Beauty and the Beast

Posted on January 12, 2012 at 6:00 pm

A+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Beer, scenes in bar
Violence/ Scariness:	Some scary moments with wolves, fighting
Diversity Issues:	Theme of not judging by appearances
Date Released to Theaters:	January 13, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	September 20, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004WE01YA

“Beauty and the Beast” is one of Disney’s most beloved fairy tales and the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. This week Disney celebrates its 25th anniversary with a splendid new DVD release that includes some special extras.

Ultimately, what makes “Beauty and the Beast” so winning, though, is its story, characters, and songs, which need no restoration. They are as fresh as ever. Clever lyrics by the late Howard Ashman are a delight, with a brute singing about how he decorates with antlers or the stirring Oscar-winning theme song played as the couple dances alone in an enormous ballroom. And it is a joy to revisit the timeless pleasures of traditional Disney storytelling, with no attempts to add sizzle from celebrity voice talent or radio-friendly pop songs. The movie’s roots are in Broadway, with performances from Tony-winners Angela Lansbury and Jerry Orbach and tuneful ballads from composer Alan Menken, including the rousing “Be Our Guest” and the joyous introductory “Belle.” Notice the way that only Belle wears blue in the opening scenes, helping to set her apart from the people in her village. We know before she does that she and the Beast have something in common when we see that he also wears blue.

Belle (voice of Broadway star Paige O’Hara) is the book-loving daughter of an absent-minded inventor. She wants “more than this provincial life” and the boorish hunter Gaston, who hopes to marry her.

Lost in the woods, Belle’s father stumbles into what appears to be a deserted castle. But the castle is inhabited by the angry Beast, once a prince, now under a spell that will last forever unless he finds love before he turns 21. The same spell turned all of the human staff of the castle into objects — a clock, a candelabra, a teapot, a mop.

The Beast, furious at being seen by an intruder, locks Belle’s father in the dungeon. Belle comes after her father and offers to take his place. The Beast accepts, lets her father go, and tells Belle she must stay with him forever.

At first antagonistic, she begins to find the Beast appealingly gentle and kind, wounded in spirit, rather than cruel. He shares her love of books. Back in Belle’s village, Gaston tries to get Belle’s father committed, saying that his talk of the Beast shows he is delusional. Belle, home on a visit to care for her father, proves that the Beast exists to show that her father is telling the truth. The townspeople are terrified and form a mob to kill the Beast.

In a fight with Gaston, the Beast is badly wounded. Belle tells him she loves him, which ends the spell. He becomes once again the handsome prince, and they live happily ever after.

Parents should know that this movie has some scary moments when Belle is chased by wolves and when Gaston and the townspeople storm the Beast’s castle. It appears briefly that the Beast has been killed. Characters drink beer and there are scenes in a bar.

Family discussion: Gaston and the Beast both wanted to marry Belle — how were their reasons different? Why did the prince became the beast and what did he have to learn before he could return to his handsome exterior? What did Belle have to learn? What made her decide she liked the Beast?

If you like this, try: Some of the other movie adaptations of this story. One of the most lyrically beautiful of all films ever made is Jean Cocteau’s version of this story, “Belle et Bete.” The Faerie Tale Theatre version stars Susan Sarandon and Klaus Kinski, and is very well done.

The Artist

Posted on January 3, 2012 at 6:14 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for a disturbing image and a crude gesture
Profanity:	No bad language, someone gives the finger
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Fire
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 3, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	June 25, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0059XTUMC

“We didn’t need dialogue,” said Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) unforgettably in Billy Wilder’s classic, “Sunset Boulevard.” “We had faces!” Swanson herself had been a silent film star, but she is best remembered for playing the actress driven mad by being made obsolete when the talkies shifted the spotlight from faces to a snappy way with a wisecrack. Of course, “Sunset Boulevard” is a talkie, filled with brilliant dialogue from Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman, Jr. (“You used to be big in pictures.” “I’m still big. It’s the pictures that got small.”) But Desmond was right about the faces. Partly because they were silent for the first decades of film-making, the movies invented a new vocabulary of story-telling and new techniques of acting. When D.W. Griffith pioneered the close-up, the declamatory, projecting to the back of the theater style of acting on the stage began to evolve into the subtle, intimate evocation of thought and emotion the way we see it in real life, with a flicker of an eyelid, the trembling of the corner of the mouth, more eloquent than the most lyrical and evocative words.

“The Artist” is a new film from French writer/director Michel Hazanavicius that evokes this classic era of Hollywood in form and content, set in the moment of transition to talkies, black and white and almost completely silent, with references to “Singin’ in the Rain,” “A Star is Born,” and even “Citizen Kane,” but very much of our moment, and so fresh and inventive that color and sound seem superfluous.

Jean Dujardin plays handsome silent film superstar Georges Valentin. He appears at the opening of his latest film with his favorite co-star, his Jack Russell terrier, dancing, bowing, and basking in the adoration of the audience — and hogging the spotlight to annoy his human co-star (Missy Pyle). Outside the theater, when an enthusiastic fan falls into his path, he laughs good-heartedly. The next morning, a photo of Valentin and his fan appears in the paper and his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) does not find it amusing. The charming whimsy and dazzling smile that work so well on screen do not mollify her.

The fan is a would-be actress named Peppy Miller (the very appealing Argentine actress Bérénice Bejo, wife of Hazanavicius). She gets her first break as a dancer on Valentin’s new film. In a captivating scene, they have to do repeated takes of a scene where they dance together because they keep getting distracted by their immediate sense of connection. In the film within a film, he is a star and she is an extra. But in their real story, it is clear she is a lead.

The sound era arrives and Miller becomes a star while Valentin, stubbornly insisting on making a new silent film, loses his wife, his money, and finally, at auction, everything he owns, including his dinner jacket and portrait. Can there be a happy ending? Well, it’s a movie!

There’s a bit of a backlash to this film, following its rapturous reception in Cannes and year-end awards, with some complaints that it plays to the affections of critics and movie insiders and that it is a nice enough film that benefits from being a valentine to cinema rather than on its own stand-alone merits. That is unfair to the intelligence behind the film and the subtle qualities beyond the quaint settings. Hazanavicius shifted the frames-per-second to be closer to the slightly jerky silent movie standard to invite us back into that world. But it is not just a re-creation of an archaic technique. The characters are real, vivid, and affecting. As shown by its final moment, the movie transcends its story to be more than a tribute to a simpler time. It is a lesson on the power of movies to re-invent a visual vocabulary for the universal language that goes beyond the borders of countries and cultures.

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New Year’s Eve

Posted on December 8, 2011 at 6:41 pm

Something seemed familiar to me as I watched Garry Marshall’s New York-based follow-up to his multi-star, multi-story LA-set romantic comedy, Valentine’s Day. It was something that went beyond the predictability of its sitcom-ish formulas and check-list of romantic comedy conventions, and it finally hit me when the wonderful Sofía Vergara appeared on screen. Part of what makes “Modern Family” so delightful is the way its characters address, tweak, and transcend the usual comedic stereotypes. But it became sadly clear that all Marshall and screenwriter Katherine Fugate can think of to do with this beautiful and talented actress is make her into a caricatured Latina hot mama. And that was when I figured it out. She was Charo and we were on a big budget version of The Love Boat. Like the television series that ran from the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, “New Year’s Eve” is an assortment of stories about love featuring a lot of big stars and with depth and imagination and sincerity that can only be measured with micrometers.

But that doesn’t mean that it is not entertaining, first for the fun of seeing so many stars cross the screen and second because so much is going on that the weakest parts are over before you realize how weak they are. It would be quicker to list the stars who are not in this movie than those who are. Oscar-winners Robert De Niro (as a terminally ill patient in the hospital), Halle Berry (as his nurse), and Hillary Swank (as the person in charge of the ball-dropping, Ryan Seacrest-led festivities in Times Square) are joined by Tony-winner Cherry Jones as owner of a music company, plus television luminaries Seth Meyers of “SNL” as an expectant father, Sarah Jessica Parker (as a wardrober who works with the Rockettes), and “Glee’s” Lea Michelle. Then there’s “Little Miss Sunshine’s” Abigail Breslin in way too much mascara as a young teen who rebels when her mother says she cannot go to Times Square, rom-com princess Katherine Heigel as a caterer at a fancy party, rocker-turned-actor John Bon Jovi as a rock star, rapper-turned actor Common, and “High School Musical’s” Zac Efron as a delivery guy who delivers more than the mousy secretary played by Michelle Pfeiffer expects. Returning “Valentine’s Day” stars (playing new characters) Ashton Kutcher is a guy who hates New Year’s Eve and gets stuck in an elevator and Jessica Biel is a woman who wants to have the first baby born in 2012 so she can win some money. And Josh Duhamel is the guy who is trying to get back to Manhattan to find the mystery woman he kissed at midnight a year ago. And we also get Hector Elizondo, of course, who is for Marshall what John Ratzenberger is to Pixar, a lucky charm who appears in every film and is always welcome.

It benefits from dropping some of the cruder elements that marred “Valentine’s Day” but even as a fairy tale it goes over the top with not one but two characters called on for impromptu televised appearances that has a tired, crowded, over-excited and tipsy New York audience aww-ing and applauding like parents at a kindergarten Christmas pageant. All these people and situations leave no room for stories or characters, just snippets that barely have time to make an impression and the casting itself becomes a distraction with meaningless “wait, wasn’t that…?” appearances in the briefest of roles. That’s just as well, as the stalled elevator and race to give birth at 12:01 do not have much to offer and the dialog has some syrupy lines about forgiveness and second chances that got unintended laughs from the audience. Even at just a few moments, Duhamel’s efforts to get back into the city drag on too long with a pointless segment about an RV ride with a preacher’s family. But by the time he makes it to his mystery date, though, we are on his side. (Am I the only one who thought it was not a great match, though?) As in the last film, there is poignant scene involving military fighting overseas. Pfeiffer, Berry, and De Niro manage to create some genuinely touching moments out of sheer star power. The outtakes over the credit sequence at the end are the best part, though they remind us how much more these stars are capable of. A better title might be “Groundhog Day” because it sure feels like we’ve seen it all before.

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Related Tags:

Comedy Date movie Romance Series/Sequel

My Week with Marilyn

Posted on December 1, 2011 at 6:00 pm

“Her skin does not reject the light.”

That was impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir’s answer when asked why he used one favorite model so many times. And it describes the luminous beauty of Marilyn Monroe, who almost half a century since her death still stands as the ultimate screen goddess. “I have an Aunt Minnie back in Vienna who would show up on time and know her lines, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?” That was what director Billy Wilder said to Monroe’s frustrated co-stars in “Some Like It Hot,” when he told them that they had to be perfect in every take because he was going to use whichever one happened to capture her getting it right. That was Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, the daughter of a mentally unstable woman, raised in foster homes, married for the first time at age 16, later an international superstar, married to the biggest athlete in the country (baseball hero Joe DiMaggio) and then to one of the most distinguished literary figures in the world (playwright Arthur Miller), and dead by an overdose of pills at age 36.

Shortly after she married Miller, Monroe went to England to make a film called “The Prince and the Showgirl” with Sir Laurence Olivier, who also directed. She was not only the movie’s star; in an effort to demonstrate her ability and depth she had formed her own production company and was studying method acting with Lee Strasberg. Colin Clark, who was third assistant director (a gofer) on the film, wrote not one but two memoirs of his experience, including The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me: Six Months on the Set With Marilyn and Olivier, which inspired this film, with Michelle Williams as Monroe and Kenneth Branagh as Olivier.

Even the radiant Williams will never be able to match Monroe as a screen presence. But her performance is thoughtful, nuanced, complex, and magnetically compelling, like Monroe herself. While it is the slightest of stories — an inexperienced and insecure young man is dazzled by Monroe who briefly makes him think he can rescue her — it is an improvement over the typical biopic. Williams captures Monroe’s mercurial, even prismatic nature, her strength and her vulnerability, and especially her understanding of her own appeal. “Should I be her?” she asks almost mischievously, with a sense of fun in being able to demonstrate how Norma Jean can turn herself into Marilyn and back again. But her reasons for letting a young gofer “accidentally” see her naked are more complicated. She is under enormous pressure and desperate for the kind of respect no one is willing to give her. Her third marriage is falling apart. She has a pattern of asking men to save her and then testing them beyond their ability. Like Rita Hayworth, who famously said that men went to bed with Gilda (her sultriest role) and woke up with her, Monroe is the victim of a kind of Catch-22. She wants to be loved for herself but has spent too many years being “her” and is not willing to risk being less effective. When she says (while skinny-dipping with Clark) that men in Hollywood are so old, it conveys a great deal about the price she paid for her absent father and need for fame.

Monroe had more than met the eye. This movie has less, but what it does have is highly watchable for Williams’ performance and a juicy turn by Dame Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike and for, I hope, inspiring watchers to return to the original, Monroe herself.

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The Muppets

Posted on November 22, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	All Ages
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild rude humor
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Some tense confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	March 19, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B006JTS5OO

Let the joy be unrestrained. The Muppets are back. It turns out that deep inside Jason Segal, best known for raunchy Judd Apatow comedies and for playing the monogamous Marshall on “How I Met Your Mother,” is at his core a puppet nerd whose highest and best use is in pushing Disney (which now owns the rights to the Muppets) to let him co-write and co-star in the happiest family movie of the year. And it is accompanied by a “Toy Story” short film that is, minute for minute, the funniest movie of the year.

Segal plays Gary, a sweet small-town guy who is devoted to his brother Walter and his girlfriend of ten years, Mary (Amy Adams), a teacher. Gary and Walter are devoted fans of the old Muppet Showand they spend many happy hours watching reruns. When Gary takes Mary on their first visit to the big city of Los Angeles, they bring Walter along so that he can realize his dream of touring the Muppet studios. Mary was hoping for something a bit more romantic but good-heartedly agrees to share the trip with Walter as long as Gary promises a special anniversary dinner for just the two of them.

The Muppet studio is broken-down and covered with cobwebs. The only other people on the tour are a couple who mistakenly thought they were at Universal Studios. Walter wanders off and overhears the dastardly Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plotting to buy the studio. He will promise to preserve the Muppets legacy and then tear it down to drill for the oil underneath. To save the studio the Muppets have to raise $10 million. But they have gone their separate ways. Can they get the band back together? And if they do, does anyone still want to see them? When Gary gets caught up in helping the Muppets, will he forget the anniversary dinner?

Segal and co-screenwriter Nicholas Stoller have seamlessly continued the story of the the captivating Muppets, with their unique blend of sweetness and self-deprecating insouciance. It’s what Danny Thomas used to call “treacle cutters” that keep the Muppets fresh and appealing, expertly countering every corny joke with heart and every tender moment with humor. With joyously sunny musical numbers composed by “Flight of the Conchords” co-star Bret McKenzie and cameos by everyone from Mickey Rooney to Sara Silverman and Neil Patrick Harris, this film is utterly true to the spirit of the original television series and pure delight for both fans and newcomers.

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