Sydney White

Sydney White

Posted on January 20, 2008 at 3:14 pm

B
Lowest Recommended Age: Middle School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some language, sexual humor, and partying
Profanity: Some crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking
Violence/ Scariness: Tense confrontations, comic peril
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters, some stereotyping
Date Released to Theaters: September 21, 2007

This updated fairy tale has some clever riffs on “Snow White” but never makes use of the considerable talents of its star, Amanda Bynes.

Copyright Morgan Creek 2007
Sydney (Bynes) is a college freshman who wants to join Kappa, the most exclusive sorority on campus, though she is more comfortable on a construction site than at a cotillion. “You know how people joke about being raised by wolves? I was raised by construction workers,” she explains and we cut to her devoted father (“The Dukes of Hazzard’s” John Schneider) illustrating the facts of life for her with plumbing supplies. When she knew she was dying, Sydney’s mother wrote her a letter, telling her how much she loved being in the sorority. Now Sydney wants to fulfill her mother’s dream.

But Sydney does not meet the standards of the Kappa president, Rachel Witchburn (Sara Paxton). She is not blonde, she is not a size 2, and, worst of all, Sydney fails to recognize Rachel’s supreme domination over just about everything on campus — especially the handsome Prince Matt Long as Tyler Prince, the campus McDreamy.

Rachel boots Sydney out of the sorority in a humiliating public ceremony. There is only one place left on campus that will take her in, the ramshackle house occupied by the campus outcasts. There are seven of them. One has allergies and sneezes a lot. One is an exchange student with jet lag who sleeps all the time. One is bashful. One is grumpy. All are nerdy. And Rachel has a plot to tear their house down so her family can build a shiny new rec center for sorority and fraternity members only.
Echoes of the Snow White story provide the movie’s brightest moments. Rachel checks constantly to make she is still considered the fairest in the land, not in a magic mirror but in the campus “hot or not” website. The poisoned apple? An Apple laptop with an important homework assignment gets infected with a virus. And of course in the big moment Sydney is awakened by a kiss from the Prince.

It is less cute when a nasty trick has the seven dorks naked at a campus party and when they march past Rachel with a mean-spirited “Hi, Ho!” It makes it harder for us to stay on the side of the good guys when they descend to the terminology of the bad guys. And it goes overboard on the geek factor; drawing less from fairy tales than from “Revenge of the Nerd”-style caricatures. For a movie that is supposed to be all about inclusion and respecting the dork within each of us, it has a lot of fun at their expense.
Bynes is captivating despite a role that does not give her much to do but display tomboyish good spirit behind some really unfortunate hair and make-up. She looks trapped in a 1970 Yardley ad, all fake tan, shag haircut, and pale eye shadow. She can make a retort sound spirited, not snappish, as when she tells Rachel that she doesn’t “speak priss.” Her best moments are with Long, who has a great smile and a rare ability to listen to what other performers are saying without thinking he has to be doing something every second he is on screen. Newcomer Jack Carpenter as Sneezy/Lenny brings warmth and humanity to a thinly written role as the most sociable of the dorks.

But director Joe Nussbaum does not trust his performers, the material, or the audience. He keeps the tempo so synthetically sitcom-y you expect to hear a rim shot and a laugh track. Everything is exaggerated. Every joke is an elbow in the ribs. Like Rachel, he is checking his “hotness” every couple of minutes. And like Rachel, his score could use some improvement.
Parents should know that this movie has some vulgar humor and strong language (references to “hos,” b-word), implied nudity, and a drinking game at a party. A strength of the movie is its emphasis on inclusion and the importance of treating diverse people respectfully, and Sydney reaches out to all groups on campus, from the Hassids to the band geeks, cross-dressers, and Goths.
Families who see this movie should talk about when they most felt like outsiders or dorks and what they can do to make sure that people around them feel included and appreciated for who they are.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy other takes on classic fairy tales like Ella Enchanted and Shrek. Barbara Stanwyk and Gary Cooper co-starred in an earlier update of Snow White, Ball of Fire.

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27 Dresses

Posted on January 17, 2008 at 7:40 am

B
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for language, some innuendo and sexuality.
Profanity: Some strong language (s-word, b-word)
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking (as liberating and empowering), characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness: Comic violence including slaps
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: January 18, 2007

27%20dresses.jpg Jane has a special closet in her apartment filled with 27 dresses so ugly that only two things can be true: (1) they were all bridesmaid’s dresses, and that means (2) all 27 brides assured her that they could be shortened and worn again.
Jane (Katherine Heigl of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Knocked Up”) is a natural caretaker. After her mother died when she was a child, she took care of her sister. She has taken care of 27 different brides, helping out with wedding details that have her over-stuffed day-planner bristling with yellow sticky reminders. In her job, she takes care of her boss, George (Edward Burns), the too-good-to-be-true mountain-climbing CEO of an impeccably politically correct corporation. She makes sure he gets his breakfast burrito and picks up his dry cleaning. In her few spare moments, she sighs with love for George or sighs with hope over the weekly write-ups of the most romantic weddings in the Sunday paper. Her dreams are of white dresses, tossed bouquets, and big cakes with lots of icing. Her reality is…dreams.
Just as she decides to let George know how she feels, urged on by her best friend Casey (the marvelous Judy Greer, wasted in an underwritten role as the movie’s designated sleep-around friend), Jane’s globe-trotting model sister Tess (Malin Akerman) arrives and she and George immediately decide to get married, with guess who taking care of all the cake, flower, and decoration details. All of this is so distracting that Jane barely has time to notice the killer smile of Kevin, a cynical reporter (the marvelous James Marsden, almost-wasted in an under-written role that seems left over from an old Clark Gable character). For no reason except the demands of the increasingly flimsy plot, Kevin is required to keep a couple of obvious secrets.
Heigl is the real deal, with girl-you-wish-lived-next-door imperishable but accessible beauty, appealing, endearing, vulnerable, with understated comic timing. Marsden, too, has charm to spare. Both hold our interest and keep us rooting for them even when the script does its best to get in the way. Do we really need yet another scene with characters letting go by getting tipsy and singing 80’s songs? Akerman (“The Heartbreak Kid”), in her second role in five months as a selfish, irresponsible, and all-around nightmare bombshell who impulsively gets engaged, struggles with an impossible task as she tries to be both over-the-top obnoxious and sympathetic at the same time. What does work is Heigl and the dresses and the fact that, like Jane, most of the audience loves to get misty at weddings. Watching this film is like waiting to catch the bride’s bouquet, more anticipation than fulfillment.

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Comedy Genre , Themes, and Features Movies -- format Romance

Good Luck Chuck

Posted on January 15, 2008 at 8:00 am

At age 10, following an awkward Spin the Bottle encounter, a little goth girl puts a hex on Charlie so that he will be surrounded by love but never find it himself. But it is the audience who will feel cursed. It is hard to tell which is more painfully difficult to sit through — the awful premise of this film or the dull filler that occupies the rest of the time onscreen.


Charlie grows up into stand-up comedian Dane Cook and becomes a dentist. When word gets out that sex with him is a quicker path to marriage than eHarmony, every gorgeous woman in town wants to sleep with him so that she can find her one true love as soon as it is over. His best friend Stu (Tony award-winner Dan Fogler), a plastic surgeon specializing in breast enhancement, disgusting, sex-obsessed conversation, and having sex with citrus, persuades Charlie that this is practically a public service, helping women to find love while having lots and lots and lots of sex. Charlie gives in and has sex with just about every unattached female in the state.


And then he meets the adorably klutzy Cam (Jessica Alba), who runs the penguin house at the local equivalent of Sea World. But he worries that if he has sex with her, she’ll meet the man of her dreams. So he has to find a way to romance her without sex.


Cook is an observational comic who thinks that referring to something is the same as making a joke about it. He is physically energetic but intellectually lazy. His appeal comes from his utter lack of embarrassment and complete absence of boundaries, making college kids feel understood and connected. His stand-up routine is the equivalent of a Facebook page. This movie is like one of his jokes, all set-up, and then a lot of energy in the hopes the audience won’t notice there is no real pay-off. We get that it is supposed to be funny that Charlie has a lot of sex with pretty girls. But they drag the joke on forever, showing Cook in a dozen different positions, not because it is particularly funny or sexy but because they have 90 minutes to fill and hope we will be distracted by all those breasts. Any movie that has to fall back on a climactic race to the airport for drama and having sex with food for comedy has run out of ideas before it began. Oh, and please don’t bother to stay for the last little improvised “joke” over the credits.


One more aspect of this film that is particularly troubling is that it is an extremely raunchy R-rated film but its humor is so juvenile its most likely audience is young teenagers, the only group likely to find it funny just because it has naughty words and naked ladies. Anyone old enough to see this movie is likely to be too old to find much to laugh at.

Parents should know that this film has extremely explicit and crude sexual references and situations and a great deal of nudity that would rate an NC-17 if in anything but a comedy. Characters use very strong and vulgar language. There is comic violence (no one badly hurt). Characters drink, including one who drinks to deal with stress, and one character is a pothead, a frequent source of humor.


Audiences who see this movie should talk about which time-honored techniques the film uses to keep Charlie a sympathetic character, despite some crass, selfish, and exploitive behavior. What made him see Cam differently?


Audiences who enjoy this film will also enjoy The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

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Comedy Romance

Stardust

Posted on December 18, 2007 at 12:14 pm

This is an enchanting story that lives up to the promise of a “once upon a time beginning,” filled with romance, adventure, magic, and wit. It has witch sisters who need to find a fallen star to make the potion that gives them eternal youth, prince brothers who want to find it because the jewel that knocked it out of the sky will determine which of them will be king, cloud pirates who sail in a flying ship, and a unicorn.


stardust.jpg Tristan (Charlie Cox) promises to bring back a fallen star to win the hand of the girl he loves. To find it, he must cross the wall that divides his village from the magical land of Stormhold on the other side. It turns out that he has a connection to Stormhold that he did not know. And it turns out that the fallen star is not an it but a she — the star has a human form, a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes). And so begins a journey that will include sword fights and transformations, captures and escapes, bickering and kisses, encounters with rascals, villains, and imprisoned princesses, and reunions with unexpected lost connections.
Director Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) blends romance, action, and comedy with brilliantly imagined visual effects, seasoning fairy tale enchantment with a splash of modern sensibility. Peter O’Toole as the dying king, Robert DeNiro as the pirate captain with a surprising hobby, and Ricky Gervais as a dealer in stolen goods, and Rupert Everett as one of a Greek chorus of murdered princes are high-spirited but never wink at the audience; the film is as sincere as its appealing lead characters. Pfeiffer has a blast as the witch, whether cooing at her restored beauty or blasting through its disintegration as she pursues the star.


Modern without being post-modern, ironic without air-quotes, romantic without apology, this is a fairy tale for our time because it takes us beyond time and reminds us that happily ever after is still a dream worth having.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy violence, with characters injured and killed in a variety of ways, everything from having their throats cut to being thrown out of windows, poisoned, and drowned. There is some mild language and there are some mild sexual references and non-explicit sexual situations. A strength of the movie is unexpected acceptance of and support for a cross-dressing character.


Families who see this movie should talk about what drew Dunstan and Tristan to the other side of the wall. What is the difference between being a shop boy and a boy who works in a shop?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy sumptuous fantasy classics The Princess Bride, Labyrinth, Time Bandits, and Ladyhawke (also featuring Pfeiffer). And they will enjoy the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess.

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Action/Adventure Based on a book Fantasy Genre , Themes, and Features Reviews Romance

Atonement

Posted on December 4, 2007 at 4:07 pm

A-
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating: Rated R for disturbing war images, language and some sexuality.
Profanity: Some very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking and smoking
Violence/ Scariness: Wartime violence with some graphic images
Diversity Issues: Class differences
Date Released to Theaters: December 7, 2007

atonement.jpg
Little toy jungle animals are lined up on the rug. Typewriter keys bang like gunshots. Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is writing a play called “The Trials of Arabella.” It is 1935 England, a dream of a summer afternoon on a sleepy but grand estate and Briony is the much-loved youngest daughter of the house. It feels like the biggest problem she will ever have is whether her young visitors will cooperate in putting on the play. She is already trying to impose her story on people. Briony is more imaginative than perceptive and that will lead to terrible betrayal, when the story she imposes is fictional but its consequences are very real.

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