Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer

Posted on June 11, 2011 at 9:43 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild rude humor and language
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild comic peril, brief footage of zombie movie
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	June 10, 2011

It’s the last day of third grade and redheaded Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) is looking forward to the greatest summer ever. She has big plans for herself and her three best friends, a summer of dares and thrills and adventures. But she is crushed to discover that two of her friends have their own plans. One is headed for circus camp and the other to Borneo. Worse than that, her parents have to leave to help her grandparents move, and she will be stuck at home with her pesty, Bigfoot-obsessed brother Stink (Parris Mosteller) and an aunt she does not even know (Heather Graham as the free-spirited Aunt Opal). Instead of the best most not-boring thrilladelic summer ever, it looks to be a bummer summer all the way, death by “starvation, boredom, and Stink-dom.”

Judy has some setbacks and learns some lessons, as the fans of book series by Megan McDonald know. Director John Schultz (“Aliens in the Attic”) provides some visual bounce; it looks like a school notebook covered with glitter and stickers. But the individual episodes play like skits and there is much too much bodily function humor (lessons: don’t eat a lot of junk food and a blue sco-cone before getting on a roller coaster called the Scream Monster — or sit next to someone who did and never make your picnic sandwiches near someone who is storing Bigfoot poop). Most important, Judy comes across as a unredeemed, self-centered brat, and nothing she learns in the course of the film is about more than having fun and winning a pointless competition with your friends. These are what we call first-world problems.

Last year’s Ramona and Beezus was charming and delightful and heartwarming. Like Judy Moody, it is based on a beloved book series about a little girl in the suburbs with a free-spirited but doting aunt, with some silly adventures and lessons learned, but it is a far better film in every category. The best I can say about this one is that children will enjoy the gross-out moments and comic disasters and everyone else will enjoy looking at the very pretty Heather Graham. As a movie, though, it’s a bummer.

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Super 8

Posted on June 9, 2011 at 6:09 pm

A couple of kids who are deeply in love with making movies have made a movie about kids deeply in love with making movies, and it is one of the most joyously thrilling treats of the summer, a love letter to childhood pleasures that last a lifetime.

Producer Steven Spielberg and writer-director J.J. Abrams may be chronological grown-up, but as this movie makes clear, they could have just as much fun with a super-8 camera and a box of M-80’s. Representing them in the film are Charles (Riley Griffiths) and Joe (Joel Courtney), middle schoolers in 1979 Lillian, Ohio, who are working on a movie to enter into a competition. In that pre-digital time, they are making it with a Super-8 camera, on film that is bought and developed at the camera store. Charles is the writer and director. Joe is in charge of make-up and special effects. Cary (Ryan Lee) in charge of explosions and Martin (Gabriel Basso) is their star. It is a zombie movie. But Charles has been reading about film-making and realizes that he has focused too much on scares and special effects. An article explains that the movie works better if there is a reason to feel something for the characters, so he decides that Martin’s detective character will have a wife. And that is how Alice (the luminous Elle Fanning) joins the group.

They sneak out one night to film a scene at the train station. When a truck drives onto the tracks as the train approaches, there is a spectacular crash. The kids run, but the camera keeps filming. What it shows will be the key to solving the real-life mystery about what was on the train.

As they wait for it to be developed, increasingly disturbing developments occupy Joe’s father, Lillian’s deputy sheriff. All the town’s dogs disappear. Engines are ripped out of cars. The sheriff and a gas station attendant are missing. The army has taken control of the crash site and will not tell anyone what is going on. The adults are so distracted that the kids are able to pursue their investigation — and their film-making — almost without supervision.

It feels in the best possible sense like a newly discovered Spielberg film from the “Goonies”/”E.T”/”Close Encounters of the Third Kind” era, with its suburban setting and kids’-eye sense of wonder and adventure. The meta-humor about the film within a film (stay through the credits to see what the final version looks like) is witty and heart-warming. “Production values!” says Charles as though it is a magical incantation. Which, in a way, it is. No one understands the language of film better than these guys and their evident pleasure in the economical story-telling through visuals adds to the dazzle. A worker silently removes the “784” from the sign that says “safety is our most important goal” and replaces it with a 1. When we then see Joe sitting by himself outside, we know what happened and feel his loss. Later, he pins a lost dog notice to a bulletin board and the camera pulls back to show us the entire board is covered with notes about lost dogs. The camera is in every way a part of the masterful storytelling here.

Like Charles, Abrams and Spielberg know that all the special effects and jump-out-at-you thrills in the world won’t resonate unless we care about the people in the story. This is definitely a movie about characters. The themes of parental estrangement are not always gracefully handled, but Abrams’ ability to put us inside the children’s world is breathtaking. All of the kids are great but Courtney and Fanning are marvels. A scene where he applies zombie make-up to her face is filled at the same time with longing, amazement, and unspoken understandings and is almost unbearably tender. Best of all is the way Abrams shows us that it is not just the happenstance of the movie footage that gives the kids the unique ability to solve the mystery and get everyone home safely; it is the way that particular moment poised between childhood and growing up gives them for a brief moment the unfiltered sense of wonder that makes everything in the world a discovery of equal magnitude and a universe of endless possibilities. It is a privileged moment that he lets us share, and a rare film that makes use of genre without getting overwhelmed by it. We get all of the popcorn pleasures of the stunts and special effects but we get the deeper pleasures of a great story, masterfully told.

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Beginners

Posted on June 9, 2011 at 5:55 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some sexual content
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness:	Very sad death from cancer, loss of parents, grief
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	June 10, 2011

Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is engaged in the saddest of tasks, clearing out his late father’s home, choosing what to take, what to give away, what no one will want. He brings his father’s dog home with him, giving him a tour. “This is the bathroom,” he says. “This is the dining room, where people come and eat sometimes.” But it is clear that no one comes to eat there. Oliver, a graphic designer, is a loner and in his grief he is even more isolated from the rest of the world.

Writer-director Mike Mills (“Thumbsucker”), a graphic designer himself, based this film on his own experience. His father came out at age 74 for the first time and lived an enthusiastic and joyous life as a gay man until he died. He tells the story impressionistically, going back and forth between Oliver’s quiet, if sometimes conflicted, support of his father’s new experiences and relationships and then his illness and months after his father’s death, when he meets an actress (Melanie Laurant of “Inglourious Basterds” and “The Concert”), falls for her, and struggles to overcome his sense of loss and learn from his father’s ability to give himself wholeheartedly to a relationship. There are flashbacks, too, showing us Oliver’s spirited if complicated mother (the superb Mary Page Keller), who was married to his father for 44 years. And Oliver mingles in details of history and even cosmology as he tells us what happened. It works beautifully. Mills tells the story with delicacy and tenderness — and with humor. The best lines are given to the dog.

Christopher Plummer is outstanding as Oliver’s father Hal, who has no regrets about his marriage but is determined to make up for the time he could not be fully himself. He calls Oliver in the middle of the night to ask what kind of music he heard in a club. “House music,” he repeats, writing it down, to make sure he knows how to ask for it the next time. He has gay pride meetings in his home. He falls in love with a man and invites him to move in, understanding that his new lover will not be monogamous. Oliver’s reaction is mixed admiration, envy, and a kind of sibling rivalry, and McGregor is an understated marvel in showing us all of that and more, without a word.

After Hal’s death, Oliver goes to a costume party, dressed as Freud. He meets Anna, who has laryngitis, and communicates only through writing. A romance begins, but Oliver will have to allow himself to take the risk of loving her, and sharing himself. At work, even though he knows the client who just wants an album cover will hate it, he has insisted on submitting a series of drawings about the history of sadness. Can he make sense of his own history of sadness?

Tenderly told and exquisitely performed, this is a gentle wonder, with characters we root for and emotions we believe in.

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‘Field of Vision’ — New on Family Movie Night

Posted on June 8, 2011 at 12:00 pm

The latest in the wonderful “Family Movie Night” series from Wal-Mart and P&G is “Field of Vision,” the story of a high school football star who has to choose between his team and his conscience when he sees filmed evidence that his teammates have been bullying a new classmate.

Faith Ford co-stars as the mother of the school’s quarterback (Tony Oller). If he tells the coach what he saw, they may be disqualified from the championship game. And the camera’s footage has more secrets to reveal as well. This is an important movie for families to share as a way to talk about some very difficult subjects, not just bullying but about finding the moral courage to decide between competing loyalties. It will be available on DVD after the broadcast.

Field of Vision

The quote in the movie is from Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?

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For the Whole Family Television

X-Men: First Class

Posted on June 6, 2011 at 2:47 pm

The two most interesting aspects of the X-Men are absorbingly explored in this prequel that takes us back to the childhoods of rival mutants Magneto and Professor Xavier, played in the first three films by classically trained Shakespearian actors Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart. Professior Xavier wants to work with humans and use the evolutionary mutations that result in superpowers to promote peace. Magneto believes that the mutants are the product of an evolutionary leap forward and the sooner the humans are dispensed with, the better. While the super-powers and special effects are fun, it is this argument and the fluid loyalties of their followers is at the heart of the X-Men saga. This film takes us back to the days when the two were allies, if not friends, set in the post WWII Cold War era.

First, it gives us a glimpse of the two men as children. Magneto, then Erik Lehnsherr , is taken to a Polish concentration camp with his mother. His anger and anguish at being separated from her fuel his power to bend metal and control magnetism. He is taken to meet with a doctor who murders his mother to get him to access that power again. He is tortured to develop it further.

Charles Xavier is a British boy from a wealthy family living far from the war in Westchester, New York. His power is telepathy. And his only friend is a fellow mutant named Raven, whose natural appearance is blue and scaly but who has the power to take on any shape. Xavier (played as an adult by James McAvoy) gets a PhD in genetic mutation while Lehnsherr (played as an adult by Michael Fassbender) is exclusively focused on revenge against the doctor who killed his mother, now known as Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).

The great strength of the X-Men series is the way it taps into the feelings of all teenagers of being mutants. It is a natural part of that time of life to feel alienated and isolated, a bit horrified with the changes they are going through. Some of the best moments of the X-Men sagas are when the mutants learn for the first time that they are not alone and begin to own their strangeness and take pride in their powers. This film has a witty “outing” reference and as an origin story, it makes the most of its opportunity to show the young mutants collected by Xavier showing off for each other. The film also makes good use of its mid-century setting, hyper-accurate in the production design and slightly skewing the history to make the atomic age both a cause of the mutations and playing field for those who want a “final solution” for the human race. Lehnsherr’s views are more understandable in the context of his experiences; he has seen what happens when those who are seen as “other” are identified; they can be rounded up and killed. January Jones looks like she just walked out off the set of “In Like Flint” and her expressionless style works well for the icy Emma Frost. Bacon looks like someone who has just come from a party at the Playboy Mansion, smooth as a member of the Rat Pack in German and English. And it makes judicious use of archival footage, weaving President Kennedy’s announcements about the Cuban missile crisis into the story so effectively he might qualify for a supporting credit.

Director Matthew Vaughn gives the material a more straight-forward and conventional treatment than he did with “Layer Cake” and “Kick-Ass.” There are some sly in-jokes for the fanboys (a cameo appearance, two references to Xavier’s future baldness) but it does not have the heightened tone or self-awareness of his other work or the witty romantic fantasy of the underrated “Stardust.” Fassbender and McAvoy do their best, but he story and characters are more in service to the summer-movie special effects, which makes it fun, if not especially memorable. It is a serviceable film with moments of brightness and energy and fine performances but it never really comes alive.

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