Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Posted on November 30, 2009 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for mild action and brief language
Profanity:	Brief schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive comic/action violence, no one hurt
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	May 22, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	December 1, 2009
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002GJTYIW

Everything is bigger, better, and especially funnier in this sequel to the surprise hit Night at the Museum. In the original, Larry (Ben Stiller) was an unsuccessful inventor who took at job as a security guard at New York’s Museum of Natural History and found that all of the exhibits came to life at night. With the help of Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams), and the young Pharaoh Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek), Larry was able to reconcile the dispute between a cowboy named Jedediah (Owen Wilson) with his neighboring diorama-mate Octavius (Steve Coogan), tame both a dinosaur skeleton and an enormous totemic sculpture, and defeat the bad guys who tried to set him up and steal the magic tablet.

As this film begins, Larry has achieved his dream of success and is doing infomercials with inventions like the glow-in-the-dark flashlight. He is so busy he seldom sees his old friends at the museum and he is shocked to find that they have all been packed up. The museum is going all 2.0 and is about to be tricked up with fancy interactive animatronics. And all of the old exhibits are being shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, not for display but for storage.

And that is how Larry, the Museum of Natural History exhibits from the first movie, and dozens of new characters from the world’s biggest museum complex in Washington DC, the Smithsonian. Ahkmenrah’s evil brother Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria) wants to use the tablet to raise an army of the dead to take over the world. Larry will have to rely on his old friends and some new ones, like Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) and George Armstrong Custer (Bill Hadar) to fight Kahmunrah and his allies Ivan the Terrible (Christopher Guest), Napoleon (Alain Chabat), and Al Capone (Jon Bernthal), who is in black and white because he was brought to life from an old photograph.

Yes, even the pictures, paintings, the gift shop bobble heads and the sculptures come to life in this film and there is one sequence where Larry escapes into Alfred Eisenstadt’s classic photo of VJ Day in Times Square, and he later empties the water out of a Turner seascape. The special effects are exceptionally well done, but what makes the movie work is its inspired cast, all having a blast and trying to top each other. Over and over, the same old gag works just fine as the best all-star comedy cast since “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” finds the sweet spot between action and inspired silliness.

Shorts

Posted on November 24, 2009 at 8:01 am

A rainbow-colored wishing rock creates comic chaos in a film from Robert Rodriguez about bullies, family communication and being very, very careful what you wish for. It is also about an army of crocodiles, a telepathic super-genius baby, and a pig-tailed villain named after a font.
Rodriguez is a one-man studio who brings a stylish, kinetic energy to two kinds of movies, the ultra-violent (“Desperado,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and the family-friendly (the “Spy Kids” series). He is writer, director, cameraman, editor, co-composer of the score and in this case also father of four members of the supporting cast.
He understands that kids would be as likely to wish for getting their braces off as for money or superpowers. He knows how to get them actively involved in figuring out what is happening. He can tell that they will find a booger monster wildly funny. And he knows that what kids and parents wish for most is to be close to friends and family.
The title refers to the way the story is presented — brief intersecting stories going back and forth in time, each filling in additional details of the others. It is set in a community that literally exists in the towering shadow of Black, Inc., a huge corporation headed by Mr. Black (James Spader). He wants to create the ultimate technology, the Black Box, with innumerable functions that include a phone, vacuum cleaner, toaster, dog groomer, and baby monitor. Black’s harried employees include Mr. and Mrs. Thompson (Leslie Mann and John Cryer), who are assigned to lead competing teams and get so caught up in the pressure to succeed that they communicate primarily by texting, even when they are standing next to each other.
That is why they do not notice that their son, Toe (Jimmy Bennett), has no friends and is thrown in the trash every morning by a group of bullies at school led by Mr. Black’s children Cole (Devon Gearhart) and Helvetica (newcomer Jolie Vanier in Wednesday Addams mode). They throw a rock at Toe that turns out to have magical powers. But Toe and the other people who come in possession of the rock are no better at holding onto it than they are at stating their wishes with the requisite precision. Like all fairy tale wish-granters, the rainbow rock is very good at finding loopholes.
Toe presents each character’s experiences with the wishing rock, going back and forth in time and letting us put the pieces together. Toe’s neighbor Loogie (Trevor Gagnon) and his brothers make a number of wishes that do not turn out the way they had hoped, including a wish for “telephonesis” instead of “telekinesis” and wishing for wisdom without being more specific about who should become wise. And then there is another neighbor, Toe’s former friend Nose (Jake Short). He is confined to home with his germaphobic mad scientist of a father (William H. Macy), who spends every minute he isn’t wiping everything down with antiseptic working on contraptions to create a bacteria-free environment. When Toe’s sister (Kat Dennings) unknowingly carries the rainbow rock to her job as Nose’s tutor, Nose uses it to make an unselfish wish – but that does not keep the consequences from being equally disastrous. When Toe’s parents wish they could be closer, the result is more literal than they had in mind.
And then Helvetica and her father get the rock, and things really get out of hand.
After the disappointment of “Spy Kids 3D” and “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl,” it is good to see Rodriguez moving toward what made the first “Spy Kids” one of the best family films of the last decade. This film is not as imaginative or heart-warming as that one, but it is refreshingly un-glamorous and it has a warmth and sense of fun that makes it just the end-of-summer treat a family might wish for.

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Gentlemen Broncos

Posted on November 9, 2009 at 8:00 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some rude humor
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Fantasy violence, comic violence including darts and lasers
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 6, 2009

“Gentlemen Broncos” is about the fantasies of a 15 year old boy and it has some of the charm but all of the failings of those stories. The charm is its unguarded purity of emotion and unchecked enthusiasm for its powers of imagination. The failings are all of that plus the resulting incoherence and absence of insight.
Benjamin (Michael Angarano) is a shy, repressed boy who lives with his single mother (Jennifer Coolidge). He writes elaborate fantasy sci-fi stories filled with flying battle stags, aliens, and drastic body functions and fluids. Breasts emit laser beams. Projectile vomit erupts like a volcano. And a hero has to sew back is own body part after it was removed for examination by his captors.
At an overnight writing workshop, Benjamin meets his idol, Chevalier (Jermaine Clement of “Flight of the Concords”), a massively self-important author who wears a Bluetooth earpiece like an accessory. And he meets Tabatha, (Halley Feiffer) a supremely confident girl who has mastered the art of mastering shy boys. Both end up appropriating Benjamin’s story, and the movie’s best moments are the variations reflecting each of their perspectives and abilities. Chevalier steals the story and publishes it under his own name. And Tabitha gets Benjamin to agree to let her sidekick film the story. As many an author has learned before him, Benjamin finds that the translation to film distorts his original vision.
Of course, the original vision may not be such a good idea, and that is the problem here. The Hesses are trying to make fun of juvenile behavior but there’s a very fine line between the level of humor they are portraying and the level of humor in the way they portray it. It is the very essence of juvenile humor to overestimate the comedic value of bodily fluids and functions, to go for the knowing snicker rather than the more-knowing laugh.

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The Box

Posted on November 8, 2009 at 8:06 pm

I loved “Donnie Darko” and was eager to listen to the DVD commentary by writer/director Richard Kelly. But I had to turn it off after the first ten minutes. Kelly explained too much, and his explanations were so mundane they detracted from the film’s intriguing ambiguities. After the fascinating but incoherent “Southland Tales,” Kelly shifts back toward explaining too much in “The Box, based on a short story by Richard Matheson and its adaptation as an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

Amid the meticulously re-created details of the 1976 Richmond, Virginia setting (harvest gold, maxi coats), a loving couple feeling some financial pressure are presented with a moral dilemma. Early one morning just before Christmas, a plain brown package is left on their doorstep with an elegant note informing them that Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) will be there at 5. Inside the package is a box with a red button covered by a locked glass dome.

Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) go to work, where each receives bad news. Norma teaches English at a private school. Just after her class on Sartre’s “No Exit,” she is informed that the school will no longer be able to subsidize her son’s tuition, a severe financial blow. And Arthur, who (like Kelly’s father) designs lenses for a Mars explorer, learns that his application to the astronaut program has been turned down.

Norma is home alone when Mr. Steward arrives. His appearance is shocking. The lower left quarter of his face has been sheered off by some massive trauma, so devastating we can see not only sinew but teeth through what once was his cheek. His message is shocking, too. He gives Norma a key to open the glass dome and tells her that if she pushes the red button within 24 hours someone she does not know will die and she will receive one million dollars in cash, tax-free.

“Maybe it’s a baby,” says Arthur. “Maybe it’s a man on death row,” says Norma. Arthur, the engineer, takes the box apart. There’s nothing inside. Rationally, it seems impossible that the offer could be real. They go back and forth. And then, as much to end the agony of uncertainty as anything else, one of them impulsively hits it. And then things really go haywire in the lives of Arthur and Norma and pretty much in the movie, too.

Kelly knows how to create a mood of claustrophobic dread and how to create stunning images. Back in those pre-Google days, people had to do research in the stacks of a library, and Kelly makes those scenes look both retro and chilling. But there is nothing to approach the best moments in “Donnie Darko,” the Sparkle Motion dance number to “Notorious,” the motivational speaker, the controversy over the story taught in school, the riff on the Smurfs. Like the box with the button, it is enticing on the surface but inside it is empty.

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Based on a book Drama Fantasy

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 8:00 am

Oh, dear. #TransformerFail

I truly loved the first Transformers movie. It was everything you need in a big summer explosion movie, with stupendous special effects, shot through with heart-thumping adrenaline, with just enough character and storyline to allow us to catch our breath and keep us interested. Our hero, high school senior Sam (Shia LeBeouf), is befriended by a car that turns into a friendly robot called Bumblebee, one of a cadre of good-guy transforming robots who fight against the bad-guy robots, called Decepticons. He is aided by a beautiful girl who is very good with cars (Megan Fox) and an armed services division led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel).

This sequel has some great special effects, but the story and the characters are poorly handled and the pacing is a mess. When the robots give a better performance than the humans, we have a problem. When the action is so complicated we can’t figure out who is where and in some cases why they are there, we have a bigger problem. When the characters are so irritating we begin to consider rooting for the bad guys, well, you know what kind of a problem we have. And when the racial humor gets so completely out of hand that it becomes uncomfortable at best and genuinely disturbing at worst, it’s a serious problem.

LeBoeuf is always appealing, Fox looks good stretching over machinery, and the movie briefly takes an interesting turn when both human and transformer characters show that they can learn from their mistakes and switch over to the side of the good guys. A stop at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum leads to Jetfire, an engaging junkpile of an autobot.

But it is too loud and it all goes on much too long. The bloated running time is well over two hours, overstuffed with pointless and increasingly annoying attempts at comedy — Sam’s mother accidentally gets high and talks about his sex life, Sam’s father doesn’t get high but talks about his sex life, good guy robots talk like the end men on a minstrel show, and Sam’s college roommate is a loudmouth who wants to get with some ladies and shrieks like a little girl when he is scared, which happens a lot. There’s another series of confrontations between a clueless bureaucrat and our know-better heroes. But the last movie’s clueless bureaucrat somehow switches sides. I would complain that this is not adequately explained, but I don’t really care. By this point, I began to think the Decepticons might have a point about how they could do better with our planet than we could.