A Ballerina’s Tale

Posted on October 14, 2015 at 5:32 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Injury and recovery
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 16, 2015

“A Ballerina’s Tale” — the title suggests a fairy story, with sugar plums and a happily ever after ending. But this documentary about Misty Copeland is a story about the brutal hard work and resolve necessary to create those exquisitely graceful performances and make them look effortless. Like the Venus and Serena documentary about the superstar tennis champions, this is a story of an African-American pioneer in a world that has traditionally been white. While ballet does not offer a competition as definitive as a sporting event, like the Williamses Copeland has a level of ability, skill, and dedication that made it impossible to put her anywhere but front and center.

And, like the Williams sisters, Copeland is in a field where people in their 20’s and 30’s may be at the end of their careers. Furthermore, like the Williams sisters, Copeland faces an unexpected health crisis that put her ability to continue at risk. Just as she was given the chance for her first lead role, Copeland found that she had a severe stress fracture in her lower leg. She was 29 years old, and did not know if she would ever dance again.

This is a good movie about a subject and a person who deserve a great movie. The drama is compelling, although it is hard to see an ad campaign as the triumph it expects us to cheer. The best parts of the movie are Copeland’s performances, starting with home video footage at the beginning, going back to when she was in her teens. Her grace and stage presence are there from the beginning. We see her stand in her favorite spot in the practice room, admitting she is a perfectionist. We learn a little about the relatively recent but still-prevalent notion that a ballet dancer should be waiflike and prepubescent-looking and as indistinguishable as possible from the other dancers. Copeland has a strong, healthy body, curvier than the typical principal dancer. And she is black. The film’s most touching moments are when the previous generation’s African-American dancers become her mentors, and we see in their eyes, faces, and still-graceful gestures how much it means to them that she may be able to go farther than they did. If this is a fairy tale, they are the fairy godmothers.

Parents should know that this film has frank discussions of racial prejudice and an injury with brief graphic images.

Family discussion: What other fields are as demanding as ballet? What did Misty Copeland learn from the women who went before her?

If you like this, try: “First Position,” “Pina,” and “Ballet 422”

Big Stone Gap

Posted on October 8, 2015 at 5:51 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for brief suggestive material
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drunkeness
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations, sad death
Diversity Issues:	Ethnic diversity
Date Released to Theaters:	October 9, 2015

Even in small towns, big things can happen. Sometimes the most famous movie star in the world stops by and makes international headlines. And even bigger things happen, too — they just don’t get into the newspapers. Adriana Trigiani’s best-selling novels about her home town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia are loving tributes to the down-home values and adorably quirky characters she grew up with. Big things happen. There are sad losses and disappointments. But there is love and honor and generosity, too. In her first feature film as a director, Trigiani has assembled a superb cast, mixing top Hollywood and Broadway talent with some locals. Ashley Judd is at the center as a woman whose discovery of a secret about her past makes her think differently about her future.

It takes place in 1978. The woman is Ave Maria Mulligan, the owner of the local pharmacy. With a name like that, there has to be a story. When her beloved mother dies, she learns for the first time that her mother’s husband was not her father, as she thought. Her mother has left her a letter explaining that her father was a man she loved in Italy. Ave is determined to find her real father, though she has never traveled anywhere. She has great friends with colorful names and personalities, especially wisecracking Fleeta Mullins (Whoopi Goldberg) and starry-eyed bookmobile librarian Iva Lou Wade (Jenna Elfman). Then there’s Theodore Tipton (John Benjamin Hickey), the high school band and choral director who works with her on the town’s legendary annual “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” pageant and is Ave’s sort-of boyfriend and a handsome coal miner with the rare ordinary name of Jack (Patrick Wilson), who has a very possessive girlfriend (Jane Krakowski as Sweet Sue Tinsley).

It takes place in an eternally cozy past where coal mining is romantic because it creates electricity and there’s no mention of black lung disease. It’s corny cornpone, but unpretentious and it goes down easy, like sweet tea brewed by sunshine.

Parents should know that this film has some sexual references including potency, paternity, and a closeted gay character and non-explicit situations, drinking and drunkenness.

Family discussion: How is Ave Maria different from the people around her? Why did her mother keep the secret so long?

If you like this, try: the book series by Adriana Trigiani and the film “Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!”

Related Tags:

Comedy Movies -- format Romance

Stonewall

Posted on September 25, 2015 at 8:00 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content, language throughout, some violence and drug use
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Police brutality, riots, reference to murders
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	September 25, 2015

In 1969, when the federal government prohibited the firing of gays and lesbians, when it was illegal for them to congregate in a bar or even to have consensual sex, when police harassment and brutality was not only permitted but expected, a man threw a brick, shattered a window, and began four days of riots that galvanized the fight for GLBTQ equality. The window was in a bar called Stonewall, and its name lives on as the symbol of the moment that ignited a revolution.

The movie “Stonewall,” intended as history and tribute, instead throws a brick through the meaning and the moment, shattering both. This movie is more than bad and worse than disappointing. It is a tragic distortion of a vitally important story that insults the people it tries to honor and insults its audience as well. Director Roland Emmerich (known for movies with a lot of big explosions and stunts) and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz so vastly underestimate their audience that they apparently believe cannot understand a movie about the GLBTQ community unless we have an all-American-style high school football hero from the heartland to identify with. How do you make a movie about the Stonewall uprising and so completely miss the point?

Our point of entry is handsome but bland Danny (Jeremy Irvine), a Hoosier who has a crush on the quarterback. He is Goldilocks to the three bears of his family, spread out to represent all points on the gay-friendliness spectrum: a taciturn father (also his football coach), a passive mother, and a devoted and free-thinking younger sister (Joey King). When his assignations with the quarterback are discovered, “faggot” is scrawled on his locker and he is shunned by everyone. He refuses to tell his father that it was a one-time thing and leaves for New York.

And so we shift from tone-deaf cliches about the Midwest to tone-deaf cliches about Christopher Street, with a group of adorably scruffy and flamboyant runaway Lost Boys who spend their time tricking and clubbing. Their leader is an Artful Dodger type known as Ray (Jonny Beauchamp). They sit on the stoop and talk about Judy Garland, alternately enjoying shocking decadence and longing for home. Around the edges of the story are the real-life characters who are far more interesting, or at least who were in real life.

This is a bad movie, purely from the standpoint of drama. It is poorly constructed, with cardboard characters and worst-of-the-year category clangers in dialog, provoking snicker and then outright snorts from the audience. “I’m too angry to love.” “These kids have nothing to lose.” But the monumental failure here is the disrespect for the real-life courageous souls who fought back nearly half a century ago and for the audience, who would relish a film that does them justice.

Parents should know that this film has explicit sexual references and situations, including predatory behavior, abuse, and prostitution, homophobic and bigoted insults, police brutality, and riots. Characters use very strong language, drink and smoke, and use drugs.

Family discussion: How was the gay rights movie like and not like other civil rights movements of the 20th century?

If you like this, try: “Longtime Companion.” “Pride,” and “Milk”

Finders Keepers

Posted on September 24, 2015 at 5:27 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and drug abuse
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad offscreen deaths, discussion of child abuse, some disturbing images of a severed limb
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 18, 2015

You might not think that a documentary about two men fighting over a severed leg would be funny, touching, and insightful, but it is. You might think that it would be a carnival freak show for the age of YouTube and Twitter, and it sort of is that, too, but mostly in the clips from the various television shows that got involved in this real-life gothic mashup of Southern culture, reality TV, dysfunctional families, substance abuse, money, tragedy, and two men, one plummeting from a life of wealth and privilege and one desperately aspiring for fame and fortune, both seeing the approval of fathers who are no longer here. And they became two men who fought each other for years over something the rest of us cannot imagine anyone would want.

Shannon Whisnant in a small-time operator in North Carolina, always up to some scheme or other. So of course he showed up to bid on items from a storage locker that were confiscated when the payments lapsed. He bought a small, rusty smoker and was surprised to open it and find inside a severed human leg, about mid-calf down, with the foot and toes. The film plays his 911 call. “I got a human foot.” “A what?” “A human left foot.” I love that he thinks that additional detail will somehow make a difference.

The foot belongs to John Wood, or at least it once did. It was amputated following a plane crash and he wanted to keep it. It seemed very reasonable to him once he heard that Whisnant had it that he would get it back. But Whisnant saw it as the golden ticket he always knew was coming to him, his chance for the big time. Oh, he had already appeared on “Jerry Springer,” but he had not achieved that level of fame he just knew in his heart was his destiny. He went on news shows to talk about his find. He started charging admission — $3 adults, $1 kids. He had t-shirts made. I would like to say they were tasteful but they were not. His twitter account is @fottmannc.

Whisnant met with Wood — at the parking lot of the Dollar General — to talk about the ownership of the foot. The details of the conversation are still disputed, but the next steps involved litigation. And more reality television.

The great gift of the film, which is at times hilarious and at times deeply moving, is that it takes this absurd dispute and humanizes the story so profoundly that by the end we are a part of it. It deals with the endearing and the obnoxious sides of American celebrity culture. It is abashing but also reassuring that the multi-year fight is finally resolved — with Solomonic jurisprudential nuance — by television’s Judge Mathis. But is is the almost unbearably intimate conversations with family members and the two men themselves that show us the inherent vulnerability of even those who at first seem cartoonish or grotesque.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, discussion of drug and alcohol abuse, discussion of tragic deaths and child abuse, and some grisly subject matter and disturbing images.

Family discussion: Why did both men want the foot? How did their relationships with their fathers affect their views of themselves?

If you like this, try: “Sherman’s March”

Related Tags:

Documentary Movies -- format

Meet the Patels

Posted on September 18, 2015 at 11:41 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic elements, brief suggestive images and incidental smoking
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking, brief smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	September 18, 2015

The best documentaries — and the best movies and the best stories — are fascinatingly specific but universal as well. When actor/comedian Ravi Patel agreed to let his parents, Vasant and Champa, try to find him a wife according to the established traditions of their Gujarati Indian culture, he and his sister Geeta decided to make a movie about the process. While the details of how it works are fascinating and often hilarious, the joy of the film is how universal it is. We have all had parents try to push us according to their own ideas of what will make us happy. Maybe we do not get “biodata” marriageability information sheets on all of the prospects, specifying that caste and horoscope must be compatible and disclosing skin shade, but pretty much everyone has had calls from relatives who want to put us in touch with a wonderful girl/boy they don’t really know but their neighbor/podiatrist/brother-in-law assures them that the possible romantic partner in question has a great personality. Geeta, a documentary filmmaker, picks up a camera and follows Ravi through a series of remarkable encounters, from speed dating to a specialized version of OK Cupid to a Patel marriage convention. It is pretty clear which girl he is going to end up with, but that in no way impairs the fun of the film.

In part that is because the real stars of the show are the Patel parents, who are irresistibly adorable. As Ravi points out, they met through the traditional system, as did most of his relatives, and they are the happiest married couple he knows. It is clear that the Western system of romance, dating, and marriage is far from perfect, so why not try the time-tested system that worked so well for his parents? He is so broken-hearted after the end of his most serious relationship, with a girl who is not Indian, he thinks he might as well go along.

And we have a lot of fun going along with him. Ravi is a natural on screen, self-deprecating and very sincere in his search for love, his affection for his culture, his love for his family, and the struggle he has, like all children of immigrants, to find his identity somewhere between the old country and the new.

Parents should know that this movie has some family drama, and some smoking and drinking.

Family discussion: How did the couples in your family meet? What is the best way to find someone to love?

If you like this, try: “Sherman’s March” and “Bride and Prejudice”