Step Up Revolution

Posted on July 27, 2012 at 11:06 pm

A girl. A guy. A ragtag but devoted and immensely talented group of dancers with varied styles and talents. Impressively toned bodies. Breathtakingly athletic moves. Even more breathtakingly sensuous moves. A conflict. A misunderstanding. A pep talk. “We’re going to need a lot more people.” More people. Confrontation. Apology. More dancing!

There isn’t much new in this fourth entry in the “Step Up” series beyond the Miami setting and slightly older characters. What began as a series about teenagers and with #3 took the characters to college is now about people in their 20’s. The performers are different but pretty much interchangeable with the equally bland stars of the previous entry. But why waste any energy on the script and performances when we’re really there to see the dancing? Each new episode wisely devotes less attention to the story and more attention to the dancing.

And the dancing just gets better with every entry. This one leads off with a cheeky flash mob on a busy Miami street that is so joyously kinetic even the cars leap up to get into the act. Sean (Ryan Guzman) is a waiter at an upscale resort whose “Mob” is competing for the most views on YouTube. If they can just beat out the cute cat video, they can win the $100,000 prize. So they stage elaborate surprise dance numbers in hopes of attracting attention. Another is a truly spectacular event staged at a swanky museum gala with dancers camouflaged as parts of the paintings and sculpture so that they seem to bloom out of some magical garden of art.

With a nod to “Dirty Dancing,” Sean meets Emily (Kathryn McCormick) at a bar on the beach that is off-limits for the hotel staff. He thinks she is on the staff, too, and he asks her to dance. With a nod to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and just about every movie about dancers, they challenge each other, show off a little, recognize how beautifully their rhythms synch, and are vastly more eloquent with their bodies than they are when they are talking. One major departure from “Step Up 3:” in that one, the guy does not discover that the girl is from a rich, snooty family until 3/4 of the way through the movie. In this one, he discovers it right away but does not let his friends find out until 3/4 of the way through.

When Emily’s father announces that he is going to build a fancy new resort that would displace Sean and everyone he cares about, Sean and his best friend Eddy (Misha Gabriel) decide “It’s not okay to make art for fun anymore. Enough with performance art; it’s time to make protest art.” Protest art turns out to look a lot like fun art and both apparently require equally determined facial expressions, pretty much the only facial expressions anyone seems to be able to muster. But the dance numbers are brilliantly staged and filmed. A protest dance with gas masks and faux tear gas inadvertently but eerily echoing last week’s “Dark Knight” shooting in Colorado. It is thrilling to see Director of Photography Crash (yes, that’s his name) take full advantage of the 3D technology to amp up the energy and, yes, wit — especially the museum dance, a number with suits, fedoras, newspapers and coffee to mock the developers and politicians, and a rousing finale that brings back #3 star Adam G. Sevani (“Moose”) and Mari Koda of #2 and #3. We sorely miss Alyson Stoner and the Lombard twins, perhaps one more reason to look forward to Chapter 5.

Parents should know that this film includes some sensual dance movies and brief strong and crude language (b-word, etc.)

Family discussion: Who was right, Sean or Eddy? Why? What is the best way for the residents and the corporation to work together?

If you like this, try: the other “Step Up” movies and the documentary about competitive dancers, Rize

Ruby Sparks

Posted on July 26, 2012 at 6:04 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language including some sexual references and some drug use
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, some drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and emotional confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	July 27, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	October 29, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B008220BA2

The idea of bringing a dream significant other to life goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who created a statue so beautiful he fell in love with her. Modern versions and variations include the sublime (“My Fair Lady,” based on a play by George Bernard Shaw called “Pygmalion”) and the sillly (“Mannequin,” “Weird Science,” and “Mr. Right”). “Ruby Sparks,” written by its star, Zoe Kazan, is a smart and endearing variation on the theme with emotional resonance that goes beyond the usual “be careful what you wish for” fairy tale. It plays with the very notion of the prevalence of the girl whose job in the movie is to be the life force (memorably termed the “manic pixie dream girl” by critic Nathan Rabin). The story may be about the writer who dreams up Kazan’s character, but it is Kazan’s voice telling the story.

Paul Dano (Kazan’s real-life boyfriend) plays Calvin (the names are well chosen), a writer of retro tastes (he uses a typewriter and drives a vintage car) who dresses in beiges and is struggling to write again after publishing an influential and critically acclaimed best-seller when he was a teenager. His therapist (Elliott Gould) has suggested that Calvin get a dog to help him go out and meet people. And he tells Calvin to just write something, anything, even something awful, to get going. Calvin gets caught up describing a warm-hearted and high-spirited girl named Ruby Sparks. And the next morning, when he goes downstairs, there she is, matter-of-factly making breakfast, as though she is there every morning.

He understandably thinks he has lost his mind. But then it turns out other people see her, too. And it turns out that when he goes back upstairs to type additional information, she becomes whatever he writes. When he writes that she speaks French, she speaks French. She is literally a dream come true. And at first, that seems perfect.

Kazan the screenwriter understands Calvin’s conflict. He wants Ruby to be exactly what he has created, but he wants her to love him of her own volition, and he understands, at some level, that he cannot have both. “I want to be what’s making her happy without making her happy,” he says.

Kazan’s fantasy is soundly based and superbly structured. As Ruby expands Calvin’s plain, ordered world, their scope widens to include Calvin’s family and colleagues. They visit his beaming child-of-the-universe mother (Annette Bening, embracing the caftan) and her sculptor boyfriend (a marvelous Antonio Banderas as Mort) and attend his publisher’s party. Ruby becomes more and more her own person, which makes Calvin become his own person, too.

Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (“Little Miss Sunshine”) make this world believable and inviting. They keep the fantasy ligh but understand the emotional core that makes it bloom.

Parents should know this film has strong and explicit language, some crude references, brief drug use, and a non-explicit sexual situation.

Family discussion: Where did Ruby come from? What other stories do you know about people who created their dream significant other?

If you like this, try: “Stranger than Fiction” and “happythankyoumoreplease”

To Rome With Love

Posted on June 28, 2012 at 6:09 pm

The quality of Woody Allen’s films is incidental, even coincidental. Woody Allen and Adam Sandler may occupy opposite ends of the comedy spectrum when it comes to their audiences and cultural touchstones. Sandler’s touchstones are “I Love the 80’s” faded celebrities and Allen’s are philosophers, New York, and jazz musicians. But they have more in common than their mutual fixations with nostalgia, male characters afflicted with arrested development, and sex. Both, thanks to the enabling devotion of their dedicated audiences, are enabled to make movies that are closer to conceptual art than fully-realized story-telling.

For Allen, who averages a film a year, his real art form is the perpetual production schedule. The prestige factor means that he can get top actors — both in ability and box office appeal to reassure the budget guys — for microscopic fractions of their usual fees. He keeps the same crew. All he has to do is provide a script. But because his priority is getting the film made rather than awards, critical reception, or selling tickets, movies like “To Rome With Love” feel like they came out of the oven without being fully cooked. It plays like a first draft, or even a handful of random notes grabbed at random from a drawer because the cameras were ready to roll.

Allen continues his tour of the capitals of Europe by setting his story in Rome, or, I should say, stories. A stunningly unoriginal opening shows us an Italian traffic cop, who advises us that Rome has many stories. Like an episode of “The Love Boat” he combines four stories, and these are variations on the themes of love, sex, music, aging, and what one character calls “Ozymondian melancholy,” a nostalgic pre-occupation with the past.

A successful architect (Alec Baldwin) confronts a younger version of himself (“The Social Network’s” Jesse Eisinberg), or perhaps himself as a younger man, to try to prevent him from making a disastrous mistake by betraying his lovely, stable, devoted girlfriend (a criminally underused Greta Gerwig) with her high-maintenance friend (a criminally mis-cast Ellen Page, who is supposed to be seductive and neurotic). A naive newlywed couple from the country come to the big city on their honeymoon. As they prepare to meet his very conservative relatives, who have offered him a high-paid job, they get tangled up in deception that includes a fetching prostitute (Penelope Cruz, one of the film’s highlights) and a predatory movie star. An ordinary man (Oscar winner Roberto Benigni) finds himself inexplicably a celebrity, hounded by paparazzi and fans who are fascinated with the most mundane details of his very mundane life. At first, he enjoys the attention and takes advantage of his fame, but then it becomes tiresome. And Allen himself plays a retired opera director who is visiting his daughter (Allison Pill, who was Zelda Fitzgerald in “Midnight in Paris”) and meet her Italian fiancé He discovers that the fiancé’s father, an undertaker, has a magnificent tenor voice, but only in the shower. There is a lot time spent on extraneous conflicts with the Allen character’s wife (Judy Davis) and the lefty politics of the younger couple that never goes anywhere.

There are some very funny lines and some mild humor from the situations, but the best that can be said of it is that just as not much energy was expended in making it, not much will be required to enjoy and then forget it.

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Magic Mike

Posted on June 28, 2012 at 6:00 pm

You might expect a movie about strippers to be either a glossy Hollywood fantasy or a gritty, sour, documentary. The surprise of “Magic Mike” is that it avoids both extremes with an appealing naturalness and intimacy that softens but does not glamorize its setting.

It is inspired by the experiences of co-producer and star Channing Tatum as an exotic dancer before he broke through as an unexpectedly versatile actor (“Step Up,” “G.I. Joe,” “Dear John,” “21 Jump Street”). Equally versatile director Stephen Soderburgh (“Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “Oceans 11”) gently bumps the story a couple of degrees away from the sordid to keep things fun and even romantic. The big musical numbers are grander and more elaborate than anything you might actually see in a small Tampa club catering to sorority girls and bachelorette parties. But even when it gets debauched and dangerous, it is still kind of sweet. It has a bit of the sense of discovery of Robert Altman’s “The Company.” Plus, those guys have some moves. The dance numbers are a blast, witty, sexy, and very wooo-worthy.

Tatum plays Mike, a would-be entrepreneur who does a little of this and that (and wears very little of this and even less of that) as he tries to straighten out his financial situation so that he can pursue his dream of designing furniture. He meets a young college drop-out named Adam (Alex Pettyfer), and introduces him to the world of exotic dancing, from trolling bars to entice girls to come to the show to turning himself into the fantasy lover they love to be scandalized by. The owner is Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), who has promised Mike he will open up a big club in Miami and make Mike his partner. (Drinking game: take a shot every time McConaughey says “all right.”)

Adam lives with his sister Brooke, played by the very appealing Cody Horn, who has a wonderful easy chemistry with Tatum. So there is a classic structure, with Mike in the center between the hardened and cynical Dallas and the naive kid in a candy store Adam, drawn to the dream of a different life with Brooke. What takes this out of the category of fluff is the way the story is unaffectedly located in the reality of the economic struggles of the area and our time. Mike tries to persuade a bank loan officer to give him some money, shoving stacks of bills across her desk and not quite understanding that even though he is still selling, this transaction differs from the easy and sleazy environments he frequents. But she sees who he is. So does Brooke, and that helps him to see himself beyond the breakaway pants.

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Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Posted on June 21, 2012 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language including sexual references, some drug use and brief violence
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drunkenness, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Disturbing themes of the end of the world, some violence
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 22, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	October 22, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B007L6VRBM

Dr. Johnson memorably said that the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully. Part of what stories do for us is concentrate the mind by providing us with narratives that eliminate distracting quotidian effluvia and allow us to focus on one element of the story. In “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” writer/director Lorene Scafaria (“Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”) makes that concentration explicit. The world is literally ending in three weeks, and we get to see how that concentrates the minds of Dodge (Steve Carell), Penny (Kiera Knightley), and the people they meet as everyone has to decide what from their “someday” list gets moved up to “now.”

Lorene Scafaria, who wrote the lovely “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,” here directs her own screenplay with a top-notch cast and a sure sense of tone and pacing. The classic elements of the journey film with a mis-matched pair on the road in search of something is kept fresh through the setting, the adventures and encounters along the way, and sensitive performances from Carell and Knightley.

As Elizabeth Kubler-Ross might have predicted, a lot of people get stuck in stage one: denial. The movie opens as Dodge and his wife hear the radio announcer promise to keep the audience up to date on the progress of the asteroid known as Matilda and its collision path with Earth, along with a countdown to the end of days and “all your classic rock favorites.” At first, most people run on automatic pilot. Dodge goes to his office and tries to explain to a client that his insurance policy does not really cover what is about to happen. “The Armageddon policy is extra.” His boss tries to fill some abandoned positions by offering promotions. People who always wanted to kill someone offer their services as assassins for hire by those who do not want to be alive when the meteor hits. Musicians put on an end of the world awareness concert. It’s like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff and staying suspended in air until the realization hits — and then he does.

People start to get desperate. Dodge’s wife leaves him. A friend (Patten Oswalt) explains that the end of the world has made it very easy to sleep with women. Dodge’s friends have a party and try to fix him up with a woman (Melanie Lynskey) who arrives wearing all of the jewelry she was saving for the right occasion. But that is not what he wants. The world is increasingly divided between people who choose various ways to numb themselves and those who take this last chance to stop being numb.

Dodge meets his neighbor, Penny, an English girl who has missed the last opportunity to get back to her family. She has a mis-delivered letter from a girl he loved and lost. And she has a car. When rioters take over their building, he offers to get her to a plane if she will help him find the woman who sent the letter. Helping each other gives them purpose. Getting to know Penny gives Dodge more of a sense of being alive than he has ever had before. Dodge had always been too cautious. Penny had always been too irresponsible. Now he must take chances and she must grow up. It’s never too late.

On their journey, they see people and places from their past, including Penny’s survivalist ex-boyfriend (Derek Luke), who thinks that stockpiling weapons and canned goods will help him rebuild society. They stop at a relentlessly chipper restaurant called Friendsy’s (yes, lots and lots of flair) where the staff’s increasingly shrill Ecstasy-fueled cheeriness becomes borderline deranged. And then, even with just days and then hours left, they begin to shift from the past to the future. And, as Rabindrath Tagore wrote, “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

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