Moonrise Kingdom

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Wes Anderson films are not so much directed as curated. Often accused of being more interested in his props than his characters, Anderson’s fussy, even obsessive focus on the objects and sets gives his films a missing the forest for the trees feeling that seems claustrophobic and frustratingly precious to some audiences and astutely ironic to others. Some, I think, see both.

On a fictional island called Penzance off the coast of mid-1960’s New England, two middle school pre-teens run away partly to be together but mostly to be someplace different from where they were. Sam (Jared Gilman) is an owlish-looking orphan who escapes from “Khaki Scout” camp overseen by the very meticulous Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). He wears glasses and a coonskin cap. He lives with foster parents who have rejected him and, as we find, after camp is over he will be sent to live in an orphanage by a woman so odiously officious the only name she goes by is Social Services (Tilda Swinton).

Suzy (Kara Hayward) is a serious and determined girl who lives with a family that does not appreciate or understand her. She wears knee socks, packs a record-player, and is very attached to her binoculars, which give her a chance to look at places far from home. Her mother (Frances McDormand) addresses her children in their home via megaphone. Sam first sees Suzy when she is in costume as a bird, about to appear in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera about Noah and the flood. They engage in a secret correspondence and make plans for their getaway.

Sam and Suzy create a world for themselves that is part fantasy, part very real. They are practical, if limited, in their understanding of their situation. Sam uses his camping skills to provide food and shelter, and they rename their site Moonrise Kingdom, establishing themselves as rulers of a place that exists in the opposite of the harsh daylight of their previous reality. They try some kissing but sleep next to each other in complete innocence. Suzy brought a record-player as one of her essentials, and they listen to music.

Meanwhile, Scout Master Ward, Suzy’s parents, and the local sheriff (Bruce Willis), who is having a joyless affair with Suzy’s mother, are searching the island for the missing children. Sam, who was ostracized for being weird by the other scouts, becomes a hero for his daring and romantic adventure and they help him try to escape with the assistance of another Scout leader (Jason Schwartzman) who is less upstanding than Ward. Even Ward ends up complimenting Sam on his “commendable” campsite.

Sam and Suzy may not have a plan for taking care of themselves past a few days and one of the things Anderson does best is conveying that exact moment between the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence (Suzy’s home is called “Summer’s End”) when things are animated by imagination that can feel completely real. Like Peter Pan and Wendy, Sam pretends to smoke a pipe and Suzy presides over a group of Lost Boys to create a family that allows them to be both adult and forever young. Like the young heroes of Dickens’ story about Mr. and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Jr., the young runaways seem to have an almost incantatory faith in the power of marriage to create a bond that will protect them from the power of the grown-ups.

In many ways Sam and Suzy are more adult than the grown-ups around them, who are petty, foolish, or lonely. And, as usual in Wes Anderson films, they are not as fully realized as the props and settings around them. It is telling that the children assume a paper mache decoy will fool the adults; it almost does. Suzy’s library books in particular are a marvel of period detail, so vivid and evocative audiences of a certain age will swear they had those books on the shelf next to Madeleine L’Engle and Norton Juster. It’s details like the coonskin cap that delight his fans and infuriate everyone else. No one in the mid-60’s and no 12 year old of any era wore a coonskin cap. The omniscient “Our Town”-style narrator (Bob Balaban) can tell us a storm is coming but he cannot make the emotions of the story feel real or meaningful.

Parents should know that this film includes some sexual references and experimentation by middle-schoolers, teen and adult smoking and drinking, some strong language, some violence, and human and animal characters peril and injury.

Family discussion: Why did the scoutmaster change his mind about which was his “real job?” Why did the children run away? How does it change the story to have it set in the 1960’s instead of today?

If you like this, try: “A Little Romance” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox”

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The Secret World of Arrietty

Posted on February 16, 2012 at 6:00 pm

A spirited young heroine and an enchantingly beautiful setting make a story of friendship and courage beguiling in Studio Ghibli’s adaptation of Mary Norton’s popular series of “Borrower” books. First published in the mid-1950’s, the stories are on based on a fanciful but entirely plausible explanation for the disappearance of small household items. Norton says are taken by “Borrowers,” tiny people who live inside the walls and beneath the floorboards. We never see them because they are terrified of what they call “human beans.”

The story begins as two big changes are taking place in a charming country cottage. A four-inch 14-year-old named Arrietty (Bridgit Mendler) is finally old enough to embark on her first borrowing expedition, in search of sugar and facial tissue. She is the only daughter of stalwart provider Pod and anxious homemaker Homily (real-life sitcom star spouses Will Arnett and Amy Poehler), who fear they may be the last Borrowers left in the world. And a frail “bean” boy named Shawn (David Henrie) arrives at the cottage, where he will be cared for until he has surgery.

Both the human and the Borrower children will ignore the warnings of the adults around them to learn about each other’s worlds and then to become friends.

It seems only fair that a story about borrowing should itself borrow so seamlessly across borders of time, geography, and culture. Norton’s British mid-century story, Ghibli’s Japanese animation, and American distributor Disney-selected voice talent all complement settings that are not so much regionless as an idyllic pan-global amalgamation. Less universally appealing is the script. It is more linear than many Studio Ghibli films but the dialog is stiff and the jokes are clunky, even delivered by reliable comic actors Arnett, Poehler, and Carol Burnett as the housekeeper who brings in exterminators to capture the Borrowers.

Studio Ghibli and screenwriter/producer Hayao Miyazaki are justly famous as masters of gorgeous hand-painted watercolor backgrounds invoking an enticing vision of lush gardens and inviting living spaces. Instead of the hyper-reality of digitally-created CGI images in most of today’s animated films, the hand-painted world of Arrietty is dreamy but tactile, with ladybugs shaking fat dew drops from velvety leaves and an exquisitely furnished dollhouse that is of interest to both the large and small residents of the cottage. But the backgrounds are so gorgeously painted that by comparison the characters can look under-drawn, like paper dolls with large but unexpressive, Keane-like eyes.

The animators have a lot of fun with scale, as we go back and forth between the “bean”-sized world and the tiny replica inhabited by the Borrowers. Each image is filled with captivating detail as we see items from one world re-contextualized in another. In their own little quarters, “borrowed” items are cleverly repurposed by Pod and Homily with detail that makes us wish for a pause button. One sugar cube seems small in a bowl on the “bean’s” table. But for Arrietty, it is nearly as wide as her shoulders, as a grub is the size of an armadillo, a rat is the size of a lion, and a pin becomes a sword. The angles are superbly used to establish the perspective of the tiny Borrowers. Scaling the “bean” kitchen table looks vertiginous.

What is most effective is the way the sense of peaceful shelter and retreat in the country setting contrasts with the precariousness of the situations faced by Shawn and Arrietty. He soberly faces the possibility that he might not survive his surgery and she risks her life whenever she leaves her home. The drama is deepened, too, by the contrast between Shawn’s physical fragility and Arrietty’s robust energy. He can hardly walk across the garden without stopping to catch his breath while she rappels the household furniture as though she is scaling Everest. But both learn from each other and their tentative steps toward friendship are sweetly expressed.

Parents should know that this G-rated film includes a seriously ill child who discusses the possibility that he might not survive surgery and some moments of peril.

Family discussion: What do Shawn and Arrietty learn from one another? How is “borrowing” different from stealing? How do Pod and Homily show their different ways of looking at the world?

If you like this, try: “The Indian in the Cupboard.” “My Neighbor Totoro,” and the Borrower books by Mary Norton

Watch Davy and Goliath on SpiritClips!

Posted on January 20, 2012 at 3:57 pm

Remember the class television series “Davy and Goliath?” The stop-motion animation children’s show about the little boy and the dog who spoke to him was owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and produced by Art and Ruth Clokey of “Gumby.” The gentle parables about sharing, tolerance, and obedience included episodes that featured Davy’s friends Nathaniel and Jonathan, among the first black characters on television to be friends of a lead white character. Episodes of the classic “Davy and Goliath” series are now available online via SpritClips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbu7jQ3HhMg

Hugo

Posted on November 22, 2011 at 7:17 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for mild thematic material, some action/peril and smoking
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drunken adult character
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad losses of parents and mistreatment of orphans, characters in peril
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	February 27, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B003Y5H5H4

Martin Scorsese’s enchanting “Hugo” is a thrillingly immersive adventure. It is about two orphans trying to solve a mystery. It is about the way that stories help us make sense of life. It stretches from the very beginnings of movies and the transformation of images through imagination into pure magic to technological advances that go beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. Scorsese, perhaps the greatest living master of cinematic storytelling and certainly the most passionate movie fan in history, waited until he and the medium reached a point where 3D was ready to be more than a stunt and become an integral element of the story and with his first film for families he stretches the frame in ways it has never been used before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-kP-olcpM&feature=youtu.be

It is based on the Caldecott award winning book by Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a Parisian orphan in the early 20th century who lives in the train station. His inventor father (Jude Law) was killed in a fire, so he came to live with his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), who wound and maintained the clocks at the station and slept in a little forgotten room inside the clockworks. Now the uncle has disappeared and Hugo is trying to keep the clocks going so no one will suspect that his uncle is gone. He is also trying to hide from the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), a WWI veteran with an injured hand and leg who likes to catch stray children and send them to the orphanage. Most of all, he is trying to repair a mysterious robotic machine that his father found in a museum.

They had been working on it together and with the help of his father’s notebook and the gears from some toys he has stolen from the station’s toy shop he is getting close. But then the proprietor of the toy shop (Ben Kingsley) has confiscated the notebook. The proprietor’s adopted daughter, the book-loving Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz of “Kick-Ass”) who is hoping for an adventure, holds the key to the mystery in more ways than one. From the opening moment, with ticking sounds that surround us as Hugo peeks out from the number 4 on a huge clock dial. The intricate pendulums, gears, and catwalks hidden inside the upper reaches of the station are enthralling, with brilliant production design by Dante Ferretti that seems to surround us.

Occasionally Scorsese will tease us a bit with 3D effects — the inspector’s nose is one example. But more often it is subtly done. Dust motes glisten several feet in front of the screen to create a sustained illusion of depth. The children’s search takes them to the movies and then to a library where they research the brief history of cinema from its invention by the Lumière brothers and the early audiences who jumped when they saw a train coming toward them on the screen. They see Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a giant clock in “Safety Last” and we get glimpses of classics from Buster Keaton’s “The General” to D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance.” And they meet a film scholar who has the last piece of the puzzle. Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan make the children’s adventure and the movie history mesh like the gears that operate the station clocks and the result is a rare story with something for every age. Scorsese lingers too long on Butterfield’s face and some of the other images and some of the scenes could be trimmed, but by the time it all comes together in a joyous celebration of film it is clear that the ultimate tribute to the cinematic giants is standing on their shoulders. (more…)

The Greening of Whitney Brown

Posted on November 22, 2011 at 12:03 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for brief mild language
Profanity:	Brief mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 23, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005TTEG0M

A middle schooler who thinks she has it all figured out finds herself tossed from 1 percent-ville to 99-percent-land in a cute new film in limited release called “The Greening of Whitney Brown.” Sammi Hanratty plays the title character, a spoiled prep school princess who is elected school president on a platform that is all about throwing the biggest, best, and most expensive party. But then her father loses his job when his company goes bankrupt and her parents (Aiden Quinn and Brooke Shields) take her to a place in the country that is all they have left. Everything is old and broken, there’s a horse that follows her around like Mary’s little sheep, she gets no cell phone reception, and everything she thought she knew about what makes someone popular turns out not to apply in her new school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeklp2nRXe4

Whitney has to start over more than once, especially after it turns out that the friend she trusted to watch out for her at her old school is more competitive and less loyal than she thought. As Whitney’s parents begin to figure out a path to a new career out in the country, Whitney begins to understand that things she once thought were important don’t matter and things she once dismissed without a thought are where the real value lies.