We Live in Time

Posted on October 17, 2024 at 5:28 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Rated R for language, sexuality, and nudity
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Cancer and cancer treatment, sad death of a parent, car accident with injuries
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 18, 2024

“We Live in Time” tries so hard to be a better movie that it seems churlish to point out that it just isn’t. The movie goes back and forth between three different time periods in the relationship of guy with soulful eyes and a boring job with a cereal company Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and successful and very creative chef and life force Almut (Florence Pugh). If it was told in a straightforward chronological manner with less talented and charismatic actors, it would just be a soapy second-rate streamer.

But it is told elliptically, so at the very beginning of the film, before the “how did they meet” and rest of the backstory, we learn that Almut has cancer for the second time. She knows how brutal the treatment will be and this sets up the existential questions of the movie: will/should she choose quantity of time or quality of time? How will she make the time she has meaningful? This sets the stakes, and then we go back to learn their story. This is where the movie star gloss may keep audiences from noticing that there is less than meets the eye.

Tobias, in something of a daze as he tries to sign divorce papers in a hotel room, leaves in a bathrobe to find a working pen and is hit by a car when he wanders onto a highway. Almut is the driver. This is one of the most contrived and least appealing meet-cutes in movie history, especially factoring in an awkward misunderstanding about Tobias’ marital status.

Almut has her own restaurant, specializing in Bavarian-English fusion cuisine. This is one of the many details in the movie that are intended to be meaningful and/or character-defining but are not. We do not understand why her job is important to her or what it reveals about her, and the same goes for a mid-movie revelation to us and Tobias about something she excelled at in her teens and then left behind. Tobias has a job that seems meaningless to him. We suspect it may be lucrative or demanding, but none of that matters to the story. Nor does his brief description of what happened to the wife he was divorcing the night Almut ran into him. His job in the story is to have his eyes well up with tears and be lop-sidedly supportive of his wife, and Garfield does as much with that as a top-level movie star can do.

The primary indicator signaling the different time periods is Almut’s hairstyle and where they live. We see them meet. We see her first diagnosis, when she is given a choice between lowering the risk of recurrence or keeping the possibility of giving birth. We see her pregnancy and the emotional and hilarious childbirth in an unusual location. And then we go back to what she does after the second diagnosis and the strain it puts on her marriage. But even with the existential questions about what we do with the time we have and how we cope with terrible loss, the movie does not earn its jumbled storyline, which is more confusing than illuminating. More important, the screenplay is not up to the level of its vastly talented and charismatic stars.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, explicit sexual references and situations, nudity, cancer and cancer treatment, the sad (offscreen) death of a parent, and a car accident with injuries. Characters drink alcohol.

Family discussion: Almut was faced with two difficult decisions following her diagnoses. What do we learn about her from the choices she made? What did she learn about herself? What does the final scene tell us about Tobias?

If you like this, try: “Love Story,” “Terms of Endearment,” and the stars’ comic book movies, “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Black Widow“

My Old Ass

Posted on September 19, 2024 at 5:19 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language throughout, drug use and sexual material
Profanity:	Very strong language used by teens and an adult
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Reference to sad death, some family conflict
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 20, 2024

I don’t think there is a sadder sentence than this one: “I thought I would always be able to go back.”

We all know that feeling, captured memorably in the last act of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” When Emily gets a chance to revisit a day from her early teen years, the mingled joy, nostalgia, and regret for taking every part of that life for granted are overwhelming. Something like that happens to Elliott (a terrific Maisy Stella) on her 18th birthday. Instead of dinner with her family, Elliott (a terrific Maisy Stella) goes off with her friends for a celebration involving some sketchily-sourced mushrooms. While her friend Ro (Kerrie Brooks) dances and her friend Ruthie (Maddie Zeigler) zonks out, Elliott has a conversation with…her future self (Aubrey Plaza), age 39.

If you were 18, what would you ask your future self? (Don’t ask for stock tips; that’s off limits.) If you had a chance to talk to your 19-years-younger self, what advice would you give? If you were 18, what advice would you take?

Elliott’s family owns a cranberry farm in a spectacularly beautiful section of Canada. But all she can think about how how excited she is to be leaving — she is about to go to college in Toronto and she has a been dreaming of the excitement of independence in a big city for as long as she can remember. Her middle brother, Max (Seth Isaac Johnson) loves the farm and is happy to be the one to take it over when his parents retire, but Elliott cannot wait for what she considers her real life to begin.

Older Elliott has had almost two decades of that “real life.” The wonderful Aubrey Plaza does not often get a chance to show the kind of warmth she does here, and it is a pleasure to see. Her 39-year-old Elliott is fragile in a way the younger version is not. She insists she is happy with her life (and proud to be a near-40-year-old PhD student) but she has clearly experienced some difficult times. The least successful moments in the film are a few brief indications that humans have had some setbacks in the next 29 years. They seem to be from an earlier draft that someone forgot to leave out.

The one very clear piece of advice older Elliott is very firm about is telling her younger self to stay far away from anyone called Chad. This is a mystery because younger Elliott has no idea who that might be and she is exclusively attracted to girls, so she cannot imagine how anyone named Chad might be a problem.

And then Chad (Percy Hynes White) suddenly appears, as Elliott is skinny dipping in a pond. He is her parents’ summer hire for the farm. And he is…irresistible. Despite her promise, despite her resolve, despite her fundamental notion of herself as exclusively gay, his patient kindness and “symmetrical face” are intoxicating.

Older Elliott has somehow managed to put her phone number in younger’s cell (as My Old Ass), so they are able to have some conversations and text exchanges, and older keeps reminding younger to have nothing to do with Chad. She also tells younger to be nicer to Mom (a lovely Maria Dizzia) and her brothers. For those last few days before she leaves for college, younger Elliott takes time to realize how much she has at home and how much she will miss everyone and everything. One of the toughest parts of growing up is realizing that you will not always be able to go back, and, as Emily says in “Our Town” that no one is able to appreciate it while it is happening. “My Old Ass” conveys all of this with welcome heart and humor.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, teenage drug use, and sexual references and situations.

Family discussion: What would you tell your younger self? What would you ask your older self?

If you like this, try: “17 Again”

Twisters

Posted on July 17, 2024 at 1:33 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense action and peril, some language and injury images
Profanity:	Some strong la

24 years ago, a cow flew across the screen and “Twister” became an instant summer movie classic. “Twister” had the magical combination of romance and action with then-state-of-the-art special effects, a human storyline just hefty enough to add urgency without disrupting the real reason we’re there (see above: flying cows), and two future Oscar-winners, Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman, along with Bill Paxton, Carey Elwes, and Lois Smith, who adeptly set the tone at the sweet spot between drama and melodrama.

The ingredients that made that storyline work were the ideal recipe: take one pair of parted lovers (the about to divorce storm chasers), some human conflict to unite them (Elwes’ arrogant rich guy), and some beyond-human conflict to unite them even more (see: the title, reference to the ). Add in one newbie to be the receptacle for exposition dumps and for us to look down to even though in real life we would be even more terrified (Jami Gertz, rising above a thankless role). Result: almost half a billion dollars in worldwide box office. Also result: a somewhat sequel, trying to rekindle the magic.

It begins with a nod to the original, which ended (spoiler alert) with the Hunt and Paxton characters successfully launching “Dorothy” (yes, a reference to the Kansas girl who was whisked to Oz via twister). Dorothy was dozens of little data-collecting chrome balls that provided previously unavailable information about the structure of these terrifying, vastly destructive storms. Tornadoes, for those who did not pay attention during the exposition part of the first film, are violently rotating columns of air that reach both the surface of the Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. They look like a stormy vortex in the distance, they travel very fast, and they cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to property and crops every year. As briefly acknowledged in this new film without any suggestion of climate change as the precipitating (in both senses of the word) factor, the number of storms is increasing.

The opening of “Twisters” takes place five years ago, when a much-too-cheerful and therefore much-too-risk-taking group of students is still working with the Dorothy machine. It is led by Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who is a scientist but also has something of a second sense about storms and the direction they will take. She is hoping to get a grant to help her not just understand twisters but to extinguish them, using the same ultra-absorbent material found in disposable diapers. The group is much too adorable and foolhardy to be there for any purpose but to teach our heroine a very painful lesson. The only survivors are Kate and Javi (Broadway’s Anthony Ramos of “Dumb Money” and “In the Heights”).

In the present day, Kate lives in New York, with businesslike clothes and hair. Her only connection to twisters is safely via computer screens. Javi shows up with some new technology developed by the military. He wants her to come with him to get the first 3D mapping of what goes on inside the twister vortex. At first she says no, but when he reminds her of how many lives can be saved, she agrees to join him in Oklahoma for a week.

There they run into hotshot YouTube stars and self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his ragtag gang, who seem to be out there for thrills and likes. Poncho-wearing fans happily buy their merch and track them as they track the storms with go-pros, a drone, and fireworks they shoot up inside the vortex for fun.

“Twisters” gently updates the technology to the era of cell phones and MRIs, noting that these days “anyone with a $10 weather app” can be a storm chaser. The insertion of a class developer villain making “all-cash offers” to the locals is clumsier. Should they have the option to go somewhere else? And what is he going to do with land that has driven long-time residents out due to extreme weather hazards? While we’re on the subject, shouldn’t there be more storm shelters in these communities?

Like the original, this film lightly sprinkles the emotions of the characters just enough to keep us going between the special effects. The role of exposition dump character this time is played by Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), a British journalist who is writing about Tyler’s group. Instead of former spouses, Kate and Javi are former colleagues sharing some survivor guilt and Kate and Tyler are in the classic Pride and Prejudice dynamic as they discover their first impressions (BTW the original title of P&P) are not accurate. Oh, if only we had super-powerful military-grade diagnostic machines to examine each other.

We also have a wise and kindly older family member to visit for some moments of respite, in this case, replacing the wonderful Lois Smith in the original, and here the also wonderful Maura Tierney as Kate’s mother.

So, let’s get to what really matters: how about the special effects? They are excellent. Cows do not fly, but a lot does, including large vehicles and roofs. A wind farm is an especially good spot to let us see the impact of up to 360 miles per hour. If there is less excitement on screen, it is due to CGI fatigue in the audience, not the believability of what we see. (Steven Spielberg is one of the producers.)

“Twisters” will not rise to the level of its predecessor, but it is an entertaining summer popcorn pleasure that will continue to build Powell’s stature as one of Hollywood’s most appealing young stars.

Parents should know that this movie has extended and sometimes very scary action sequences of the most severe weather. Characters are injured and killed and there are some graphic images.

Family discussion: What was your first thought when you saw Tyler and his crew? What’s the difference between a tamer and a rustler? How do you know when fear should push you forward?

If you like this, try: “Twister” and documentaries like “Stormchasers” and the Nova episodes “Oklahoma’s Deadliest Tornadoes” and “Deadliest Tornadoes”

Fly Me to the Moon

Posted on July 11, 2024 at 12:12 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and smoking
Diversity Issues:	Issues of perception, expectations, and treatment of women
Date Released to Theaters:	July 12, 2024

Unless you care more about historical accuracy than a rollicking good story, I think you will really enjoy this movie, one of the most purely entertaining films of the year. And some of it is even true.

There are many places to get the real story of the moon landing. This has some of the story right, and some enhanced for dramatic, comedic, and romantic purposes, all of which are very well served.

Scarlett Johansson, who also produced, plays Kelly, an advertising executive who has the right combination for success in that field: she always understands her market/target/audience and she will say or do whatever it takes on its behalf. She can spin anything and that includes selling her own services.

She is approached by a mysterious man who says his name is Moe Berkus ( Woody Harrelson) and that he works for President Richard Nixon. John F. Kennedy promised an American man on the moon by the end of the decade and the end of the 60s is approaching. For the politicians, this is an essential achievement for the Cold War battle for supremacy of capitalism and democracy. If that sounds more like branding than public policy, you understand why, in the midst of some of the most divisive and troubled years of the 20th century, someone might decide that what NASA needed was an expert in marketing. After all, selling a product, whether breakfast cereal, car, or the space program, is about making the product real, immediate, personal, and aspirational. Kelly and her assistant arrive in Cocoa Beach, ready to sell the moon.

You could say the people in NASA were not happy about this, but perhaps a better term would be horrified. Their culture is about secrecy (national security), science, and control. The person in charge is Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) and he does his best to discourage Kelly. In other words, the ideal set-up for romantic sparks, and when it’s Tatum and Johansson, it’s more like fireworks. They are wonderful together.

The sharp, witty, and wise screenplay is by third-generation Hollywood writer Rose Gilroy (her grandfather was “The Subject Was Roses” screenwriter Frank Gilroy and her parents are Dan Gilroy of “Real Steel,” “Kong: Skull Island,” and “Nightcrawler” and Rene Russo). It skillfully balances the romantic comedy with the dramatic themes and the inherent tension in the goal everyone is working toward. Even if we know that indeed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will indeed walk on the moon the question of public support, we get caught up in the surprising challenges along the way. Who could guess that having astronauts sell watches, cars, and underwear — and, of course, Tang — would make them so relatable Americans would start to root for them? What will they have do and which Senators will they have to persuade to get the funding they need? Is there a way to sell space not as a distraction but as an unassailable story of American heroes and know-how?

Cole and Kelly have real differences that give this film a welcome depth. Both on the personal and professional level, the issue of what the truth is and how and when to tell it is presented thoughtfully and with the complexity it deserves, but it is never pedantic or preachy. Jim Rash plays a temperamental commercial director Moe insists join the team to make a back-up for the broadcast. The stunning technological innovations from a group of engineers with an average age of 26, working to solve the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the history of the world, in a building tall enough to enclose four Statues of Liberty on each other’s shoulders.

And there is a wonderful black cat. Plus Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost, in a brief, funny cameo. This movie is romantic, funny, exciting, and meaningful, filled with joy, honoring the heroes of the voyage to the moon for their dedication, innovation, and courage. And it has heartwarming compassion for the vulnerability of its characters that resonates with us long after the movie is over.

Parents should know that this film has some strong language, references to criminal behavior and a shooting in self-defense. For historical accuracy, there is a lot of smoking and a character talks about the impact on his health.

Family discussion: Who changes more, Cole or Kelly? Who is currently in the International Space Station today? Would you like to go to the moon? Visit the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, where you can touch a real moon rock and see the NASA capsules.

If you like this, try: Other films about the Apollo 11 program, including “The Dish,” “Hidden Figures,” “First Man,” Tom Hanks’ excellent miniseries, “From the Earth to the Moon,” and the documentaries “Earthrise” and “Apollo 11”

The Lost City

Posted on March 24, 2022 at 5:49 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended peril and violence, leeches, chases, explosions, guns, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 25, 2022
Date Released to DVD:	July 25, 2022

Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first thing. Yes, “The Lost City” is a lot like “Romancing the Stone,” the 1984 action/comedy/romance movie starring Kathleen Turner, Michael Douglas, and Danny DeVito. Both movies are opposites-don’t-attract-and-then-do stories about shy, bookish-but-beautiful stay-at-home romance novelists who end up on wild jungle adventures with handsome men who are not entirely heroic. Both feature colorful third leads and bad guys scary enough to make the moments of peril exciting.

And that’s a pretty great combination, isn’t it? Especially with four delectable stars at the top of the game: Oscar-winners Sandra Bullock and Brad Pitt plus Channing Tatum and Daniel Radcliffe. Do not listen to those who say that Bullock does not look like a 57-year-old. She looks like a radiantly gorgeous 57-year-old who is completely believable playing someone 20 years younger opposite a leading man who is in reality 14 years younger.

Bullock plays Loretta Sage, a widow still struggling with grief over the loss of her husband and dissatisfaction at her redirection from unsuccessful scholar of ancient civilizations to very successful author of bodice-ripper novels about a pair of very sexy Indian Jones-style adventuresome anthropologists.

Loretta’s purple prose and knowledge of the details of runes and ruins are just one reason for the books’ popularity. The other reason is the handsome, hunky, Fabio-like cover model, Alan (Tatum). He has the broad shoulders, easy charm and flowing locks the fans love. (When I say “has,” I do not necessarily mean growing from his scalp, more like, in his closet to be applied as needed.) He also has something of a crush on Loretta, though he may be confusing both of them for the characters she imagined.

Loretta, who describes herself as a “sabiosexual” (one who is attracted to intellect), thinks of Alan as a brainless pretty boy. She might be a bit jealous of his effortless appeal. She reluctantly agrees to a joint appearance to promote her new book. It does not go well. And then, as she is leaving, she gets into the wrong car and finds herself seated before a lovely array of cheeses and cold meats and an impeccably dressed billionaire who has the most indispensable of all powerful villains, a British accent. He has a clue to a lost treasure, he wants Loretta to translate it, and he won’t take no for an answer.

And so, Loretta is off to the jungle (it was filmed in the Dominican Republic), and Alan, possibly confusing himself with the hero he portrays, goes off to rescue her, with the help of his meditation teacher, a former Navy SEAL played by Brad Pitt, who is as usual the MVP as he is wherever we are lucky enough to see him. This takes nothing away from Bullock and Tatum, who are enormous fun to watch. They have great chemistry and are clearly having a blast. It’s just that Pitt is even more fun. They all get strong support from the rest of the cast, especially Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Loretta’s publisher/publicist and Patti Harrison as the social media liaison. Directors Aaron Nee and Adam Nee keep things moving so the various plot holes fly by without disrupting the popcorn pleasure of seeing Bullock get over her inhibitions and assumptions, Tatum dance, and Pitt be cool in this highly entertaining story.

NOTE: Stay for a post-credit scene.

Parents should know that this movie has extended peril and action with guns, chases, and explosions, and many characters are injured and killed. A character has to take off his clothes to have leeches removed from his body and we see some nudity. Characters use strong language and drink alcohol.

Family discussion: What do Loretta and Alan have in common? What surprised them about each other? Why does Fairfax only want what is impossible to get?

If you like this, try: “Romancing the Stone”