is gorgeous, inspiring filmmaking.

Parents should know that this movie includes extended peril with some violence and some disturbing images. A theme of the film is the tiger’s determination to kill Mowgli, and characters are injured and killed (including parents).

Family discussion: Why did the wolves and Baloo have different ideas about Mowgli’s “tricks?” Should Mowgli stay in the jungle or live with other humans?

If you like this, try: Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories and two earlier films based on this story, one starring Sabu and the Disney animated version.