Dolphin Tale

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:41 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild thematic elements
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Some alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Injured human and animal characters, offscreen wartime violence, recovering human and animal amputees, discussion of parental loss and abandonment
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 12, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004EPZ01G

It won’t be available for sale until next week but I just can’t wait to feature this terrific film. I have a copy to give away so if you’d like to enter, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Dolphin in the subject line and don’t forget your address! I’ll pick a winner December 16.

Clearwater Florida’s star attraction Winter, the dolphin with the prosthetic tail, plays herself in a heart-warming story that is one of the best family movies of the year.

The human characters are fictional, but Winter really did lose her tail and would not have survived without the development of a mechanical tail to allow her to swim. In this story, a nice connection is made not just between a lonely boy and the affectionate dolphin but between the two species who have to adjust to the loss of limbs and the use of mechanical replacements.

In this version, a boy named Sawyer (Nathan Gamble) has become something of a loner after his father left and his favorite cousin Kyle, a swim champion, joins the military. He is unhappy about being sent to summer school. All he wants to do is tinker with his remote controlled helicopter in his workshop and wait for his cousin to come home.

On the way to school one morning, he sees an injured dolphin on the beach. He gently cuts her free and whistles to her to keep her calm until the Marine rescue team arrives. Later, he sneaks into the aquarium where she is being cared for and meets the marine biologist in charge, Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick, Jr.) and his young daughter, Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff). Winter responds to Sawyer so well that they let him stay and help take care of her.

Hazel and Sawyer spend hours cradling Winter gently until she starts to try to swim. As Winter begins to get better, Sawyer starts to become a part of the community at the aquarium. His mother (Ashley Judd) is at first frustrated and angry that he has been ditching school. But then she realizes that he is learning far more from being with Winter at the aquarium than he could anywhere else. When Kyle comes back injured, both he and Winter will need to find the courage to confront their challenges. A lovably irascible doctor at Kyle’s VA facility (Morgan Freeman) thinks he can adapt the prosthetic technology they use to help the wounded veterans to give Winter a new tail.

And then just as Winter’s survival is on track, the survival of the aquarium and the marine program is at risk.

That’s a lot to handle, but writer/director Charles Martin Smith wisely keeps the focus on Sawyer and Hazel, and it is a treat to see their passion and optimism. Gamble and Zuehlsdorff have a lovely natural chemistry and the grown-ups in the cast provide able support. The story has a fairy tale quality, especially when it comes to saving the aquarium, and then the footage of the real-life disabled kids visiting Winter reminds us that the true story is even more magical.

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Killer Elite

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:11 pm

Like this year’s “The Devil’s Double,” this film would be much more satisfying and believable if it was not so self-serving in favor of the people telling the story. The oddest part is that the fight scenes are brutally, authentic while the non-fight scenes are laughably ridiculous. While it says it is “based on a true story,” the book that inspired it is labeled as a work of fiction and has been discredited by family members of those involved.

It opens in 1980, with the world in unrest and an oil crisis. Danny (Jason Statham), ex-special forces, works various dangerous jobs with his long-time ally Hunter (Robert De Niro) until he decides to leave it all behind and have a new, peaceful life in Australia. But he gets pulled back in when Hunter is kidnapped by a sheik who wants Danny to hunt down and kill the men from British forces who killed his three sons in an armed conflict in Oman. But Danny can’t just kill them. The sheik wants taped confessions from each and then Danny has to make each death look like an accident (which of course makes it impossible, 30 years later, to say that the accidental deaths were not really homicides). Danny gets the band back together, with, of course, one newbie just to act as a wild card, and goes after the sheik’s three targets.

But in this nasty, brutish world, everyone’s a bad guy; it’s just a question of degree. While Danny and his group are going after the guys who killed the sheik’s sons, the guys who think those guys were the good guys go after Danny. And while all of that is going on, the desiccated old men sitting around in expensively furnished board rooms are moving them all around like chess pieces, with even less regard for whether they get knocked off the board. These are the “feather men” (because of their light touch) who like some third-rate Batman villain actually leave their calling card to let the men who do the actual killing know that they’ve been there. Just to make sure we get the point, the old guys in suits actually say things like, “What we did there was questionable,” “We all know our people went too far,” and “We’re businessmen and bankers now. We can leave no trace of our activities.” Meanwhile, the guys who kill people (as opposed to ordering other people to do it) say things like, “Killing is easy. Living with it is the hard part.” So we know they have feelings, get it?

Statham is always a pleasure to watch and De Niro is superb as the man who has given his life to adrenaline and rough justice but is loyal to his friend and his family. The fight scenes are not the usual choreographed carnage but believably rough and exhausting. There are some nice shifts of allegiance back and forth and some good points to be made about how behind the killing is profits from oil. But the whole premise becomes increasingly ludicrous until it falls apart.

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Love and Other Drugs

Posted on February 28, 2011 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, and some drug material
Profanity:	Extremely strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking (including drinking to deal with stress, drunkenness), drugs, marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations, illness, brief violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 24, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	March 1, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004L3AR0K

“Love and Other Drugs” is the cure for the common movie, a smart, sexy, touching romance and a thoughtful exploration of a remarkable time that illuminates some of our most vital contemporary concerns.
“Ask your doctor about…” ads began appearing in magazines in the 1990’s. Before that, medication was a highly technical product requiring extensive medical expertise. But then pharmaceutical companies were allowed to advertise directly to consumers. This not coincidentally coincided with a flood of new drugs to make you not just get better but feel better, as in experience less anxiety and have a brighter outlook. Who wouldn’t want to ask their doctor about that?
And all of this not coincidentally coincided with the go-go years of pharmaceutical sales jobs. As the movie points out, this was the only entry level position in the world where you could begin by making six figures. It was like the California Gold Rush; an all’s fair era of claim-jumping and anything goes marketing tactics that included pens and opera tickets, lavish “medical conferences” at exotic beach and golf course resorts, generous “consulting fees” for doctors, beauty queen sale reps, and goodies for the medical staff. Anything to entice the people with the prescription pads to order up lots of Brand X instead of Brand Y.
Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is his family’s embarrassing failure. Co-writer/director Edward Zwick (“thirtysomething,” “Now and Again,” “Glory”) brings in 70’s stars the late Jill Clayburgh and George Segal as his parents, a nice touch. His father and sister are doctors. His brother is a dot.com millionaire. He was fired from selling electronic equipment (a boombox playing “Two Princes” nails the era in a nanosecond) for having sex with his manager’s girlfriend. So he takes a job in drug sales at Pfizer, goes through training, and gets a job selling mood elevators in the Ohio River valley. He has a lot of competition from the Prozac guys, and then comes Viagra. Maggie (Anne Hathaway) is a free-spirited artist with early onset Parkinson’s who takes buses of elderly people to Canada to get affordable prescription drugs. She sizes him up immediately as someone who is constantly looking for meaningless sex “for an hour or two of relief from the pain of being you” because she feels the same way.
Meaningless sex works out fine for a while, but then of course it gets complicated as Maggie has to cope with Parkinson’s and Jamie learns more about the consequences of the drug marketing. We see less and less of their bodies and their sexual encounters as we see more about what is going on with them emotionally.
Both the relationship at the heart of the story and the environment around them are absorbing and insightful. Almost as an aside, we see the benefits of this category of drugs as a homeless man who dumpster dives for the rival Prozac Jamie throws away literally cleans up his act and applies for a job. In a very moving scene Maggie happens on a Parkinson’s support group. She is overjoyed with the connection she feels to the other patients (played by real people coping with Parkinson’s) while Jamie is daunted by a glimpse of the future from a caregiver.
On one level, it works as a story about the real leap of faith each of us goes through in entering into a long-term relationship — faith not just in the other person but in our own capacity for “in sickness and in health,” the terror of not being known, the greater terror of being known and being rejected. The health care issues are presented in an even-handed but very personal way, not just through Maggie’s experience but through the doctor character superbly played by the immeasurably gifted Hank Azaria. He shows us a man who has his own lapses but is terribly frustrated with a system that squeezes him on every side, compromising treatment. Gylenhaal and Hathaway (getting along much better then they did as unhappy spouses in “Brokeback Mountain”) give performances of wit, courage, grace, and generosity. RX prn.

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It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Posted on February 23, 2011 at 3:57 pm

A stressed-out teenager impetuously checks himself into a mental hospital in this semi-autobiographical tale based on It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. It is brought to screen by the talented writer-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have demonstrated their understanding of teenagers struggling with difficult situations in the understated “Sugar” and “Half Nelson.” Here, they show a more playful side, with witty and imaginative fantasy sequences that make the unabashed decency and kindness at its heart even more touching.

Keir Gilchrist plays Craig, a 16-year-old student at a Manhattan high school for high-achievers. He is feeling a great deal of pressure to succeed and frightened by thoughts of suicide. He visits the emergency room and when the doctor tells him he can go home, he pleads to be admitted, not understanding that it will mean he must be kept under observation for five days. “I thought you guys could do something quick,” he says. “I have school tomorrow.” Craig also does not realize that the area where the teenagers are treated is being renovated, so he will be staying on the adult ward.

Immediately dubbed “Cool Craig” by a friendly patient named Bobby (Zach Galifanakis of “The Hangover”), Craig discovers a through-the-looking-glass world that challenges the connections and assumptions of his “normal” life. The kind psychiatrist (Viola Davis) immediately recognizes that all Craig needs is some breathing room and reassurance. That gives Craig a chance to look around. He develops confidence when he sees many people far worse off than he is, and when he sees that he can give and accept help. Art and music therapy help him think of what he can express instead of how he will be evaluated. And a pretty fellow patient (Emma Roberts, with her aunt Julia’s lovely smile) is the best medicine of all.

Boden and Fleck, whose previous films had an understated naturalism, make the most of the heightened sensibility of the mental ward setting with sequences that take us inside Craig’s fantasies and memories. In one, we see Craig remembering an incident when he was five, drawing inside a tent in his parents’ living room. The present-day Craig is shown as a five year old, and then in his teen-age persona in the five-year-old’s pajamas. When pushed into being the vocalist in music therapy, Craig swings into a deliriously Bowie-fied version of “Under Pressure.” Boden and Fleck continue to show skill in casting and directing. Gilchrist, Roberts, and Zoe Kravitz as the classmate Craig wishes he could date are all first-rate, and Galifanakis leaves every bit of his stand-up persona behind to give a real performance with subtlety and grace.

It is a relief to see a movie about mental illness that recognizes the real pain but focuses on the real humanity of everyone involved, patients, staff, and Craig’s family. Craig first comes into the emergency room and tells the intake nurse that he wants to kill himself. When she hands him a clipboard and tells him to fill out a form it comes across not as callous but as reassuring. Treating his fear as routine is part of what makes him feel safe there. Boden and Fleck are now among the most reliable and promising film-makers around.

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Unstoppable

Posted on February 15, 2011 at 8:00 am

Don’t think of it as a train. Think of it as “a missile the size of the Chrysler building.” That is what the station supervisor, Connie (Rosario Dawson) says when she finds out that the driverless train is carrying toxic and highly flammable cargo and heading toward a city with a lot of people and a sharp curve that the train cannot stay on at its speed. Or, you can think of it the way director Tony Scott does — as a delivery system for adrenaline.

A speeding train. Bureaucrats who don’t understand the problem and would not know how to solve it if they did. Real working people who do both. And a couple of guys who have to get to know one another at breakneck speed as they try to find a way to stop a missile the size of the Chrysler building.

Fortunately, one of those guys is Denzel Washington who singlehandedly anchors the eye of the storm, steadying the story and adding focus and even a little bit of depth. He is, as they used to say about Superman, more powerful than a locomotive.