The Thief and the Cobbler

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

This neglected but absolutely delightful animated musical (released in theaters as “Arabian Knight”) is a must for family viewing.

A shy cobbler and a plucky princess save ancient Baghdad in this fairy tale, put together by the Oscar-winning animator from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” It is one of the most visually inventive animated movies ever made, with dazzling optical illusions and shifts in perspective. Jennifer (Flashdance) Beals and Matthew (Ferris Bueller) Broderick provide the voices for the leads, with the late Vincent Price’s voice providing silky menace as the evil sorcerer. Jonathan Winters as the hilarious thief steals every scene he is in.

The musical numbers are pleasant, with one sensational show-stopper when the desert brigands explain that if you don’t go to school you’ll turn out like them. Unlike the recent Disney movies, this was not designed to sell merchandise, just to tell a story and entertain, which it does very, very well. It is suitable for everyone except maybe the smallest children, who might be frightened by the hulking bad guys.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

Four couples sort out their romantic entanglements in Shakespeare’s most magical love story. Hermia and Lysander love each other, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. Demetrius loves Hermia, but is loved by her friend Helena. When Hermia and Lysander run off together, Helena tells Demetrius, and he chases after them, with Helena chasing him. Meanwhile, as the four lovers wander in an enchanted forest, the fairy queen and king argue over custody of a changeling child. The local Duke prepares for his marriage to a woman who seems not entirely sure she wants to marry him, and a group of workmen rehearse a play to perform at the wedding celebration.

With the help of his mischevious companion, the fairy king obtains the juice of a magical flower that causes people to fall in love with whomever they first see after they wake up to his queen and to Lysander and Demetrius. The queen falls in love with a man who has a donkey’s head. Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with the neglected Helena, forgetting all about Hermia. But by morning, everything is sorted out, and the wedding festivities end with the workmen’s remarkable play.

Filmed several times before, most famously with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as the Puck, this sumptuous version manages to be both earthy and enchanted. The cast includes Hollywood royalty (Michelle Pfeiffer as Fairy Queen Titania, theater-trained performers (including Ally McBeal’s Calista Flockhart and and Kevin Kline, magnificent as Bottom the would-be actor), international stars Sophie Marceau and Rupert Everett, and “new vaudevillian” and MacArthur genius grant award-winner Bill Irwin. The resulting mix of acting styles clashes at times, as does the mix of music and the switch of setting from ancient Athens to 19th century Tuscany, arias and all. Ultimately, though, it is charming, an accessible introduction to the works of that guy in the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Parents should know that there is some earthiness (including an inexplicit scene of Puck relieving himself, some brief nudity, and Hermia’s firm resolve not to have sex with Lysander until they are married).

Kids will enjoy the movie more if they have some basic introduction to the plot. They may want to talk about an era in which a father could order his child to marry the person he chose, about “the course of true love,” and how people work out the problems in relationships. Older kids may like to talk about the metaphor of an enchanted forest as a place to find self-knowledge and to resolve issues.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton version of “Taming of the Shrew” and the Franco Zeffirelli version of “Romeo and Juliet.”

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Based on a play Drama Romance

Diamonds

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

Kirk Douglas plays Harry, an aging boxer recovering from a stroke, who wants to retreive some lost “magic diamonds” he once hid in Reno. So he sets off in a Thelma and Louise-style vintage convertible with his son (Dan Ackroyd) and grandson (Corbin Allred). And you haven’t seen many movies if you don’t guess that some major bonding is accomplished and some long-standing family wounds are healed along the way.

We want to like it. There’s a reason that road movies that feature both adventure and reconciliation are so popular, and of course we’re rooting for Kirk Douglas’ recovery from a stroke even more than for the character’s. And every so often it captures us with a genuine moment of humor or connection between the characters. But far more often it gets in its own way, especially with attitudes about drinking, smoking, fighting, and women that were out of date when the yellowing clippings in Harry’s scrapbook were first printed.

Parents should know that this movie originally received an R rating, but the MPAA backed down after Kirk Douglas lodged a complaint. They should have kept it an R. Nearly a third of the movie is set in a brothel, cutting back and forth between the sexual encounters of the three generations. While there is no nudity, the discussions of the encounters are explicit. Drinking, smoking, fighting, sex, and drug use are casually used as positive indicators of maturity and masculinity. A father takes his underage son to the brothel as an introduction to sex.

Families whose teens do see the movie might want to talk about the struggle Ackroyd’s character has to be the father he wishes his own father had been, the importance of letting people know that you love, respect, and support them, and how it feels to be suddenly alone and disabled.

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Drama Family Issues

Life is Beautiful

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

This Oscar-winner for Best Actor and Best Foreign Film is a “fable” is about a father’s love for his wife and son in the midst of the Holocaust. Writer/director Roberto Begnini stars as a Chaplinesque character who charms a beautiful teacher by creating a world of gentle magic around them. The first half of the movie is their sweet love story, with only faint foreshadowing of the tragedies that lie ahead.

But then Begnini and his wife and child are sent to a concentration camp. To protect his son’s life, he teaches him to hide from the guards during the day. To protect his son’s heart, he constructs an elaborate fantasy that they are participating in a very difficult contest to win the ultimate prize, a real tank. And his son finds that this make sense, and he goes along with it.

This movie inspired a lot of controversy from people who said that it was an inaccurate portrayal of the Holocaust, and that it was wrong to set a comedy, even a gentle bittersweet one, in a concentration camp. But the movie is never less than respectful of the suffering during the Holocaust, and of the impossibility of any kind of real portrayal of that experience. Even “Schindler’s List” is not a portrayal of the Holocaust. That experience is fundamentally incomprehensible. The best we can hope for from art is that it gives us glimpses. This movie gives us such a glimpse, but it is really about love, and the indominability of humanity even in the midst of inhumanity.

We often see in life and in movies that people react to extreme adversity by magnifying whatever sense of control they have left — think of Mrs. Van Dam’s focus on her coat in “The Diary of Anne Frank,” absurd in light of the fact that they never go outside, so she has no real need for a coat, but important because somehow she has chosen the coat as a place to locate her sense of herself as not having lost everything. In “Life is Beautiful,” the father focuses on his special talent for creating a feeling of magic to protect his son from the worst reality of the Holocaust, the sense of utter betrayal. Very importantly, he gives his son a sense of control, by letting him think that he has made the choice to participate in the contest. And knowing that he has kept his child’s faith intact gives him a sense of control, and purpose, that keeps him going.

This is an excellent movie for families to watch together, to discuss not just the historical framework but challenges that parents face when they see their children learn about tragedy and unfairness.

Pleasantville

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

In “Dave” and “Big” screenwriter Gary Ross gave us characters whose innocent honesty and goodness revealed and transformed the adult world. Now, as both screenwriter and director of “Pleasantville,” he has created teen-aged twins who are transported into an idyllic black and white 1950’s television sitcom where everything is perpetually sunny and cheerful, married couples sleep in twin beds, the basketball team never loses, and messy complications simply don’t exist. Tobey Maguire (David) and Reese Witherspoon (Jennifer) are well aware of the messy complications of the modern world. David has retreated into reruns of “Pleasantville,” a television show that makes “Andy of Mayberry” and “Father Knows Best” look like hard-hitting docudramas. And Jennifer is something of a self-described “slut.” When a mysterious TV repairman played by “Andy of Mayberry’s” Don Knotts gives them a magic remote control, David and Jennifer find themselves transformed into Pleasantville’s Bud and Mary Sue. As the twins interact with Pleasantville’s black and white world, they cannot help revealing its limits and ultimately transforming it. “Mary Sue” mischeviously introduces the concept of sex to her high school classmates, and then, more sensitively, to her Pleasantville mother (Joan Allen). “Bud” tells them about a world where the roads go on to other places, where the weather is not always sunny and mild, where people can decide to do things differently than they have before. As the characters open themselves up to change, they and their surroundings begin to bloom into color, in one of the most magical visual effects ever put onto film.

But some residents of Pleasantville are threatened and terrified by the changes. “No colored” signs appear in store windows. New rules are imposed. When the twins’ Pleasantville father (William H. Macy) finds no one there to hear his “Honey, I’m home!” he does not know what to do. He wants his wife to go back to black and white.

At first, Jennifer thinks that it is sex that turns the black and white characters into color. But when she stays “pasty,” she realizes that the colors reveal something more subtle and meaningful — the willingness to challenge the accepted and opening oneself up to honest reflection about one’s own feelings and longings.

High schoolers may appreciate the way that the twins, at first retreating in different ways from the problems of the modern world, find that the rewards of the examined life make it ultimately worthwhile. Topics for discussion include the movie’s parallels to Nazi Germany (book burning) and American Jim Crow laws (“No colored” signs), and the challenges of independent thinking. NOTE: parents should know that the movie contains fairly explicit references to masturbation (and a non-explicit depiction) and to teen and adulterous sex.

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Drama Family Issues Fantasy