Posted on May 14, 2015 at 8:00 am
Queen Latifah plays blues singer Bessie Smith in a new movie premiering on HBO May 16, 2015. Monique co-stars as Ma Rainey.
Here is the real Bessie Smith.
Posted on May 8, 2015 at 3:14 pm
Happy 100th birthday to the writer/director/star of one of the greatest films of all time, Citizen Kane
Turner Classic Movies has a great tribute to Mr. Welles every Friday this month, with some of this best and least known films, hosted by one of my favorite critics, David Edelstein.
Don’t miss:
And don’t forget: “The Stranger,” “The VIPs,” “Chimes at Midnight,” “F for Fake,” and pretty much everything else Welles ever worked on.
Posted on May 7, 2015 at 5:57 pm
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | Middle School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, including some violent and sexual situations |
| Profanity: | Some strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, smoking |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Gang rape, child abuse and child homelessness, war scenes |
| Diversity Issues: | A theme of the movie |
| Date Released to Theaters: | May 8, 2015 |
Christina Noble is an Irish woman known as “Mama Tina” to thousands of Vietnamese children and their families. Her own childhood was one of poverty, abandonment, loss, and hardship, but her resilience and determination led her to give children half a world away the help she never had herself. This film tells her improbable story and conveys her endless charm, her engaging spirit, and the extraordinary difference that one person can make in the world.
Noble is played by three different actresses to show us her life as a child, a teenager and young mother, and as a woman in her 40’s, her children grown, who follows a dream to go to Vietnam and help the homeless children of Vietnam. We first see her skipping school at age 10 to sing Doris Day songs in a bar (played by Gloria Cramer Curtis), and running from the truant officer. Her mother dies and her father all but abandons the children who are eventually split up. Christina ends up at a convent school. As a teenager, she is played by the radiant Sarah Greene (“Penny Dreadful”), and undergoes a second cruel abandonment by her father, a gang rape, a pregnancy, and then is forced to give up her child through the same kind of forced adoption program documented in “Philomena.” She finally falls in love, gets married, and has more children, but her husband is cruel and abusive.
The story moves back and forth in time to give us a greater understanding of Christina’s courage and of her faith in God, in her purpose, and in her ability to make something better out of what she has. Irish star and stand-up comedian Deirdre O’Kane (“Moone Boy”) gives a smashing performance as the grown-up Christina, fearless and always frank, whether confronting a child molester, getting a smile from a dour desk clerk, asking for money from every corporate representative trying to do business in Vietnam or challenging God to do a better job or at least get out of her way and let her get on with it. And her indomitable spirit and merry heart make this remarkable story vivid, true, and touching.
Parents should know that this film includes themes of deprivation and abuse, including the loss of a parent, abandonment, gang rape, child molestation, child homelessness, and a character being forced to give up her child. There is some strong language, drinking, and smoking.
Family discussion: Why was helping the homeless and orphaned children of Vietnam so important to Christina Noble? What made it possible for her to survive the loss, abandonment, and abuse of her early years? How can you learn to be more resilient?
If you like this, try: Noble’s book, Bridge Across My Sorrows
Posted on May 7, 2015 at 5:51 pm
Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon are both talented, beautiful actresses with savvy business acumen and strong entrepreneurial energy. Witherspoon’s accolades in 2014 included more than a Best Actress Oscar nomination for “Wild.” She also produced it, and another Oscar-nominated film, “Gone Girl.” Both Witherspoon and Vergara produced the vastly less ambitious “Hot Pursuit,” a high-concept, low-octane road movie filled with chases and shrieking that cannot disguise the soul-numbing vacuousness of its screenplay.
Our fun couple consists of Cooper (her first name is a who-cares third act reveal), a by-the-book, second-generation cop played by Witherspoon, and Mrs. Riva, the wife (and very quickly, widow) of a Colombian drug dealer, with ethnic attributes less subtle than Charo crossed with the Frito Bandito. She keeps hanging on to her roller bag filled with sparkly stilettos.
Cooper has a lot to prove when she gets her first chance in the field after a mishap involving the tasering of a teenager who yelled “Shotgun” because he wanted the front passenger seat in a car. When Riva and her husband need police escorts to court so they can testify against the big drug kingpin, Cooper gets assigned to Mrs. Riva. But before they can leave the Riva’s home, two different sets of assassins show up, one pair masked.
I wonder if they will turn out to be people Cooper did not realize were untrustworthy! We haven’t seen that before!
Cooper and Mrs. Riva are very different people with very different views of the world and very different goals. The one goal that they share is not getting killed. After an APB is issued for their capture, they go on the run, arguing, hiding out, stealing, abandoning, and crashing vehicles, and all kinds of exhausting and unfunny hijinks.
It is particularly disappointing that this movie was produced and directed by women. If men foisted so many lazy jokes about Vergara’s lush figure on an audience looking for a little light entertainment, we’d decry them for sexism. Well, if the sparkly shoe fits….
Parents should know that this film includes crime and law enforcement violence, with characters injured and killed, peril, chases, explosions, drugs and drug dealing, strong language, sexual references, and some gender and sexual humor.
Family discussion: Does this movie make fun of stereotypes or perpetuate them? When did the characters’ views about each other change?
If you like this, try: “Outrageous Fortune” and “Midnight Run”
Posted on May 7, 2015 at 5:41 pm
C-| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for some language, drug use and brief sexuality |
| Profanity: | Some strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, drugs, and drug overdose |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Battle scenes, extended discussion of war dead |
| Diversity Issues: | None |
| Date Released to Theaters: | May 8, 2015 |
If only salutory intentions and one good performance could save a film so fundamentally wrongly conceived. “Bravetown” starts out as “Footloose,” veers into “Ordinary People,” and ends up as “Swing Kids,” with jaw-dropping shifts in tone and focus and total misreading of the import of its message.
It really is a shame, because it has a good heart and an important point to make about the devastation of small towns with very little opportunity but a lot of patriotic spirit, and the devastation when so many of the town’s young men go to war. And the always-welcome Josh Duhamel as always gives a performance of enormous heart and intelligence. He plays Alex, the small town’s psychiatric social worker assigned to Josh Harvest(!) (Lucas Till), a sulky teenager who has been sent to live with his father following an accidental drug overdose.
Josh barely knows his monosyllabic father (“That Thing You Do’s” Tom Everett Scott). And the log cabin in the small, depressed North Dakota town is the other side of the world from Josh’s life as a hot — and usually high — young DJ, living with a single mom (Maria Bello) who struggles with substance abuse. Josh’s entire life is music, having sex with his girlfriend, and watching “Platoon” while smoking weed. Until he takes one pill too many and finds himself in court one time too many. Thus, a one-way ticket to a town called Paragon, where the only place that seems to do any business is the recruiting office.
It follows the “Footloose” formula closely at first. The Chris Penn role of only local kid who will talk to him is played by Jae Head (“The Blind Side”). It’s a little weird that he looks about eight years younger than Josh and begins by talking about how pretty his sister is, how she just broke up with her boyfriend, and how she’s in a dance team that is terrible. It is a lot weirder when Josh decides to attend the school dance and the dance team gets up to perform and they are, in fact, terrible, and then, as soon as Josh gets behind the turntables and starts spinning, they magically snap into shape instantly develop a whole new perfectly synchronized routine.
I am not kidding. I mean, even in “Footloose” and “Flashdance” and all of that genre, we at least get to see them practice and slowly get better.
And then it gets really crazy.
Back to the “Footloose” template: The sister (Kherington Payne as Mary) is pretty but troubled and has a dead brother. Her ex-boyfriend likes to hit people and tells Josh to stay away from her. Mary takes Josh to her special place, in this case a tribute to the young men the town has lost to war.
And for the “Ordinary People” part: Alex is an offbeat but insightful therapist who gains the trust of the recalcitrant Josh by letting him spend their court-ordered time watching soccer and eating pizza. These are the only scenes in the film that have any warmth.
Alex, like everyone else in town, is hurting, too. So is Mary’s depressed mother, played by Laura Dern. She seems to be relegated these days to struggling mother roles but is always watchable in them.
Things go completely nuts when we get to the dance team competitions, with a couple of disturbingly clueless examples of cultural appropriation. The Indian (as in Asia, not America) dance number is insensitive, but even worse is the one that has the group dressed up in sweat suits and gold chains like one of those awful fraternity “ghetto” parties.
And then it gets really really crazy as the teenagers start telling the grown-ups what’s wrong and it affects them the way Josh’s magical DJ-ing affected the dance team. Instant cure! Followed by the most insanely mis-imagined — wait for it — dance number on film since the Swing Kids fought Hitler with some swell big band music.
Parents should know that this film has some strong language, an explicit sexual situation, drinking and drug use, some racial and cultural insensitivity, bullies and fighting, wartime battle scenes and discussion of casualties and fatalities.
Family discussion: Why did Alex watch soccer games with Josh? Can you think of a time when you wished you had shared more about yourself?
If you like this, try: the “Step Up” movies, “Footloose” and “Flashdance”
