Max

Posted on June 25, 2015 at 5:51 pm

“Max” is a good, old-fashioned story of a boy and a dog who mend each other’s broken hearts. It is heartwarming without getting treacly, and frank without getting too disturbing. And it has adventure, romance, loss, and something to say about what we should ask of ourselves and each other. It is one of the best live action family films of the year.

Justin Wincott (a terrific Josh Wiggins) is an unhappy teenager who lives in Texas with his parents (Thomas Haden Church as Ray and Lauren Graham as Pamela). His older brother Kyle (Robbie Amell of “The DUFF”) is a Marine in Afghanistan, working with a dog named Max, who protects the troops and sniffs out danger, locating hidden bombs and caches of weapons. Justin won’t even stop playing a video game when Kyle is Skyping with his parents. Kyle gently teases him for not coming to the computer screen to say hello. “I’m just over here dealing with a minor insurgency. He’s trying to save the whole universe.”

But Kyle is killed, and Max is severely traumatized. The Wincotts are devastated, though proud of Kyle’s service for his country. Ray, himself a wounded veteran, is stoic and firm in his beliefs about patriotism and manhood. Justin is angry, bitter, and hurt. He is not interested in helping a damaged dog. He does not know yet that the best way for him to heal his spirit is to find a way to help someone else. He and Max share a great loss and need to learn how to process what they have experienced.

Kyle’s best friend, who served with him, was released early and goes to work for Ray. And Justin has a best friend, Chuy (Dejon LaQuake), who has a spirited, brave cousin who loves dogs named Carmen (Mia Xitlali). With Carmen’s help, Justin helps Max feel at home. But as a Marine tells him, “These dogs were born to work. Take away that sense of purpose and they’re lost.”

Justin needed a sense of purpose, too. He finds it when it turns out their town has some bad guys with guns and rottweilers. Justin and his friends find out that Max’s sense of purpose means he will do anything to keep them safe. Yakin keeps a lot of moving parts moving smoothly. Justin’s relationship with his dad, with Max, with Carmen, and with the bad guys all come together as a part of his growing understanding of his own sense of purpose.

Parents should know that this film includes wartime violence, a sad death, dog fights, adults and children in peril, weapons dealers, brief strong language, and a teen kiss.

Family discussion: Why was it hard for Justin and his father to get along? Why did Justin’s father wait to tell him the story of his wound?

If you like this, try: the “Lassie” movies and “Remember the Titans”

Big Game

Posted on June 25, 2015 at 5:41 pm

Yes, it is basically “Die Hard” and “Under Siege” in the mountains of Finland, if Bruce Willis was a kid on a rite-of-passage solo hunting trip. And instead of executive hostages in a big office building, the kid has to save the President of the United States, who has been ejected from Air Force One in some sort of attack we will learn more about later on.

So, the storyline is far from fresh. But the location is, and it is excitingly filmed and engagingly performed.

Samuel L. Jackson plays President William Allen Moore, en route to a G8-style meeting when his Secret Service officer, Morris (Ray Stevenson) sends him out in a parachute pod to protect him from what appears to be an assassination or kidnap attempt, led by known terrorist-type bad guy and obvious mercenary sociopath Hazar (Mehmet Kurtulus). Meanwhile, back in the Situation Room back home, the vice president (Victor Garber), the head of the CIA (Felicity Huffman), and a national security expert (James Broadbent) are trying to locate and rescue the President.

Copyright Big Zero Film Entertainment 2015

But you probably suspect that some of the people we are supposed to be trusting will turn out not to be trustworthy, and you are right.

Meanwhile, Oskari (the nicely underplaying Onni Tommila) in on his Finnish walkabout. He is on his own in the wilderness with a bow and arrow, expected to bring home an impressive kill. He is under a lot of pressure, because his father is a legendary hunter. But the bow is nearly as big as he is and the hint his father gave him about where the best spot is to find his prey. But his father’s idea of help was not what Oskari thought. And the big game he found was a guy in a suit who is pretty big stuff in Washington but not so powerful away from home.

Writer/director (and Tommila’s uncle) Jalmari Helander knows Hollywood movies and matches the pacing and tone of the best of the genre. There is nothing new in the twists of the plot, but the relationship between the canny President and the unruffled boy, each with different skills, and the action sequences that are unrealistic but fun keep things entertaining.

Parents should know that this film incudes extended action-style violence, characters injured and killed, themes of treason and assassination, some strong language, and potty humor.

Family discussion: How did Oskari feel when he saw what his father left for him? What was Oskari’s biggest challenge?

If you like this, try: “Masterminds” with Patrick Stewart

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Action/Adventure Stories About Kids

Infinitely Polar Bear

Posted on June 25, 2015 at 5:36 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Family tension
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	June 19, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	January 4, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B016UTP3V0

“Infinitely Polar Bear” is the term a young girl uses in this film for bipolar disorder, the mental illness that her father struggled with as he cared for his daughters. It indicates that this sensitive, touching story reflects the perspective of the children who lived with him.

Writer/director Maya Forbes based the film on her family’s story, when she and her sister lived with their father near their school in Boston in the 1970’s so that their mother could attend an MBA program in New York.

Because their father could not work, and because his wealthy family would not give them enough money to live on, the only way their mother could support them was to get a business degree, but she wanted the girls to stay in their home and school. And so, Cam (Mark Ruffalo), who had been living alone, moves into the family apartment, and Maggie (Zoe Saldana) lives in New York during the week and comes home on weekends. And the girls, Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky, Forbes’ daughter) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide) spend their weeks with a man who loves them very much but who fills the apartment with chaos and clutter, chain-smokes, drinks, and, worst of all, is SO embarrassing.

There is something both perceptive in presenting embarrassment as their primary reaction. Children naturally see the world in terms of how it affects them, and school-age children are first discovering the way that they are judged by their peers and are therefore excruciatingly sensitive to it, and can become near-frantic about blending in. But it is reassuring as well. The girls know that both of their parents love them very much.

Forbes presents the story with enormous insight and compassion for each member of the family. The young actresses who play the two girls are wonderfully natural. Saldana gives a performance of endless grace. And Ruffalo manages to make Cam a complete and complex character, unlike the typical movie portrayal of mental illness as a bundle of cute quirks or sociopathic fury. There is nothing as carelessly lofty as the Boston upper class. While Cam knows their era is ending and would not want it to continue, it persists in his speech and carriage and in occasional flashes of a sense of entitlement. He impulsively decides to take his daughters on a tour of his family’s mansion, even though it is now owned by someone else, who reasonably thinks that no one, even former owners, should be allowed to enter without an invitation. He visits his grandmother, who still controls the family money, and has dinner with his parents (Keir Dullea and Beth Dixon, nailing the effete accents, snobbery, and helplessness). He tinkers with a dozen projects and stays up all night creating a mermaid costume. And he self-medicates with chain-smoking and constant sips of beer. Ruffalo plays Cam not as a mentally ill man but as a man who has a mental illness, along with a lot of other qualities, including a deep love for his wife and children.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, themes of mental illness, smoking, drinking, drugs, and family dysfunction.

Family discussion: Do you agree with the decision made by the parents about leaving the girls with Cam? How have ideas about mental illness changed since the era of this film? How does the writer/director, who based the story on her own life, feel about her parents?

If you like this, try: “Donnie Darko,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Silver Linings Playbook”

Ted 2

Posted on June 25, 2015 at 5:22 pm

“Subtle” is not a word that naturally comes to mind for a movie that features a bong in the shape of male genitalia (which is more powerful — the longing for weed or the ew-factor of a straight guy who does not want to appear to be sucking on a dong-shaped bong)? Or for a movie that shows us a fertility clinic accident drenching a character with an output of said body part, followed by a joke insulting African-American men and those with a genetic ailment. A trifecta!

The raunch-fest “Ted 2” does indeed rely on gross-out, juvenile, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, marijuana-philic, oh-no-they-didn’t humor, though much of it is more humor-ish, fake-funny, outrageousness pretending to be comedy. It spends most of its running time, too long at almost two hours, on jokes about bodily parts and functions, drugs, the joys of slackerdom, and pratfalls, which I admit pretty much sums up my least favorite kind of comedy. So if the two examples above strike you as hilarious, kick my rating up a couple of notches and go enjoy yourself.

The parts I did enjoy were the low-key, random, off-beat moments, especially in the performances of Mark Wahlberg and, briefly Liam Neeson. The gimmick may be the talking teddy bear, but the star of the film in every way is Wahlberg, who in the midst of a slob comedy gives a performance that is so precise and witty it is close to adorable.

“Ted” was an amiably crude film about a boy named Johnny who wished that his teddy bear would come alive, like Pinocchio, or the Nutcracker. Ted does come to life and decades later, John (Wahlberg) and Ted (voiced by writer/director Seth MacFarlane), are happily still best friends, enjoying the pleasures of adulthood (sex, porn, weed, beer) while happily holding on to childhood when it comes to thunderstorms and responsibility. The happy ending of course has to be unraveled for a sequel, so we begin with John now divorced from the long-time girlfriend who gently suggested he might want to grow up, and Ted getting married to his girlfriend, Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth). After a great musical production number right out of a Busby Berkeley film, we skip ahead a year, and find Ted and Tami-Lynn bickering to the point of not speaking to one another. So, of course they decide to have a baby. This requires the assistance of a fertile male human. Ted’s first choice is, of course, Tom Brady, so he and John come up with a plan to obtain a sample without Brady’s finding out.

It does not end well, so John volunteers to provide the sample himself, leading to the scene described above. That does not work out well, either, so they try adoption, which brings Ted’s situation to the attention of the authorities. Apparently, one has to be human to adopt a child. Ted is classified as property, and is thus ineligible to adopt, work, or even be married. This being America, they find a lawyer (Sam L. Jackson — get it? played by a very game Amanda Seyfried) to go to court and have Ted declared human. This leads to a thoughtful exploration of existential ontology.

Kidding! It’s just a series of dumb situations and dumb jokes made by dumb characters in various locations, including the aforesaid fertility clinic, courtroom, and very lovely home of Tom Brady, plus a pot farm and New York Comic-Con. Giovanni Ribisi returns as the demented Donny, who conspires with the head of Hasbro (did they really consent to product placement in this film) to kidnap Ted because, oh, who cares. Certainly not MacFarlane, who makes no attempt at any kind of storyline or character. He just throws in a gross joke, pop culture shout-out, or surprise cameo (the cast of SNL! Some “Star Trek” actors! Liam Neeson, who clearly did not learn anything from his appearance in “A Million Ways to Die in the West!” Patrick Warburton in a Tick costume!) instead. Neeson is wonderful. Wahlberg is terrific. But not enough to overcome the movie’s limp, puerile, vapidity.

NOTE: Stay all the way to the end of the credits for an extra scene.

Parents should know that this film has constant very strong language with crude and explicit sexual references, sexual situations, drinking, extensive drug use, comic peril, and violence. Some of the humor is intentionally offensive. Some is is just offensive. See the thoughtful discussion of the racist themes and jokes by Wesley Morris in Grantland.

Family discussion: Is Ted human? Who should decide?

If you like this, try: “Ted” and “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”

Interview: Boaz Yakin and Josh Wiggins of “Max”

Posted on June 24, 2015 at 3:11 pm

Boz Yakin wrote and directed “Max,” the story of a weapons-sniffing military dog whose human partner is killed. So traumatized he can no longer work, he goes to live with the grieving family and is cared for by their younger son, played by Josh Wiggins. I spoke to Yakin and Wiggins about the film and got to see Jagger, one of the five dogs who play the title character, too.

“I felt like it had been a while since someone made a movie about the human/animal dog human bond in particular,” sais Yakin. “A story that was was exciting and adventurous and harkened back to some of the things that excited me when I was younger. I wanted to make a family movie but not just for kids. I approached my friend Sheldon (co-writer Sheldon Lettich), who was a Marine and a Vietnam vet. He brought the idea of making it about a MWD, a military working dog. Once that came in the family that Josh is apart of and all that just kind of started to create themselves and it all started rolling from there.”

Josh Wiggins is also experienced with dogs and has three dogs himself, a Rottweiler, a Lab and a little Chihuahua Wiener dog mix, “every level, small, medium, and large.” His father is a K-9 dog handler, who trains dogs to locate bombs. “Before I left to go shoot for the video I ran the dogs and it helped a lot. You learn how to hold the dog and how to compose yourself and stuff like that.” Then he spent some time with the dogs in the movie so they would be comfortable with each other. “Before we started shooting I went to this facility where they were training. We would run around on bikes and get into cages with them, run around trees back and forth. I love dogs, so I was very comfortable bonding with them. It’s just like with a person. When you spend months and months with someone you get pretty close to them.”

Yakin said the dog trainers were as much a part of the making of the movie as the cinematographer and stunt coordinator. “They train a lot of the animals you might see in a lot of movies. And they’re just so specific and so well organized and it really makes your life easy. The dogs respond to that kind of environment so well. It really was remarkable for both of us to see what they were able to make them do.” The two main dogs were named Jagger and Carlos, but each of the five dogs used to play the role of Max had special skills. They had to use a female dog to play Max in the fight scenes because males are not permitted to fight each other. Carlos was unpredictable but uncannily was the best “actor.” In one scene, he had to convey a new sense of respect for one of the characters and he added tip of the head that was all his own. And “there was a moment at the beginning of the movie where in order to show that he’s found the weapons, he is supposed to just sit where they are. So Carlos comes and sits and does this with his head and I was almost tempted not to yell. Like people are going to think it’s like cute dog added right you know. But in fact Carlos was just his jittery self got on the thing and went here ok and sat down on it and I went man this dog is unbelievable. He kept doing stuff like that throughout the film. So a lot of what gives Max his personality is Carlos’ personality.”

Wiggins is terrific as Justin, an unhappy kid who resents his father (Thomas Haden Church) because he is demanding and undemonstrative. And because Justin blames his father for sending his older brother, Kyle, to war. “He’s definitely overshadowed by his brother but I think there is definitely some jealousy, whether he would accept it or not, because his brother is kind of his dad’s perfect image of what a son should have been and Justin is not like that. So I think there is definitely some jealousy. I think Kyle fits in much better with his family than he does. But that doesn’t mean there is resentment towards him. It’s jealousy you know, not resentment. He has to find himself.” There are a lot of stunts in the film, as Justin and Max get involved with illegal weapons dealers. There were stunt doubles, but Wiggins said, “I did a good amount of the bike riding. All the jumps and stuff were my stunt double, Keith Schmidt, Jr., and did an awesome job with it. Of course I’m a teenager, I’ve ridden a bike before but nothing to that extent , with rocks and tree branches and all that. It was really cool to be able to go outside of my comfort zone a little bit which is the cool thing about acting. You do a lot of stuff you really wouldn’t do otherwise.”

Television veterans Church and Lauren Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) play Justin’s parents. Yakin talked about working with them. “Thomas is so close to this character. He comes from Texas and his father who is a “Great Santini”-like a military man. So in some ways the challenge for Thomas was to make something imaginative for himself in that space. For Lauren coming from where she does feeling like a part of this family was a little bit more challenging. She felt a little bit more like an outsider. It was a little bit less clear to her how to get into it. I think she marvelously managed to work her way into this situation.” But, “the whole movie hinges upon Josh,” he added. “With a movie like this it’s easy for it to slip into sentimentality in the wrong situation. You know you want it to be emotional but not sentimental and when we saw Josh’s work one of the things that really stuck me about it was that it’s perfectly appropriate for the scene, it’s honest and it has emotion in it but it never tries to hand it to an audience and it’s never sentimental. Once we know that we had that core we can cast the other kids around him.”

The movie raises some important issues about families and about the military. Yakin wanted the movie to be more than just a boy and his dog. “For me the exciting part and the challenging part is making a family movie that provokes and challenges kids to think about and feel things that they aren’t necessarily asked to think about and feel and that allows adults to enjoy it even though it’s a movie that a young person can see. It allows adults to enjoy it for what it is without just feeling like they have to be there for their kids. So we’re trying to make a movie that can provoke and challenge while entertaining because it’s an adventure movie. And this country has been at war for how many years since 1991, and it’s a pressure that’s laying over everything that we do and feel about all the time. It’s always there and while trying to make a movie that’s entertaining and fun to a degree you know this war and the pressure of what it means to be a man, an American man in an environment where your manhood and masculinity are defined by how you react by this particular stress is always on you. That to me was interesting. Making the movie, it’s a family movie and I’m not trying to lay it on too thick but being an American man in the age of constant war. What the choices are in within the Justin character. That’s what the movie is about.”