Total Recall

Posted on August 2, 2012 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, some sexual content, brief nudity, and language
Profanity:	Some strong language (for example, s-words, one f-word)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and sustained sci-fi action and violence, shooting, explosions, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	August 3, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005LAII3A

Will the 2012 version of the story inspired by Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” erase the memory of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic from 1990? Dick’s story is about a time in the future when a company named Rekal (Rekall in the films) implants false memories to order — vacations, heroic missions, romances –and a man who tries to buy a memory only to find that his own real-life memories have been imperfectly erased and he is neither what nor who he thought he was. Both movie versions are very loose adaptations, but both, like the story, are about heroes who have no memory of their previous lives as spies and assassins until an attempt to insert a happy memory of a vacation trip inadvertently jars loose some imperfectly erased memories of another life.

The original film is fondly remembered but even its fans admit that it is cheesy, with special effects that look like cardboard compared to today’s digital enhancements. The new version has vastly better effects and a vastly better actor with Colin Farrell as Quaid (Quail in the story). He is a factory worker (jackhammer operator in the earlier film) whose dreams seem more real to him than his waking life with a beautiful, affectionate, and sympathetic wife (Kate Beckinsale as Lori, memorably played in the original by Sharon Stone).

Director Len Wiseman (the “Underworld” movies and “Life Free or Die Hard”) and production designer Patrick Tatopoulos create a dazzlingly dystopic world. If it draws heavily on the brilliant work of Syd Mead in “Blade Runner,” at least it pays homage to the best and, after all, that was also based on a Dick story about a dark future and the exploitation of imperfect memory. As in “Blade Runner,” the setting combines the decay of edifices contemporary to our time that we still think of as impressive and useful with the imposition of harshly impersonal spaces and some mind-boggling technology that is matter-of-factly ordinary for the characters who use it. The hover car and the literally hand-held phone are great fun. There are some major logical inconsistencies in the story but it works as a popcorn pleasure.

Some people have strong attachments to the original movie and embrace the cheesiness and for them this re-imagined version is unlikely to replace that memory. While it honors the earlier version, sometimes directly, sometimes with a cheeky twist, this version works just fine on its own, with well-staged chases and confrontations and even a bit of existential rumination about memory, identity, and redemption. Beckinsale’s character is more prominent than Stone’s (yes, she is married to the director, with whom she worked in the vampiric “Underworld” series as well, but it works). Bryan Cranston, Bill Nighy, and Bokeem Woodbine contribute solid performances that keep things grounded. No Mars, no turban, no “consider this a div-ausss,” but it is an entertaining, visually striking adventure with a main character you will not want to forget.

Parents should know that this film includes a great deal of intense and sometimes graphic sci-fi action, peril, and violence, with many shoot-outs and many characters injured and killed. There are some disturbing images of mutants. Characters use some strong language (mostly s-words and one f-word), drink, and get drunk. There are some sexual references and a non-explicit situation and brief nudity (a woman with three breasts).

Family discussion: How did Quaid decide who to believe? If you had a chance to buy a memory from Rekall, would you? What would it be?

If you like this, try: “Blade Runner,” also based on a story by Philip K. Dick, and the original “Total Recall” with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:06 pm

Director Rupert Sanders is known for making television commercials that look like fairy tales, with angels falling from the sky for a guy who uses Axe body spray and a boy battling samurai warriors with Excalibur to sell X-Box game consoles. With his first feature film he has made a fairy tale that looks like a commercial, with every frame filled with eye-popping images and a lot of dramatic posing. A 30 second version would have made a great commercial for perfume or skin cream. As a movie, it is just so-so, with uneven performances and dodgy pacing. After over 100 movie versions of the classic fairy tale about the girl whose lips are red as blood, skin is white as snow, and hair black as ebony and the evil stepmother who orders her taken into the woods and killed, the Disney animated version is still the fairest of them all.

Like Tarsem’s superior “Mirror Mirror,” released earlier this year, this version makes Snow White into an action heroine, leading the battle against her evil stepmother. Charlize Theron plays Ravenna, who literally bewitches a king grieving for his late wife. She murders him on their wedding night, taking over his kingdom with the help of her creepy brother/henchman Finn (Sam Spruell) and locking the young princess in a grubby tower. Ravenna cares for just one thing — eternal beauty. She swans around looking haughty in fabulous Colleen Atwood costumes that can best be described as haute predator couture, with all kinds of intricate spikes and skulls. Everything is either sharp or poisonous and laced-up tightly, with talon-like finger-armor. She stalks and flounces nicely but when it is time for her to get ferocious she is all eye-rolls and screeches, a bad version of Carol Burnett doing Norma Desmond.

Ravenna has an enormous gold mirror that looks like giant frisbee hanging on the wall, and the robed creature who lives inside assures her that she is the fairest in the land. She also gets some reassurance from skeevy Finn, with whom she shares the creepiest brother watching his sister take a bath scene since “Bunny Lake is Missing.” You also know he’s twisted from his terrible haircut, a sort of medieval mullet.

While Ravenna is bathing in thick cream and literally sucking the life out of young women, Snow White (Kristen Stewart) is still locked in the tower. For years. But she stays so pure that when the birds come to perch on her window, she does not grab and eat them. She just allows them to show her a loose nail she can use as a weapon, which comes in very handy as Finn arrives shortly to indicate some predatory tendencies and take her to the queen. The mirror guy has informed Ravenna that Snow White has come of age. Her purity is so powerful that she alone has the power to destroy Ravenna, says the mirror. But her power is so great that if Ravenna can eat her heart, she will no longer need touch-ups and refills. Her beauty will stay as it is forever.

When Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, where everything is creepy and scary and even Ravenna has no power. The only person who knows the Dark Forest well enough to bring her back is The Huntsman (no name), played by “The Avengers'” Thor, Chris Hemsworth. Ravenna promises to bring his dead wife back to life if he will capture the prisoner and he agrees to go. But Snow White isn’t the only one who gets tripped up in the forest. Sanders gets much too enmeshed in all of the tree-branches-turning to snakes-style special effects and the forest section of the film goes on much too long, with at least three too many set-ups and confrontations, including the return of Finn. And it gets worse when they emerge into a sort of Light Forest fairyland, when the story really starts to go haywire, with a whole “chosen one” theme that had people in the audience groaning. Stewart is out of her league. She is fine playing characters like the vulnerable Bella in “Twilight,” but when called on here to inspire the troops, she sounds like she is ordering pizza.

And then there are the dwarfs. It is hard to imagine that in 2012 anyone could think it is appropriate to cast full-size actors, no matter how talented and no matter how persuasive the special effects, as little people. It is a shame to see Bob Hoskins, Nick Frost, Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and others in roles that should be played by little people. By the time they show up, the plot has fallen apart, with an unnecessary love triangle and a preposterous encounter with a troll. Nearly everyone’s accents waver, some of the dialogue is truly awful, and I am certain no one in a fairy tale should ever use the word “okay.” Recasting Snow White as the hero of her own story is long overdue and production designer Dominic Watkins creates some real magic. But this is not only not the best Snow White; it’s not the best one in the last four months.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy and battle violence with many characters injured and killed, and some graphic and disturbing images including bloody wounds, bugs, and snakes. There is brief partial nudity and some scenes of a brother watching his sister bathe and then suggestively touching a young woman in a predatory manner.

Family discussion: How did Ravenna’s costumes reflect her character? How did the three drops of blood spilled by both characters’ mothers show their connection?

If you like this, try: Some of the more than 100 other movie versions of this story including the recent “Mirror Mirror” and the Disney animated classic

The Three Stooges

Posted on April 12, 2012 at 6:00 pm

I believe it was the great philosopher Curly Joe who first said that you cannot step in the same stream twice. And perhaps it was Shemp who said that you can’t go home again. Okay, that was the great ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus and the early 20th century American author Thomas Wolfe, but even the least-loved late-era members of the of the literally knuckle-headed 1930’s-1950’s comedy trio The Three Stooges would know that whatever appeal they had could never be re-created. Big time fans the Farrelly brothers came closer to the spirit of their slapstick idols with films like “There’s Something About Mary,” “Shallow Hal,” and “Stuck on You” than in this dead mackerel of an attempt to recreate a Moe, Larry, and Curly for the 21st century. Stars Chris Diamantopoulos (Moe), Sean Hayes (Larry), and Chris Sasso (Curly) have clearly studied the moves of the head-bonking, eye-poking Stooges, but they have no chemistry, poor pacing, an unsteady sense of the Stooges’ appeal, and 80 years of history separating us from the Stooges’ setting.

The original Stooges, Moe and “Curly” Howard and Larry Fine, had years of knockabout experience in vaudeville to perfect their interactions and develop an understanding of their audience. They are funny in the context of their time in their constant efforts to join the middle class and their constant creation of chaos wherever they go. But in this film, they lazily borrow the premise of “The Blues Brothers” (they have to raise money to keep the orphanage that has been their home since they were abandoned there as infants decades ago) and become entangled in a murder plot and “Jersey Shore.” Is this funny? Soitenly not.

The expected slapstick happens, but it is pretty joyless and some of the material crosses a line the Stooges would never have considered. Larry David plays a nun named Sister Mary Mengele, surely a rather arcane reference within the context of this movie and meaner and more provocative than anything in the world of the original Three Stooges. I perked up when I saw them enter a hospital, hoping for a “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine” reference, but instead there was an extended scene with Moe and Curly, dressed as nurses, aiming naked baby boys at each other to get faces full of pee. “You must be French,” Curly says to one. “That’s a lot of oui-oui.” A child becomes critically ill and it is supposed to be funny when for a moment it appears that she has died. Adoptive families and their friends will be disturbed by a scene where kids are lined up at the orphanage in front of prospective parents and are told “no wonder your parents didn’t want you.” And whose idea was it that the Stooges should become involved in a murder for hire plot as a gorgeous wife (Sofia Vergara) plots to kill her wealthy husband? Or to have Moe go on “Jersey Shore?” Or a Bob Dylan song? Or a close-up of a lion’s testicles? Or, when a character shoots a gun, the line, “I thought you were a Democrat!” Why, I oughta……

This movie is proof positive that the Stooges were three of a kind (okay, five if you count Shemp and Curly Joe — we will not speak of Joe Besser), and, definitively inimitable.

Parents should know that this film includes constant comic violence including head-slamming and eye-poking (directors come on screen at the end to warn children not to attempt the stunts at home), some crude humor including language and graphic, gross-out potty jokes, murder for hire, scary lion,and insensitive and deliberately offensive material about nuns and adoption

Family discussion: How does this version hold up to the The Three Stooges movies of the 1930’s-50’s? What are the biggest differences?

If you like this, try: the original The Three Stooges short films and visit the Stooges Museum, the Stoogeum

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Comedy Remake

Mirror Mirror

Posted on March 29, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar has found a story worthy of his ravishing visuals and the result is an enchanting update of the classic fairy tale of Snow White.

Julia Roberts is clearly having a blast as the evil queen whose hostile takeover impulse is so strong she tells us from the beginning that we are hearing her version of the story. But we know from the first moment that our heroine will be the “pretentiously named” Snow White. She does commune with a songbird as the movie opens, but this is not the Snow White warbling by the wishing well about waiting for her prince or sleeping until she is rescued with a magical kiss. Sister is doing it for herself — sword fighting, leading a brave, if diminutive, gang of marauders, and doing some rescuing of her own.

Once upon a time there was a happy kingdom filled with music and dance. But after the king remarried, he disappeared, leaving the Queen to impose higher and higher taxes on the burdened populace and lock princess Snow White (Lily Collins of “The Blind Side”) in her room. When she timidly ventures out on her 18th birthday because there is to be a party in the castle, the Queen sneers, “Is there a fire in your bedroom? Because that would be the only reason for you to leave.”

The Queen is broke and desperately need to marry a wealthy royal, and for that she needs to use all of her magical powers to continue to appear young and beautiful. Prince Alcott (“Social Network” Winklevii-portrayer Armie Hammer) looks like the answer, despite his showing up without his clothes, having been robbed in the woods by seven mysterious accordion-legged marauders. But at the costume ball, he sees Snow White in a magnificent swan dress (don’t think Bjork, think faaabulous) and instantly knows that she is the fairest of them all.

But Snow has other issues on her mind, after her first venture outside the castle shows her what a cruel and selfish ruler her stepmother has been. She becomes an outlaw, joining forces with seven men short of stature but big of heart. And the Queen, aided by her sniveling courtier (who better for that role than Nathan Lane) tries to use every bit of magic and old fashioned evil to ensnare the Prince before the magic mirror — with help from a very tight corset, a disgusting beauty ritual, and a love potion — are no longer enough.

As Tarsem and sometimes Tarsem Singh, the director has made ads, music videos (REM’s “Losing My Religion”) and films like “The Fall” and “The Cell,” all filled with richly imagined images of striking beauty. Working with production designer Tom Foden and the late costume designer Eiko Ishioka, he has created a setting that is part Maxfield Parrish, part Richard Avedon, with gorgeous elegance and panache and with insight and meaning. The mirror is wonderfully constructed out of liquid that leads to a room where the Queen consults another version of herself. The costumes are not just splendid; they are witty and character-revealing, with the Queen a peacock and Snow White a swan. Hammer is handsome and unexpectedly funny. And Collins is luminous, genuinely magical as Snow White, sweet and brave, and it is a pleasure to watch her growing understanding of the world and her ability and responsibility to make it better. He keeps the tone irreverent, but never snarky. There are some funny lines (and one unnecessary and un-funny crude joke) and some modern twists, but the heart of the story in every way goes back to the original folk tales, especially a welcome new twist near the end. The Grimm brothers might not recognize some of the details of their classic fairy tale and Disney might be surprised by a princess who does not wait for her prince to come to get things done. But the themes of honor, justice, romance, and the search for a happily ever after ending are every bit as satisfying as the original.

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A New “Flintstones” from “Family Guy’s” Seth McFarlane?

Posted on March 12, 2012 at 3:48 pm

At the SXSW festival, “Family Guy” creator Seth McFarlane told the crowd he is working on a television reboot of “The Flintstones,” a beloved 1960’s cartoon series that led to a couple of not-beloved feature films. McFarlane told the audience that the very first thing he ever drew as a child was a picture of the Flintstones and it feels good to be coming full circle. He promised it would be updated but not as edgy as “The Family Guy.”

There’s really not a lot about that show — other than the references to 1960s America, which really come through in the writing more than the visual — that needs to be changed visually and stylistically. They invented the template that we’re using in animation. We kinda want to keep it, more or less, the same.

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Animation Remake Television