Cloverfield

Posted on April 21, 2008 at 11:00 am

Stories, especially movies, are usually linear and organized in part because stories are how we make sense of the world but mostly because of the limits of time. If we are only going to give two hours of our lives to a movie, we don’t have time for irrelevant details. But real life is messy. Patterns only emerge in retrospect. Part of the appeal of scary movies is that we know that it’s just a movie. Those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the great ape in King Kong are contained, not just within the limits of the screen but also within the formal limits of traditional story-telling. The perfect lighting and welling music provoke a response in us that is a kind of comfortable scariness.
This movie goes in another direction. A clever premise keeps the audience literally off-balance in “Cloverfield” from J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias. We may be in stadium seating at the mall multiplex, eating popcorn, but what we are watching is not a feature film. It is an artifact, a home video found at a site “formerly known as Central Park” that happened to be running when something terrible happened. It’s as though the only documentation of a massive and devastating attack was a 21st century equivalent of the Zapruder film.

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I am Legend

Posted on March 18, 2008 at 8:00 am

Will Smith plays the last man on earth in this third movie based on Richard Matheson’s novella. Scientist Robert Neville was immune to the virus that wiped out everyone. He spends his days hunting for food in the deserted streets of Manhattan, now overgrown with brush and inhabited by deer, and working in the lab to find a cure for the virus. And he spends his nights barricaded to protect himself from the infected creatures who are hunting him. Once human, they are now mindlessly enraged vampire/zombie killers who can do nothing but devour.
Okay, they can do one other thing. They can learn. In their feral, furious way they can cooperate and plan. Neville can trap them for his experiments or throw them off his trail, but they keep getting smarter. He is not just their prey — he is their teacher, and he is teaching them how to get him.

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Nancy Drew: Mystery in the Hollywood Hills

Posted on March 11, 2008 at 8:00 am

Part of the appeal of Nancy Drew through the decades has been the way she has continually been updated while remaining essentially the same. The problem with this movie is that the updates are poorly chosen, awkwardly inserted, and inappropriate for its intended audience.

In the original books, Nancy’s mysteries were usually about lost lockets, secret codes, maybe a kidnapping or some attempted harm that Nancy was able to prevent just in time. In this film, the central puzzle is the murder of a film star, and the plot centers on an out-of-wedlock pregnancy kept secret even from the father. This is an incomprehensibly poor choice in a movie intended for children. It also a poor dramatic choice, undercutting the movie’s plot, tone, and style and throwing its story off-balance.

In the opening scene, Nancy (Emma Roberts) crisply captures a couple of bad guys (watch for “Saturday Night Live” alum Chris Kattan). They may think they have captured her, but she soon turns them over to the grateful local cops, who have come to rely on her for their toughest cases. But all of that is coming to an end. Nancy’s father (Tate Donovan) has to go to Los Angeles for several months on business and she is going with him. And after solving that last mystery had her dangling off a rooftop, Mr. Drew makes Nancy promise that she will take a break from crime and just be a normal high school girl in their new city.

She does not tell him she selected their new home because it had a mystery for her to solve. Many years ago, a beautiful and successful actress was murdered there and left some clues behind. And there is a caretaker who may know something as well.

All of this is much more important to Nancy than lesser mysteries like how to make friends in her new school. But that retro attire she whipped up from her mother’s old patterns pretty much acts as a classmate-repellent, so she has to find a way to make some friends who like her the way she is.

Roberts (daughter of Eric and niece of Julia) has a natural elegance, poise, and focus. She fits well in the role and she looks sweetly chic in her classic wardrobe. As in the books, Nancy is a clever, determined, and spunky detective who can be fascinated by crime and still have an air of innocence. When it comes to boyfriend Ned Nickerson (Max Thieriot), she is barely aware that he might feel anything more than friendship or expect her to make him a priority. This makes her focus on the illicit romance of a long-dead movie star all the more awkward. So is a possible jealousy subplot involving Ned and an annoyingly precocious 12-year-old named Corky (Josh Flitter). A surprise cameo from a big star is just a distraction, adding nothing to the sleuthing or new kid in school storylines.

Young detectives serve as inspiration and metaphor for children trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the adult world. Seeing someone their own age understand and explain what is going on to grown-ups is highly satisfying for children. But here the uncertain shifts in tone from sincerity to almost-camp and the inappropriate subject matter make the unsolvable mystery just who this movie’s audience was intended to be.

Parents should know that although handled in a low-key way, the themes of this film include murder and out of wedlock pregnancy. There are some scary moments, including what appears to be a ghost. Nancy also takes some risks and breaks some rules.

Families who see this movie should talk about why some of the other girls thought Nancy was strange and how that affected the way they treated her. How should we treat people who are different? What made them change their minds? Who in the film was jealous, and why? They might like to think about the changes Nancy has had to make over the years. Even in the constantly-reissued books, Nancy does not drive a blue roadster anymore. She uses the internet in her sleuthing. Vestiges of racial and gender stereotypes have been eliminated. What other changes do you think they have made or should make?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy reading the books. Nancy Drew now appears at different ages in separate series designed for ages eight to early teens (with more mature material than the original series). She even appears in video games.

For more background on the history of Nancy Drew, try Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her and Bobbie Ann Mason’s The Girl Sleuth. They will also enjoy Agent Cody Banks and an earlier version, The Original Nancy Drew Movie Mystery Collection, played by Bonita Granville.

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Family Issues Thriller

We Own the Night

Posted on February 12, 2008 at 8:00 am

This is a curious hybrid combining contemporary language and violence with a retro set-up right out of a 1930’s James Cagney/Pat O’Brien movie and pulsating undercover law enforcement action of 1970’s films like Serpico and The French Connection.
The story is simple: two brothers find themselves on opposite sides of the war on drugs. Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix), is a nightclub manager with a gorgeous girlfriend (Eva Mendes as Amada). He loves the nightlife, he loves to feel important and respected, and he loves to feel that he is something of a rule-breaker. He loves to feel far away from his law enforcement relatives and has changed his last name to Green so no one will know he has cops in his family. His brother Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) hates anyone who breaks the law, especially drug dealers. his father Burt (Robert Duvall) wants to be proud of both of his sons.

Bobby and Amada show up at Joseph’s promotion ceremony, high and giggling. Joseph, Burt, and some of the other officers take Bobby upstairs to the church sanctuary to ask him to help them capture a drug dealer named Vadim (electrifying newcomer Alex Veadov), nephew of the club’s owner. The owner and his wife have treated Bobby like a member of the family. Bobby refuses — until catastrophe occurs and he has to think about who really is family and whose side he will be on.

Despite a powerful chase scene and some affecting performances, the movie’s retro slant makes it simplistic and superficial. Instead of commenting on the conventions of the past, it awkwardly tries to pretend that they are still in effect.

Parents should know that this movie has intense and graphic peril and violence, including a lot of gunfire. Many characters are wounded and killed. The plot concerns drug dealers and narcotics officers, and characters use and sell drugs, drink, and smoke. They also use strong language. A strength of the movie is its diverse characters, but there are some racial epithets.

Families who see this movie should talk about what made Bobby and Joseph alike and what made them different.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy The Departed and classic crime dramas of the 1930’s like Angels With Dirty Faces.

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Drama Thriller

Sunshine

Posted on January 8, 2008 at 12:34 pm

The sun is dying. A rocket ship from earth, meaningfully named “Icarus,” failed in its mission to reboot the sun with a supercharged nuclear payload designed to “create a star within a star.” Now the earth’s last chance is Icarus II. If they do not deliver the payload, the sun and all of its planets will die.

But this is not the usual “and then something goes wrong” or “and then an alien leaps out of a crew member’s chest” space opera. This is a meticulously constructed story that presents its characters with a series of exponentially more complex moral and practical dilemmas as gripping as the perilous situations that threaten the mission.

Director Danny Boyle transcends genre. His films have ranged from horror (28 Days Later) to thrillers (Shallow Grave) to charming family fantasy (Millions). But all of his films focus on moral choices. In 28 Days Later, he showed us a world infested with enraged zombies where it is the uninfected humans who are the scariest predators. In both Shallow Grave and Millions, characters discover the corrosive effect of stolen money. Boyle likes to make us think about what we would do to survive, how far we would go to get something we wanted.

The crew of Icarus II has just passed the point where communication with earth has been cut off. They are alone, a community unto themselves, and they must struggle with the remnants of the priorities and procedures they have been given as they are confronted with increasingly dire circumstances and increasingly conflicted priorities.

Should they change their course to try to save anyone who might still be there? No, that would interfere with their mission. But what if it might increase the chance of completing the mission? And what if things change and it is essential for completing the mission?

And what if there is not enough oxygen for everyone? How do we decide who gets to live? By assigning blame? By rank? By who is most important for completion of the mission? And, at the end of these judgments, who are we? How do they change us?

Boyle and his able cast create an atmosphere of conviction and sincerity that makes us invest in the answers to these questions, and the debates as gripping as the action scenes.

Parents should know that this is an intense and disturbing movie, with extreme peril, some jump-out-at-you shocks, and some graphic violence. Characters are injured and killed and there is a suicide. One of the strengths of the movie is the way it presents moral issues in a provocative manner, and that may be disturbing for some audience members. Another strength of the movie is its portrayal of diverse characters.

Families who see this movie should talk about how the characters evaluated their choices. What were their priorities? When they disagreed, what were the determining factors? Authors often use science fiction and the device of putting diverse characters in an environment that is cut off from everyone else to highlight particular controversies. How would this story have been different if it took place today, in the US?

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy Silent Running, Apollo 13, and 2001 – A Space Odyssey. Books like Tragic Choices and The Problems of Jurisprudence consider ways to evaluate options in a legal, economic, and public policy framework and of course many books consider moral, ethical, and spiritual approaches to these issues as well.