Who Is Simon Miller? Family Night TV

Posted on August 4, 2011 at 8:00 am

The latest in the Family Movie Night series on NBC is Who Is Simon Miller? this Saturday, August 6, at 8/7 central. It is the story of a family discovery that the husband and father they thought they knew had another life — maybe many other lives. Stars include Loren Dean (“Say Anything” and “Mumford”) and Christine Baranski (“Mamma Mia”). It is an exciting spy story and a warm-hearted family drama. And it raises some good questions for family discussion about when it can be difficult to find the time and the right words to tell our families the things they should know — and about how getting away from our daily concerns can strengthen family bonds, even in a high-stress environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT83qkDbzQg

Some peeks behind the scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDbsCZnWeUo

For more information, check out their Facebook page. And don’t forget to hit “like” to let NBC and sponsors Wal-Mart and Proctor & Gamble know how much we appreciate good movies the entire family can enjoy.

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For the Whole Family Television

Morgan Spurlock on 50 Un-Miss-able Documentaries

Posted on August 3, 2011 at 10:40 am

Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me and Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is the host of a new series on Current called “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.” He quotes Alfred Hitchcock: “In feature films, the director is God. In documentaries, God is the director.” He will discuss the list with fellow documentarians and film experts and catch up with some of the people and stories

The shows will count down from fifty to one, eventually revealing what our panel of preeminent film critics, academics and industry insiders has chosen as the most entertaining, powerful and influential modern documentary. However, this is not your average list show. Renowned documentarian Morgan Spurlock will embark on a road trip to track down the filmmakers and characters behind some of the most remarkable moments in contemporary cinema. Along the way, he’ll meet maverick directors and eccentric contributors, travel to iconic locations and explore the impact that the documentaries have made on both their subjects and society, all the while counting down to number one.

Current will also be running some of the documentaries he recommends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1M2Elfa_cI

50 Documentaries to See Before You Die Part 1

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Crazy, Stupid, Love

Posted on July 29, 2011 at 9:55 am

This painful comedy about the agonies of love has some deftly observed moments and strong performances but its essential tawdriness overwhelms its efforts to be cuddly and life-affirming.

Everyone is miserably in love with the wrong person. Steve Carell plays Cal, married for almost 25 years to his teenage sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore), who tells him in the opening scene that she wants a divorce. Their 13-year-old son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with their 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica (the heart-twistingly vulnerable Analeigh Tipton). Jessica has a crush on Cal. Emily slept with her co-worker, David (Kevin Bacon). Cal goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and meets someone who is not miserable and not in love: Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who takes a different beautiful woman home from the bar every night. Jacob tells Cal that he lost Emily because he lost his sense of what it means to be a man. For Jacob, being a man means pitching the New Balance shoes and ill-fitting suits and manipulating women to have sex by pretending to listen to them. Cal is soon channeling his inner playa, first seducing a teacher named Kate (Marisa Tomei in a thankless role) and then a series of montaged lovelies. Meanwhile, Robbie is texting romantic pleas to Jessica and Jessica is following the advice of a classmate and taking nude photos of herself to give to Cal and Emily is dating David, whose role seems to be nice guy whose unfitness for love is demonstrated by everyone’s intended-to-be-funny-but-not-funny-at-all inability to pronounce his last name correctly.

Got that? Then, just as Jacob’s method begins to work for Cal, it stops working for Jacob. The one woman who turned him down is Hannah (Emma Stone), a recent law graduate studying for the bar exam. Circumstances lead her to return to the bar to proposition Jacob and back at his sleek bachelor pad something unprecedented happens — a night of real intimacy, talking and laughing. Now Jacob needs advice on his uncharted territory: how to be a part of a relationship that lasts more than 24 hours.

There’s an inexpressibly lovely moment as Emily calls Cal, not realizing he is right outside their house because he sneaks over at night to maintain the garden (metaphor alert). She tells him she is in the basement trying to restart the pilot light but he can see she is upstairs and just needed an excuse to call. And Stone continues to be one of the most endearingly honest, intelligent, and expressive performers on screen. She shows us how the flurry of mixed emotions she feels that first night with Jacob flicker across her face as she tries to manage her feelings of confidence and fear, longing and logic.

But that is not enough to make up for the smarminess of the story’s assumptions and the characters’ behavior. There’s an excruciating climactic scene in which two of the characters made humiliating public declarations that are intended to be gallant but come off as self-indulgent and completely inappropriate. And other than Hannah, the characters are just not very nice. Jessica keeps telling us she loves Cal because he is such a kind man and great father. Not from what we see. He shows little concern for what his children are going through with their parents’ separation or anything else they are going through. He does not know who his son’s teacher is. And he is awful to the women he sleeps with, which the movie seems to think is fine. When one of them becomes angry at him because he never called her, she is portrayed as shrewish and unreasonable. Jacob, whose only evidence of responsibility or being aware of anyone else’s needs or feelings is his decision to help Cal become a lady-killer, provides very little reason other than hotness for deserving Hannah’s love or making any effort to earn it. The film is as callous toward the one-night-stands who get tossed aside as Jacob and Cal are. There is no suggestion that someone should give them pointers on how to respect themselves enough not to fall for manipulative cads. Even worse is the treatment of the Jessica/Robbie relationship. She is, we are repeatedly told, 17. Taking nude pictures of herself to give to a man is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible signal to a prospective romantic partner but probably a crime. Giving those pictures to a 13-year-old is portrayed in the film as an act of compassionate generosity when it is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible mixed message but definitely a crime. The movie is going for a wistful romanticism. For me it was more like a pervy sociopathy.

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Cowboys & Aliens

Posted on July 28, 2011 at 6:28 pm

The last word I thought I’d be using about a movie called “Cowboys & Aliens” is “realistic,” but what I like best about this film is the way it uses the most speculative of fantasies for thoughtful exploration, not just six-guns vs. laser shooters. Perhaps “respectful” is a more appropriate term. Without any snarkiness or irony it shows us the way that frontiersmen a decade after the Civil War would rise to the challenge of an alien invasion the same way they battled nature and each other, making up in determination for what they lacked in knowledge and technology.

As co-star Brendan Wayne explained to me in an interview, we can’t make the kinds of iconic John Ford films his grandfather, John Wayne starred in because “you can’t really do cowboys and Indians without insulting history and culture.” But a fight against aliens doesn’t require any nuance or sensitivity and that makes it possible to revisit the archetypes that continue to define us as a culture in a way that is both traditional and new.

As for plot, the title says it all. A cowboy (Daniel Craig) wakes up with amnesia. He does not know who he is, where he got the injury to his abdomen, or how a strange metal cuff became attached to his arm. We learn at the same time he does that his fighting skills are excellent and he has no compunction about killing — or relieving his victim of his boots, guns, and horse. And he has eyes the color of the clear sky over the Rockies.

“What do you know?” asks the preacher (Clancy Brown) who discovers the gunman has broken into his home “English,” says the gunman. He seems to know how to survive, or at least how to recognize danger and the vulnerability of those who intend to attack him.

The preacher lives in a town where the hot-headed and arrogant son of the local rancher accidentally shoots a deputy sheriff. He and the gunman are jailed waiting for federal marshalls — or for the young man’s father. One way or the other, they will leave the jail that night.

The father, Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) arrives, determined to take his son home. The marshalls arrive to take him to federal court. And then the aliens arrive and even in this land where nothing is certain and no rules seem to apply, this is so far out of their experience they can only call the invaders “demons.”

This middle section is the most intriguing. The cowboys can’t go to Google or watch old movies to figure out what to do. They don’t have electricity or automatic weapons. They have to figure out a way to fight their demons using only the same qualities and resources they bring to staking their claim on the land.

They know how to track their prey. And Dolarhyde was a Colonel at Antietem. That means he knows military tactics. And what it means to lose his men. The gunman’s memory begins to return and they get help from some unexpected sources in time for a final battle. The film falls apart a bit here and the long list of writers and producers (including Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard) may have been a factor in a disappointing last act that shows evidence of compromise and lack of focus. The aliens themselves also seem under-imagined and the reveal of their ultimate purpose caused some laughter in the theater.

Director Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) likes to avoid CGI whenever possible, and he makes superb use of both the mechanical effects and the Western landscape. The faces of Ford and Craig are a landscape of their own and both men provide heft and a sense of resolute determination that resonates with our deepest myths and reminds us why so many of them include cowboys.

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The Smurfs

Posted on July 28, 2011 at 9:58 am

After a promising beginning with the tart but sweet romantic comedy “Never Been Kissed,” director Raja Gosnell has been mired in the quagmire of movie junk food, “family” movies like “Scooby-Doo” and “Yours, Mine and Ours.” They are the cinematic equivalent of high sugar, high fat processed food: loud, crude, special-effects-driven, cheesy, and vacuous. His updates miss both the charm and the point of the originals. While the animated “My Little Pony” is not only back on television but it is suddenly hip, this latest version of the Smurfs combines an enchanted world of magical animated characters with live-action New York City and manages to get the worst of both worlds. It tries to appeal to kids with pratfalls, potty humor, and the substitution of “Smurf” for every possible noun, verb, and adjective. It tries to appeal to adults with pointless cameos by Tim Gunn and Joan Rivers. Gunn looks around with the disappointed expression he usually reserves for those Project Runway contestants who are an hour from deadline without an idea and Rivers delivers her one line as if she is hoping her face will look as lively as the expressions of the animated characters. It doesn’t.

The Smurfs were created by Belgian comic artist Peyo (Pierre Culliford), who came up with the idea after he and a friend joked around by substituting nonsense syllables for the words in a conversation. He created a community of magical blue creatures “three apples high” called Smurfs who have adventures, fight off the evil wizard Gargamel, and say things like “Oh my Smurf!” “Smurf-zactly!” and, heaven help us, “Smurf happens.” The film-makers are so proud of that last piece of wit they used it for the URL of the movie’s website.

Children enjoy the Smurfs because they are tiny, magical, sometimes mischievous but sweet, and able to defeat their foe, a human-sized wizard named Gargamel. Kids like being able to predict what each Smurf will do, not too challenging because each one’s name, Seven Dwarf-style reflecting his sole characteristic. (The only female Smurf is called Smurfette, because being female is all you need to know about her.) Children learn what it means to be “Greedy,” “Grouchy,” “Vain,” or “Clumsy,” from the characters with those names. And listening to the way the word “Smurf” is used in the dialog is a good introduction to the way language works.

This film takes six of the Smurfs out of their animated community, with its quaint mushroom houses and soft pastel colors. Grouchy (George Lopez), Brainy (“SNL’s” Fred Armisen), Clumsy (Anton Yelchin), the inexplicably Scottish Gutsy (Alan Cummings), Smurfette (the endearingly candy-sparkle voice of pop star Katy Perry), and elder statesman Papa Smurf (Jonathan Winters) are chased by Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and his cat Azrael, who want their magical blue essence. They are all sucked through a portal that lands them in live action Central Park.

Before they can find a way to get back home, they encounter a harried marketing executive (Neil Patrick Harris) and his pregnant wife (“Glee’s” Jayma Mays), toy store F.A.O. Schwartz, an apartment, an office, a prison yard, and many, many unfunny attempts at comedy about the words “blue” and “Smurf.” Also, in a plot twist apparently lifted from every single episode of the last two seasons of “Bewitched,” the Smurfs mess up their new friend’s advertising campaign for his imperious boss (“Modern Family” bombshell Sofia Vergara) but of course somehow it turns out for the best.

The kids in the audience enjoyed the pratfalls, laughing uproariously when Gargamel got hit by a bus, and happily squealing at the gross-out humor from a disgusting hairball, a smelly port-a-potty, and a chamber pot in the middle of an elegant restaurant. They liked seeing Harris get down with the Smurfs for a rousing round of “Rock Band.” It is good to see Smurfette get a chance to show her fighting spirit, though not so good to see her stuck with a plot line about wanting new dresses, and downright disappointing to see her have to stand on a heating vent in one of them for a Marilyn Monroe joke. This must be why Gutsy is Scottish – so his kilt can billow up when he stands on the vent, too.

The movie wants us to feel affection for the Smurfs and make fun of them, too. It is is raw and mean-spirited, with too many of the “Smurf” word substitutions more naughty than nice (“Who Smurfed?” “Where the Smurf are we?”). That’s Smurfed up.

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