Dolphin Tale

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:41 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild thematic elements
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Some alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Injured human and animal characters, offscreen wartime violence, recovering human and animal amputees, discussion of parental loss and abandonment
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 12, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004EPZ01G

It won’t be available for sale until next week but I just can’t wait to feature this terrific film. I have a copy to give away so if you’d like to enter, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Dolphin in the subject line and don’t forget your address! I’ll pick a winner December 16.

Clearwater Florida’s star attraction Winter, the dolphin with the prosthetic tail, plays herself in a heart-warming story that is one of the best family movies of the year.

The human characters are fictional, but Winter really did lose her tail and would not have survived without the development of a mechanical tail to allow her to swim. In this story, a nice connection is made not just between a lonely boy and the affectionate dolphin but between the two species who have to adjust to the loss of limbs and the use of mechanical replacements.

In this version, a boy named Sawyer (Nathan Gamble) has become something of a loner after his father left and his favorite cousin Kyle, a swim champion, joins the military. He is unhappy about being sent to summer school. All he wants to do is tinker with his remote controlled helicopter in his workshop and wait for his cousin to come home.

On the way to school one morning, he sees an injured dolphin on the beach. He gently cuts her free and whistles to her to keep her calm until the Marine rescue team arrives. Later, he sneaks into the aquarium where she is being cared for and meets the marine biologist in charge, Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick, Jr.) and his young daughter, Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff). Winter responds to Sawyer so well that they let him stay and help take care of her.

Hazel and Sawyer spend hours cradling Winter gently until she starts to try to swim. As Winter begins to get better, Sawyer starts to become a part of the community at the aquarium. His mother (Ashley Judd) is at first frustrated and angry that he has been ditching school. But then she realizes that he is learning far more from being with Winter at the aquarium than he could anywhere else. When Kyle comes back injured, both he and Winter will need to find the courage to confront their challenges. A lovably irascible doctor at Kyle’s VA facility (Morgan Freeman) thinks he can adapt the prosthetic technology they use to help the wounded veterans to give Winter a new tail.

And then just as Winter’s survival is on track, the survival of the aquarium and the marine program is at risk.

That’s a lot to handle, but writer/director Charles Martin Smith wisely keeps the focus on Sawyer and Hazel, and it is a treat to see their passion and optimism. Gamble and Zuehlsdorff have a lovely natural chemistry and the grown-ups in the cast provide able support. The story has a fairy tale quality, especially when it comes to saving the aquarium, and then the footage of the real-life disabled kids visiting Winter reminds us that the true story is even more magical.

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Spy Kids: All the Time in the World 4D

Posted on August 20, 2011 at 10:53 pm

Jessica Alba was dressed for her role in Robert Rodriguez’s ultra-violent “Machete” when, on a break from filming, she stopped to change her baby’s diaper. Rodriguez says he saw her performing this most domestic of tasks in her action-movie attire and knew it was time to start up the “Spy Kids” series again, this time with Alba taking her baby with her on a mission.

The first Spy Kids was about Carmen and Juni Cortez (Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara), children of super-spies who got caught up in the family business. It was sharp and funny and imaginative and made it clear that the real adventure is being part of a family. It was a rare film for audiences of any age with strong, smart female and Latino characters. And Rodriguez, known for his ultra-violent films for adults (“Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” “Machete”), kept the “Spy Kids” series refreshingly non-violent. If this fourth in the series is not as good as the first, it is better than the unfortunately titled Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. And much, much better than The Smurfs.

Alba plays Marissa Wilson, a spy who goes into labor in the middle of a chase but manages to capture the evil Time Keeper on her way to the delivery room. She quits to be a stay-at-home mom for the baby and her twin step-children, Cecil (Mason Cook) and Rebecca (Rowan Blanchard). Her husband Wilbur (a likable Joel McHale), has a “Spy Hunter” television show but somehow never figured out that his wife was not a decorator.

A year later, the Time Keeper is creating chaos and Marissa, the twins, and the baby are off to save the world and do some family bonding as well. The original spy kids, now grown up, arrive for some bad guy chasing and family conflict resolving as well.

Everyone gets a chance to know each other better, of course, but the film has a bit more substance. Cecil is hearing-impaired and he and everyone around him are completely comfortable with it. It is very rare in movies of any age that we get to see a character with a disability rather than a disability with a character. Cecil is a regular kid who happens to have hearing aids and Cook gives a nice comic snap to his comments. The gadgets are a lot of fun, including a robot dog with more functions than a Swiss Army Knife, hilariously voiced by Ricky Gervais, and “hammer hands” gloves that can punch through walls. Like all parents, Rodriguez is dismayed by the ever-quickening passage of time. So in the midst of the silliness with a “4 dimension” scratch and sniff card to accompany some of the story’s most odoriferous moments, a muddled storyline, and too much potty humor, there is a sweet theme about seizing the moment for what matters most.

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Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer

Posted on June 11, 2011 at 9:43 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild rude humor and language
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild comic peril, brief footage of zombie movie
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	June 10, 2011

It’s the last day of third grade and redheaded Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) is looking forward to the greatest summer ever. She has big plans for herself and her three best friends, a summer of dares and thrills and adventures. But she is crushed to discover that two of her friends have their own plans. One is headed for circus camp and the other to Borneo. Worse than that, her parents have to leave to help her grandparents move, and she will be stuck at home with her pesty, Bigfoot-obsessed brother Stink (Parris Mosteller) and an aunt she does not even know (Heather Graham as the free-spirited Aunt Opal). Instead of the best most not-boring thrilladelic summer ever, it looks to be a bummer summer all the way, death by “starvation, boredom, and Stink-dom.”

Judy has some setbacks and learns some lessons, as the fans of book series by Megan McDonald know. Director John Schultz (“Aliens in the Attic”) provides some visual bounce; it looks like a school notebook covered with glitter and stickers. But the individual episodes play like skits and there is much too much bodily function humor (lessons: don’t eat a lot of junk food and a blue sco-cone before getting on a roller coaster called the Scream Monster — or sit next to someone who did and never make your picnic sandwiches near someone who is storing Bigfoot poop). Most important, Judy comes across as a unredeemed, self-centered brat, and nothing she learns in the course of the film is about more than having fun and winning a pointless competition with your friends. These are what we call first-world problems.

Last year’s Ramona and Beezus was charming and delightful and heartwarming. Like Judy Moody, it is based on a beloved book series about a little girl in the suburbs with a free-spirited but doting aunt, with some silly adventures and lessons learned, but it is a far better film in every category. The best I can say about this one is that children will enjoy the gross-out moments and comic disasters and everyone else will enjoy looking at the very pretty Heather Graham. As a movie, though, it’s a bummer.

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Super 8

Posted on June 9, 2011 at 6:09 pm

A couple of kids who are deeply in love with making movies have made a movie about kids deeply in love with making movies, and it is one of the most joyously thrilling treats of the summer, a love letter to childhood pleasures that last a lifetime.

Producer Steven Spielberg and writer-director J.J. Abrams may be chronological grown-up, but as this movie makes clear, they could have just as much fun with a super-8 camera and a box of M-80’s. Representing them in the film are Charles (Riley Griffiths) and Joe (Joel Courtney), middle schoolers in 1979 Lillian, Ohio, who are working on a movie to enter into a competition. In that pre-digital time, they are making it with a Super-8 camera, on film that is bought and developed at the camera store. Charles is the writer and director. Joe is in charge of make-up and special effects. Cary (Ryan Lee) in charge of explosions and Martin (Gabriel Basso) is their star. It is a zombie movie. But Charles has been reading about film-making and realizes that he has focused too much on scares and special effects. An article explains that the movie works better if there is a reason to feel something for the characters, so he decides that Martin’s detective character will have a wife. And that is how Alice (the luminous Elle Fanning) joins the group.

They sneak out one night to film a scene at the train station. When a truck drives onto the tracks as the train approaches, there is a spectacular crash. The kids run, but the camera keeps filming. What it shows will be the key to solving the real-life mystery about what was on the train.

As they wait for it to be developed, increasingly disturbing developments occupy Joe’s father, Lillian’s deputy sheriff. All the town’s dogs disappear. Engines are ripped out of cars. The sheriff and a gas station attendant are missing. The army has taken control of the crash site and will not tell anyone what is going on. The adults are so distracted that the kids are able to pursue their investigation — and their film-making — almost without supervision.

It feels in the best possible sense like a newly discovered Spielberg film from the “Goonies”/”E.T”/”Close Encounters of the Third Kind” era, with its suburban setting and kids’-eye sense of wonder and adventure. The meta-humor about the film within a film (stay through the credits to see what the final version looks like) is witty and heart-warming. “Production values!” says Charles as though it is a magical incantation. Which, in a way, it is. No one understands the language of film better than these guys and their evident pleasure in the economical story-telling through visuals adds to the dazzle. A worker silently removes the “784” from the sign that says “safety is our most important goal” and replaces it with a 1. When we then see Joe sitting by himself outside, we know what happened and feel his loss. Later, he pins a lost dog notice to a bulletin board and the camera pulls back to show us the entire board is covered with notes about lost dogs. The camera is in every way a part of the masterful storytelling here.

Like Charles, Abrams and Spielberg know that all the special effects and jump-out-at-you thrills in the world won’t resonate unless we care about the people in the story. This is definitely a movie about characters. The themes of parental estrangement are not always gracefully handled, but Abrams’ ability to put us inside the children’s world is breathtaking. All of the kids are great but Courtney and Fanning are marvels. A scene where he applies zombie make-up to her face is filled at the same time with longing, amazement, and unspoken understandings and is almost unbearably tender. Best of all is the way Abrams shows us that it is not just the happenstance of the movie footage that gives the kids the unique ability to solve the mystery and get everyone home safely; it is the way that particular moment poised between childhood and growing up gives them for a brief moment the unfiltered sense of wonder that makes everything in the world a discovery of equal magnitude and a universe of endless possibilities. It is a privileged moment that he lets us share, and a rare film that makes use of genre without getting overwhelmed by it. We get all of the popcorn pleasures of the stunts and special effects but we get the deeper pleasures of a great story, masterfully told.

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Mia and the Migoo

Posted on May 12, 2011 at 10:13 am

The influence of acclaimed Japanese animation wizard Hayao Miyazaki is clear in “Mia and the Migoo,” an award-winning film from French director Jacques-Rémy Girerd. It has a Miyazaki-like brave young heroine on an eco-themed journey and random encounters with grotesque characters. And, like Miyazaki, Girerd remains committed to traditional, hand-drawn animation, a welcome shift from computer-created images.

But “Mia” incorporates some of Miyazaki’s weaknesses – narrative incoherence and a remote, chilly quality – while never reaching the soaring visual or emotional scope of “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke,” or even “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” And a weak script feels like “Ferngully 3: Revenge of the Developers.”

Mia (voice of Amanda Misquez) is a little girl in an unidentified South American country. Her father, Paulo (voice of Joaquin Mas) has taken a dangerous job far from home to earn money to take care of her. As he works on a luxury homes construction project in a pristine part of the rainforest, he is trapped in a landslide. Mia immediately senses that her father needs her. She visits her mother’s grave to say goodbye and sets off to find him.

The man behind the construction project is Jekhide (voice of John DiMaggio of “Futurama”), a callous bully who relies on bribes, intimidation, and worse to get the project done. Gunpowder is “the smell of brute strength and power,” he tells his kind-hearted young son, Aldrin (voice of Vincent Agnello). “I’ll take that flame-thrower as well,” Jekhide tells a weapons dealer (voice of James Woods), as he prepares to hunt down the mysterious creature that has been obstructing the builders.

The Yeti-like creature is the Migoo, guardian of an “Avatar”-style Tree of Life. Mia and Aldrin will have to help the Migoo guard the tree or all life on earth will be at risk.

The Migoo are lumpen, golem-like muddy figures who are so dim-witted and consumed with bickering it is hard to imagine that they could protect a paperclip. But briefly there is one intriguing suggestion that they – it – is/are not several entities but a single one, at the same time big and small, many and one. This echoes Mia’s mystic connection to her father, somehow waking, hundreds of miles away, the instant that he was in trouble, as well as the theme of the film about our interconnectedness to our environment. But it quickly gets lost in an unbalanced, too-many-cooks script (five credited writers). Distracting flashes of crude humor dissipate any connection to the characters and odd encounters derail the momentum. And the climax muddles its own message.

The total control permitted by computer-generated animation has achieved and even exceeded photography to reach a kind of hyper-realism, liberating the few remaining practitioners of hand-drawn animation to experiment with a more free-form, impressionistic form of story-telling. Recent masterpieces of animation like “Coraline” or the “Triplets of Belleville” are thrilling demonstrations of strong personal taste rejecting many of the tools offered by computer graphics in favor of a distinctive personal vision.

This freedom puts even more of an obligation to make each artistic choice in service of the story. “Mia and the Migoo” does have some striking images with strong blocks of color. They would be impressive illustrations in a book. But animation, as the word indicates, is about movement. The lack of fluidity in “Mia” is not an artistic choice; it is inadequacy that in close-ups recalls the lips-only action in old “Clutch Cargo” cartoons.

Girerd makes the odd choice of outlining most of his figures with a glowing alizarin crimson. It may be intended to suggest the heat of global warming but it makes them look bruised. Red underpainting seems to add a radioactive glow to the backgrounds as well, highly out of place for a movie which celebrates the rich greens and blues of fertile vegetation and life-giving waters.

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