From Paris With Love

Posted on June 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm

John Travolta loves to be bad. And so he is clearly having a blast — in both senses of the word — in this film, playing a bald guy with an earring who likes to shoot first and think later. As Charlie Wax, a top ops guy who loves to break rules and mess with heads, he gives new meaning to the word trigger-happy.

If only it was as much fun for the audience. But this movie was clearly more about entertaining the star than the ticket-buyers. Wax arrives in Paris noisy and obnoxious, arguing with security about bringing his “energy drink” into the country. Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a straight-laced, chess master, embassy aide who is hoping for a promotion to black ops, slaps a diplomatic sticker on Wax’s bag to get him through. Then they are off for an odd-couple buddy-cop joy ride that involves drug dealers, terrorists, and many opportunities for shooting first and not sticking around to ask questions later. For no particular reason, Reece ends up carrying a vase filled with cocaine through many different locations like takeout.

Even by the low bar for this genre, “From Paris With Love” feels under-scripted. There are a few good set-ups from director Pierre Morel (“District B13”), including a scene in a stairwell where our updates on the action come from the bodies falling past a stunned Reece and a shoot-out in a warehouse filled with mannequins lined up like terra cotta warriors. But it misses when it asks us to take Wax even a little bit seriously as a good guy. The title’s reference to James Bond and a painful reminder of Travolta’s better days in “Pulp Fiction” just ring hollow. Return to sender.

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Shutter Island

Posted on June 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

Dennis Lehane, author of gritty crime novels like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone and one of the writers of “The Wire,” and director Martin Scorsese, best known for movies like “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” about wiseguys, hitmen, and omertas, have come together for “Shutter Island.” While it is less a crime story than a horror-tinged psychological mystery, this, too, is about murder and madness, the difficulty of separating truth from lies, about twisted motives and anguished fears, and about the devastating consequences of unthinkable pain and loss.

Set in 1954, it begins when a murderer confined to a hospital for the criminally insane has not just escaped; she has disappeared. She was in a locked cell and then she was gone.

In the midst of a huge, gusting rainstorm, two federal marshals investigate, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo). The hospital, once a Civil War fort, is on an island off the coast of Massachusetts and when the storm knocks out all power and phone lines they are completely isolated. The marshals get soaked in the rain so they change into the only dry clothes available — orderly uniforms. They begin to look as though they belong there.

The hospital is eerie. The doctors are smooth but uncooperative, with an unsettling way of diagnosing not just the patients but the marshals — they seem to think that they are the ones who are asking questions. The patients cannot be trusted. But can anyone?

To say any more about what happens would be to spoil it. So, I’ll just write a bit about about some of what goes on around what is happening to the characters.

The first is just the pure pleasure of seeing a master film-maker showing us everything in his power after a lifetime of watching and making movies. No one in history has ever been more passionate about film than Martin Scorsese and that is clear in every placement of the camera, every cut from his full partner in film-making, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and every element of the set from his “Casino” production designer Dante Ferretti. The camera tracks through the dank corridors, the blade-like steps of the circular staircase, the driving rain and sheer cliff, telling us just what Scorsese wants us to know and no more. Each shot keeps us inside Teddy’s thoughts and the shifts between the objective and subjective are handled with a consummate understanding of the language of cinema.

Next is the choice of the setting, not just the island but the era. We see Teddy frequently thinking back to his traumatic experience at the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau. Teddy and the doctors are very much of their time a crucial one in the development of psychiatric theories as three camps — surgical, pharmaceutical, and talk therapies competed with each other and this adds another layer of interest to the proceedings.

Finally, this is a movie where everything feels like a metaphor, a clue, or both at once and every single detail is a part of the story. The intricacy of the story reaches a meta-level about the power of stories — to harm and to heal. It is an expert thriller with plenty of chills and jumps and goosebumps but finally it is the questions it raises about our ability to trust the characters and our own conclusions that will haunt us.

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Based on a book Drama Thriller

Smile of the Week: Happy June!

Posted on June 2, 2010 at 3:54 pm

From “Carousel,” the musical about a carnival barker whose love for a sweet small-town girl ends in tragedy when he tries to steal some money to take care of her. He gets a chance to come back from heaven for just one day to see his daughter graduate from high school and let her know that she will never walk alone. The gorgeous music from Rodgers and Hammerstein is performed by Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae.

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Musical Smile of the Week

Alice in Wonderland

Posted on June 1, 2010 at 8:00 am

Almost 150 years ago Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson published his wildly imaginative story about Alice’s adventures down a rabbit hole. And now the wildly imaginative director Tim Burton has brought Wonderland to the 3D movie screen. It is less faithful to the original story than many of the previous dozen or so movie versions, but I think Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, would approve of Burton’s bringing his own take to the classic characters.

He brings his own story as well. Carroll’s Alice is a little girl bored by her sister’s dull book, and her journey is episodic and filled with wordplay and references to Victorian society that fill the annotated edition of the book with witty footnotes.

To make the story more cinematic, Burton tells us that all of that has already happened in what young Alice thought was a dream. This is her return visit. Alice is 18 years old and has just been proposed to by a dull but wealthy lord with no chin and bad digestion. As she meets up with the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter, she is not the only one who is confused. Characters seem puzzled and unsure about whether she is the real Alice. The Mad Hatter peers at her perplexedly. She may be Alice, and yet not quite completely the Alice they are looking for. “You were once muchier,” he tells her. “You’ve lost your muchiness.” In Burton’s version, Alice’s adventures are about her finding her “muchiness.” Her visit to Wonderland is a chance for her to understand what she is capable of and how much she will lose if she makes her decisions based on what people expect from her. As in the Carroll story, she is constantly changing size, and Burton shows us that she is really finding her place. She believes she is once again in a dream but increasingly learns that it is one she can control. By the time she faces the Jabberwock, she knows that she is in control — and that her courage and determination can create the opportunity she needs to follow her heart.

Johnny Depp brings a depth, even a poignance to the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter is utterly delicious as the peppery red queen, hilariously furious over her stolen tarts. There’s a thrilling battle, the visuals are dazzling, with references to classic book illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and the 3D effects will have you feeling as though you are falling down the rabbit hole yourself. The frame story bookending the Wonderland/Underland adventure is tedious and, oddly, less believable than the disappearing cat and frog footmen. But Burton’s re-interpretation of the classic story is filled with muchiness and the result is pretty darn frabjuous.

Spellbound

Posted on June 1, 2010 at 7:05 am

A+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
Profanity:	One very brief word
Alcohol/ Drugs:	A parent possibly impaired by drugs or alcohol at one point
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense scenes of competition
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2003

In honor of this week’s Scripps Spelling Bee finals, every family should see this m-a-r-v-e-l-o-u-s movie about the national spelling bee because it is about so much more. It is about the strength of American diversity and the commitment of this country to opportunity — the eight featured competitors include three children of immigrants (one’s father still speaks no English) and a wide range of ethnic and economic backgrounds. It is about ambition, dedication, and courage. It is about finding a dream that speaks to each individual. Most of all, it is about family — the opportunity to discuss the wide variation in styles of family communication and values is in itself a reason for every family with children to watch this movie together. Plus, it is one of the most genuinely thrilling, touching, and purely enjoyable movies of the year.

This is the true story of the 1999 National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., and especially of eight regional winners in the competition. They are: Ashley, a black girl who lives with her mother in a housing project in the city where the competition takes place, Harry, the youngest of the group, a slightly hyper kid who impulsively answers one interviewer’s question in the voice of a “musical robot,” April, whose fond but mildly befuddled parents cannot quite figure out how such a ragingly focused child appeared in their house, Angela, the daughter of an illegal Mexican immigrant who still speaks no English, Ted, a loner from Missouri, Neil, the son of Indian immigrants whose intense focus — including special spelling tutors and hours-long drills — has him the second member of the family to be a regional champion, Emily, the child of privilege, who wonders if she should bring her au pair along to the competition, and Nupur, another child of Indian immigrants, whose regional title is saluted by a sign on the local Hooters that reads, “Congradulations Nupur!”

These and 240 other contestants are all 8th grade and younger. They don’t quite understand what a heart-breakingly awkward and painful moment that is in their lives, but we do. As we watch these kids, girls towering over boys, more with braces than without, puberty’s uneven effects everywhere, many of the kids confessing that they feel all alone in their school, we see them hold on to this mastery of words eclipsing anything an adult can do as a lifeline, or maybe a flashlight, leading them to their adult selves. There were audible gasps in the theater as each new word was given to the contestants, including hellebore, terrene, logorrhea, kirtle, clavecin, heleoplankton, cabotinage, and opsimath. Half of those words are not even recognized by the spellchecker in my word processing program, but these kids, who learned how to read only a little more than half their lives ago, are able to handle an astonishing number of them. Meanwhile, some words recognizable to most college-educated adults turn out to be stumpers for the kids, sharply drawing the line between expertise and experience.

The movie is filled with brilliantly observed moments that illuminate the lives of the individuals but also the lives of all families and all dreamers. These kids, with their slightly old-fashioned area of expertise (this is the era of the spellchecker, after all, and as that list shows, these are not words likely to come up in conversation or even most college textbooks) have an engaging sense of adventure, affection, and wonder about words and language. One shows off her huge dictionary almost as big as she is and about to fall to pieces from use, and says she does not think she will ever part with it. Three boys talk about how they lost to Nupur. Ashley tells us she is a “prayer warrior” who feels like her life is a movie.

And we get to see every kind of family. All the parents assure their children that they are winners no matter what happens at the national bee, but some do so more convincingly than others. Each family has its own idea of what it means to achieve success and what they think success could mean for their future. One father hires special spelling tutors and runs constant drills. Others look on all but speechless at children whose talents seem as exotic to them as though they had sprouted feathers.

Parents should know that there are some tense and sad scenes. Children are upset when they lose (they are escorted onstage to a “comfort room”). One child uses a mildly bad word.

Families who see this movie should talk about how the families in the movie, especially the immigrant families and those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, see the importance of the spelling bee. They should talk about what it takes to be a winner in any category of achievement and how they measure their own successes (and failures).

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Searching for Bobby Fischer, based on a real-life child who became a chess champion.