Ice Princess

Posted on January 25, 2010 at 8:19 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Some tense scenes
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, strong women
Date Released to Theaters:	2005

Getting ready for the Winter Olympics? Here’s a good place to start.
When I tell you that this is the story of a brainy but shy girl who dreams of being a champion figure skater and that she meets up with a demanding anything-to-win coach and a cute guy who drives the Zamboni machine, you may think that there won’t be any surprises. But there are, and they’re all nice ones.

First is the characters, who rise above the level of the usual bland interchangeable stick figures for movies of this kind. Michelle Trachtenberg brings a nice shy spirit to Casey, the aspiring scientist/skater, and she has able support from the always-engaging Joan Cusack as her mother and the nicely flinty Kim Cattrall as the coach. Second is that this is not a classic “makeover movie.” Casey gets a bit of a touch-up with some eye-liner and an outfit with some sequins but she is no Cinderella who is transformed with a wand. She studies hard, takes a part-time job to play for her expenses, and spends hours practicing. And the boy who likes her admires her intelligence and dedication, before the eye-liner and sparkles. But the nicest surprise is that after a spate of “mean girl” movies, this one gives us a character who competes with Casey but is honest, loyal, and supportive.

This is a story of a girl with a dream, but it is also the story of two mothers with dreams for their daughters, both based on dreams of their own that did not come true.

Casey’s mother wants her daughter to become a brilliant scholar. She also wants Casey to dress in sensible (dowdy and middle-aged) clothes. She does not like the “twinkie little outfits” that figure skaters wear and admits that “no matter how old the rest of us get, we will still always hate the prom queen.”

Tina (Cattrall) was once a figure skating champion who made a mistake that cost her a chance at an Olympic gold medal. She wants her daughter Gen (Hayden Panettiere) to get the gold medal she could not have. She thinks she knows what it takes to survive in competitive skating. “When the CIA wants to learn new dirty tricks, they study figure skaters and their moms.”

When Gen tells her that she wants more than skating in her life, she does not listen. Casey thinks she cannot tell her mother that she does not want the career her mother has set her heart on. Both mothers have to learn that their daughters are entitled to their own dreams. The daughters have to learn that, too.

The story had an assist from “The Princess Diaries” author Meg Cabot, which may be why it feels like it should be called “Ice Princess Diaries.” (Maybe someday they will find a way to include a father in one of these movies, as Cabot does in her books.*) But the formula is nicely played out, with sincerity and sweetness enough to inspire the young viewers to come up with some dreams of their own.

Parents should know that the movie has some tense confrontations, some mild language (“that pretty much blew”) and a few kisses. There is a skating costume that appears to show more chest than some in the audience will think appropriate for a teenager and a brief shot of a painful-looking wound.

Families who see this movie should talk about the most important advice that Casey gets from Gen. Why does Casey decide to trust Tina? How does Casey decide what is most important to her? What does she learn from her mother and what does she learn from Tina?

Families who see this movie should talk about the mothering styles of Joan and Tina. How are they alike, how are they different, and what do they have in common with your family?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy The Princess Diaries, like this film, based on a book by Meg Cabot. Older viewers will enjoy some other ice skating movies like The Cutting Edge, Ice Castles and the movies starring real-life Olympic gold medalist Sonja Henie. This story has a lot in common with the classic children’s book, Skating Shoes, part of the “Shoes” series by Noel Streatfeild, well worth reading aloud at bedtime. Families will also enjoy seeing Trachtenberg in Harriet the Spy, Cusack in School of Rock, and Panettiere in Remember the Titans and in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, as the voice of an ant princess named Dot.

*Many thanks to the Meg Cabot fans who wrote in to tell me that there is a loving father in the Princess Diaries books.

Veggie Tales: Silly Little Thing Called Love

Posted on January 20, 2010 at 7:39 am

The Veggie Tales gang give us three stories about love in this characteristically bright and tuneful treat, covering love for your family, love for your neighbors, and love of God. And of course it has time for the always-adorable silly songs, along with some thoughts from real kids about what love means.

I have one copy of this DVD to give away to the first person who sends me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with the word Veggie in the subject line. Enjoy!

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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Rocky and Bullwinkle Celebrate their 50th Anniversary

Posted on November 20, 2009 at 8:54 am

My friend Bob Elisberg has a marvelous salute to the sensational Rocky and Bullwinkle, “from the maniacally clever mind of Jay Ward,” who yesterday celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first broadcast.

My parents were very strict about television, but this was one of the few shows they let us watch. They not only let us — they watched with us. It was one of the first television shows for children to have jokes for adults. As I grew up, there were innumerable times when I would learn something new and suddenly have the retroactive pleasure of understanding some past Rocky and Bullwinkle joke. There’s an opera called “Boris Godunov?” Aha! That explains the name of R&B bad guy Boris Badanov! And remember the name of their alma mater? Wassamata U? Remember “fan mail from some flounders?” And “watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat?” (“That trick never works!”)

Few people today will get the joke about the Kerward Derby (a play on the name of then-minor-celebrity Durward Kirby), but this is still purely delightful.

And of course I always had a special fondness for Dudley Do-Right because his leading lady was named Nell.