Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life

Posted on October 6, 2016 at 5:53 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for rude humor throughout, language and thematic elements
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking (adult)
Violence/ Scariness:	Some peril, sad off-screen death of a child, parental abandonment and marital break-up, cartoonishly exaggerated adult villains, some misbehavior including vandalism and mayhem
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 7, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	January 2, 2017
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01LTHWXX4

This just might be the most accurate movie title of all time. Middle school is pretty much the worst years of everyone’s life. Terrible stress and tragedy happens at all ages, but it is the years from 12 to 14 where the internal turmoil and agonizing uncertainty are so acute that we still wince remembering them decades later. This film, based on the series of books by mega-bestselling author James Patterson (with Chris Tebbetts and illustrations by Laura Park) has some delightfully satisfying moments of fantasy revenge against a tyrannical, rules-obssessed principal and a borderline-abusive potential stepfather. But it sneaks in some quietly touching and surprisingly wise insights about loss and working with a “new normal.” Bright direction and an exceptionally engaging cast of kids make this film a genuine fall family treat.

Rafe Khatchadorian (Griffin Gluck) has been expelled from two schools (we never find out why) and has just one more chance. He would rather stay home all day and draw pictures in his notebook, where he has created a whole world of monsters and aliens, charmingly animated. “There’s a big world out there,” Rafe’s mother (Lauren Graham) tells him. “There’s a big world in there, too,” he says. And it is clear that is the world he prefers.

He does not even make it inside the building, though, when he meets the new school’s Principal Dwight (Andy Daly), who cares about just two things: his rules, and the school’s test score ranking. Dwight’s rules basically outlaw anything that is fun, friendly, expressive of individuality, or likely to keep the school from the #1 test score ranking Dwight cherishes so deeply that he has cultivated a number 1 bush by topiary in front of the school. Dwight’s consigliere/enforcer is Ida Stricker (“Parks and Recreation’s” Retta). So, bright, patterned shirts, talking in the hallways, even drawing in a notebook — all banned. There’s also a school bully who threatens to give Rafe “a wedgie so bad you’ll be able to taste your underwear.”

But there are three bright spots. Rafe’s best friend, Leo (Thomas Barbusca), is always there to make him laugh and spur him on. There’s a friendly girl named Jeannie (Isabela Moner), and a kind, sympathetic teacher (“Happy Endings'” Adam Pally) who uses the Drake and the Wu-Tang Clan to teach the class about macroeconomic trends. Rafe decides to take on Dwight by breaking every rule, with Leo’s help. Meanwhile, Rafe’s mom is getting serious with the boyfriend Rafe and his sister call “Bear” (Rob Riggle in his usual role of a walking Axe body spray).

The revenge fantasy is funny and satisfying, mostly about making the pompous Principal Dwight look silly. And it gives Rafe a way to begin to make new friends, to resolve issues with the school bully, and to think through the other problems in his life.

The film is bright and fun, like its sparkling soundtrack of pop songs. The young actors are refreshingly natural and Barbusca has great comic timing. Rafe’s sister Georgia (Alexa Nisenson) and love interest Jeanne (Isabela Moner) are real characters, smart and capable. When the more serious issues arise, it is organic and sensitively handled. The pranks are signed RAFE, which stands for “rules aren’t for everyone.” But this movie is.

Parents should know that this film includes schoolyard epithets, potty humor, references to death of a child, parental abandonment, and marital breakup, comically exaggerated adult villains, cartoon-style peril, and tween misbehavior including driving and mild vandalism.

Family discussion: What is the best way to challenge unfair rules? What school rules would you like to change?

If you like this, try: “Harriet the Spy,” “How to Eat Fried Worms,” and the book series that inspired the film

The Queen of Katwe

Posted on September 22, 2016 at 5:59 pm

An illiterate girl from the slums of Uganda became an internationally ranked chess champion. So of course there is a Disney movie. But director Mira Nair has not made the usual feel-good underdog story. It is a wonderfully rich depiction of a family and a culture, as complex in its way as a master-level chess game with intricate moves by many pieces with different strengths and vulnerabilities.

At the center of the story is Harriet (Lupita Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave”), a young widow with five children living in dire poverty. She cannot afford to send her children to school, and so they sell maize in the street and at an open market. Her oldest daughter, Night (Taryn Kyaze) is a young teenager already attracting the attention of a man. The youngest is a baby. When Harriet’s daughter Phiona (Madina Nalwanga) and her brother are lured into a chess class with cups of porridge, Harriet is scared and angry. She needs the children to bring in money, and she believes that the chess teacher, Robert Katende (David Oyelowo of “Selma”) is using them for some sort of gambling operation. But Katende, who is waiting for a job as an engineer, persuades her that he just wants her children to learn.

Nair (“Monsoon Wedding,” “The Namesake”) has a great eye, and a great gift for creating vibrant, layered, wonderfully inviting communities on screen. As Harriet tries to protect her family, despite eviction, a sexual predator, a terrible injury, she recognizes that she has to do more than keep her children safe. She has to open the world to them. Phiona cannot read or count, but somehow she can see eight moves ahead on a chess board as only a very few masters of the game can do. Robert knows that poverty is only the beginning of the problem the children face. The snobbery and bigotry of the middle class Ugandans is the real obstacle. They will not even allow the children from the slum to compete. Robert tricks the official into agreeing to let them in if they can raise the entry fee. And then he raises the money himself, by playing soccer.

Newcomer Nalwanga, from a community much like Phiona’s, has a winning screen presence, and we can see that she has inherited her ability to think through chess problems from her mother’s canny navigation of the challenges to the family’s most basic survival. Nyong’o shows a grace and courage, even in the direst moments, that echo Phiona’s resilience.

Parents should know that this movie includes themes of poverty and deprivation, child is hurt in an accident with scenes of painful medical treatment, there are also some references to sexual predators and there is an out of wedlock teen pregnancy.

Family discussion: Why did Robert change his mind? Why did Phiona get cranky after she returned home?

If you like this, try: “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” “Brooklyn Castle,” and “Endgame”

Kubo and the Two Strings

Posted on August 18, 2016 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic elements, scary images, action and peril
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Monsters, peril, sad offscreen deaths
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 19, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	November 20, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01KMKM4TW

LAIKA Studios’ fourth film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” is a fable of exquisite beauty and meaning, gorgeously produced in the most painstaking of all forms of filmmaking, stop-motion animation. They are the modern-day equivalent of the monks who labored for years on each page of illuminated manuscripts.

Every detail in every frame and every element of the story, set in a magical version of ancient Japan, reflects the simple profundity of the ancient and contemporary Japanese art that inspired it. LAIKA’s last film, “The Boxtrolls,” was set in a cluttered, sooty, steampunkish imaginary Victorian London, and the studio’s motto was “no square corners, no straight lines.” This time it went in the opposite direction, with the muted palette and spare, carefully balanced settings of Japanese woodblock prints and the sharp lines and perfect corners of origami.

One of the hardest elements to get right in stop-motion is water, because it is impossible to control it frame to frame. In “Boxtrolls,” the studio’s greatest technical triumph was an elaborate set-up for a brief scene in which a character touched standing water and created some ripples. LAIKA loves to challenge itself, and so this film starts with a storm at sea. A woman we will learn is Kubo’s mother is desperately trying to stay upright on a tiny boat. We know she is escaping someone or something, but we are not sure yet what or who it is. And we do not learn until she is washed up on the shore, exhausted and hurt, that she is not alone. In her backpack, there is a baby. It is Kubo.

Like Harry Potter, Kubo had a father who died trying to protect him from a danger so great that Kubo bears a wound. One of his eyes is gone. Kubo’s mother survived, but she used all of her magic to save him and now she is frail, forgetful, and inconsolable.

When we next see them, he is about 11, and has been caring for her all his life. Each day, he makes her food and feeds her. And then he walks from their home in a cave on top of a cliff into the nearest town, where he tells stories in the market. He has the power to bring origami characters to life to act out thrilling tales of the great samurai warrior Hanzo. The townspeople love his stories, which always end with a cliffhanger, and they toss him coins.

The community has an annual Obon festival, where they light lanterns and remember the dead. Kubo wants to go, so he violates his mother’s rule about never being out after dark. And the danger she protected him from years ago comes after him in the form of his mother’s two spooky sisters, both voiced by Rooney Mara and both wearing implacable-expression white masks and terrifying swoopy capes made of black feathers.

Kubo’s mother has just enough magic left to save him one more time. And then she is gone, and Kubo finds himself on a journey, accompanied by the live version of the small monkey charm he always carried in his pocket. He and Monkey (Charlize Theron) set off to find the three pieces of Hanzo’s armor that he will need to fight the sisters and their father, who wants Kubo’s other eye. Along the way they meet a samurai who has been cursed and turned into a giant beetle (Matthew McConaughey). And they meet and fight three different monsters, a giant skeleton, an underwater garden of eyes, and an enormous, floating, reticulated moon serpent, each giving Kubo a chance to discover his courage and power.

This is a gorgeous, epic adventure with grandeur, scope, and spectacular settings, every bit of it wonderfully imaginative. It reflects LAIKA’s own adventurous spirit in taking on narrative and technical challenges as daunting as that faced by any hero. Who else would try to create a stop-motion battle under water? Or take on, in a family movie, a quest that encompasses themes of family, story, courage, loss, destiny, and meaning? LAIKA understands that the most enduring fairy tales are not afraid to deal with darkness because that is the only way to understand its true message, here delivered in a breathtaking conclusion, of tenderness and forgiveness.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy-style peril and violence with monsters and magic, and sad deaths of parents.

Family discussion: Why did Kubo answer his grandfather’s questions the way he did? Why didn’t Monkey tell Kubo where she came from? Why did the two strings make a difference?

If you like this, try: “Coraline,” “Paranorman,” and “The Boxtrolls”

Trailer: The Great Gilly Hopkins

Posted on August 17, 2016 at 8:00 am

The classic Katherine Paterson novel, The Great Gilly Hopkins, the story of an angry foster child who dreams of being reunited with her mother, is now a movie starring Oscar-winner Kathy Bates as a kind-hearted foster mother.

Pete’s Dragon

Posted on August 11, 2016 at 5:24 pm

Disney has wisely jettisoned the songs, the plot and the cartoon for the remake of the Helen Reddy musical with live-action boy befriended by a cartoon dragon. It’s still about Pete and his dragon friend Elliott, and the entirely new story that is genuinely enchanting.

This seems to be a year for stories about children who make friends with giant, magical creatures. We’ve already had “The BFG” and have “A Monster Calls” coming up. And this reworking also owes quite a debt to another live-action 3D Disney remake of just a few months ago, “The Jungle Book.” But hey, it is a lovely fantasy — a child left alone finds a devoted protector. Pete (Levi Alexander), age 5, is reading a book called Elliott Gets Lost in the back seat of the car with the encouragement of his parents when there is an accident. The parents are killed (very discreetly handled off-screen), and Pete is left alone, like Mowgli and Tarzan, but instead of being raised by wolves or apes, he is taken in by a furry green dragon he dubs Elliot.

Six years later, Pete (now played Oakes Fegley) is living a life of Rousseauian paradise in the woods. We don’t waste time on how or what they eat or why his teeth are so white and even. It’s just racing through the Edenic forest and, in the film’s most exhilarating scene, leaping off a cliff in the sure knowledge that Elliott will be there to catch him and take him soaring through the sky in gorgeous 3D. They are very happy together.

But a logging operation is moving very close to the cozy cave where Elliot and Pete live. Two brothers, Gavin (“Star Trek’s” Karl Urban) and Jack (Wes Bentley) are cutting trees in the forest under the watchful eye of Jack’s girlfriend, Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), a forest ranger who considers the woods her home. Her father Meacham (Robert Redford) likes to tell local children the legend of the dragon in the woods and boasts that he once fought the dragon with a knife. But Grace insists that she knows every inch of the forest and does not believe his story.

Gavin is reckless and greedy. When Gavin’s crew goes beyond Grace’s limits, Jack’s daughter Natalie (“Southpaw’s” Oona Laurence) discovers Pete, who has not seen another person in six years. He goes home with Jack and Grace and begins to learn about the human world. But he misses Elliot terribly. Gavin discovers Elliot and thinks he can make a fortune by capturing him.

The movie is disjointed at times, likely due to recutting, leaving unanswered questions about Grace’s relationship to Jack and Natalie and oddly having three main characters motherless. I never quite got used to the idea of a dragon with fur instead of scales. But it is thrilling to see Pete and Elliot soar together and the love between them is genuine and heartwarming enough to make this one of the year’s best family films.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy/action-style peril and violence, sad death of parents (discreetly shown) and references to other absent parents, and brief mild language.

Family discussion: Why did Gavin and Jack have different ideas about their business? If you had a dragon friend, what name would you pick?

If you like this, try: “The Jungle Book” and “Free Willy”