Terminator Genisys

Posted on June 30, 2015 at 5:15 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and gunplay throughout, partial nudity and brief strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and often graphic peril and violence, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	July 1, 2015

Copyright Universal 2015 — Copyright Paramount 2015

“I’ll be back,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said in the first “Terminator” movie. He had the title role but only 16 lines, with about a total of 80 words. But those three words have become a legend. It now appears he meant it more than we thought, as he appears four decades later in a fifth “Terminator” movie, with two more in the pipeline.

The storyline is about how a network of computers called Skynet took over and all but destroyed life on earth, except for a small group of rebels led by John Connor. Given the time travel that occurs in the films, they in effect act as their own prequels and sequels. This is more of a side-quel, presenting some of the same characters and events in a sort of alternate, butterfly effect universe. Some changes are explained, including why a robot that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger now looks so much older than he did in the first one. (I didn’t say it was explained persuasively, just that they recognize someone has to say something about it.) Many changes are not explained, and I am not just talking about the fact that the characters are, other than Schwarzenegger, played by different actors. Some of those changes are good. Some are not. And some are just dumb.

Here’s a good one. In the first film, we learn that John Connor has sent Kyle, his top rebel colleague back in time to protect Sarah Connor because the Terminator (Schwarzenegger) has been sent back to kill her before she can even become pregnant with Connor, to eliminate him so that he can never be born and lead the rebellion against the machines. In this film, we see it happen. John (Jason Clarke) explains that, as we already know but Kyle does not, Sarah is not yet the tough, resilient woman she will become by the end of #1 and really show us in #2. She is “scared and weak.” She is also, John tells Kyle, a waitress, though since Kyle was very young when Skynet took over and declared humanity a pestilence that had to be eradicated before it contaminated the earth beyond repair, he has no idea what that is.

But then we see Sarah (now played by “Game of Thrones'” Emilia Clarke, no relation to Jason), and she is not the frightened, inexperienced girl Kyle expected. Plus, she has Terminator of her own (Schwarzenegger) who is protecting her, not killing her.

Even by the very low standards of blockbuster sci-fi, the mumbo-jumbo here is pretty over the top, with plot holes bigger than the school bus that hangs over the side of a bridge in one of the film’s showiest action sequences. We have not quite reached nuke the fridge status yet, but we’re teetering on the brink with unanswered questions and outright subversion of some of the series’ core precepts. And it is one thing to make reference to the earlier films; it is another to wink at them and at us. Make a character we trust untrustworthy. Okay. Age the Terminator. Well…okay. Call him “Pops.” Sort of okay. Have him fake smile. Okay. Have him keep a cache of sentimental tokens. Not okay. This is not Pinocchio, and he is not going to become a Real Boy.

But hey, this is summer, and we don’t need think-y movies, right? So let’s drive right through those plot holes, enjoy seeing Arnold now fight a CGI Arnold circa 1984, hang that school bus off the bridge, and keep going, without looking back.

NOTE: Stay past the credits for a scene that will not surprise you about what’s in store for #6.

Parents should know that there is extensive and intense peril and violence throughout the film, just under the R level, with characters injured and killed and some disturbing images. There is also some discreet nudity, and brief strong language, with a couple of mildly crude sexual references.

Family discussion: If you could go back in time to make a change, what would it be? What is the best way to prevent a Skynet-type machine takeover?

If you like this, try: the first two “Terminator” movies

The Farewell Party

Posted on June 11, 2015 at 5:36 pm

Israeli filmmaker Sharon Mayman says that the idea for “The Farewell Party” came from the time that his boyfriend’s grandmother, age 92, was dying, and paramedics prolonged her suffering by “fighting for her life like she was 16 years old.” Her son, in frustration, said to the paramedics, “If you bring her back, you’re taking her with you.” In Israel, as everywhere else, new conversations, long overdue, are beginning about the end of life. This bittersweet story of love, friendship, and loss takes place in an assisted living facility where those who are still healthy spend a lot of time visiting those who are not. We first see Yeheskel (Ze’ev Revach) literally playing God. He is on the phone with a frail friend, pretending to be God, telling her to stay strong. And then he and his wife Levana (Levana Finkelstein) go to visit their closest friend, who is suffering terribly and dying slowly. His wife, frantic and furious, tells Yeshekel he must use his skill as an inventor to help them. And so Yeshekel does, working with a new arrival who has some experience in gentle and peaceful death — a veterinarian — and his friend, a cop.

The machine works, and they think they are done. But word has gotten out and the loved ones of people who are in great pain keep coming to Yeheskel to ask for his help, sometimes so desperate they will threaten blackmail. Levana gets increasingly uncomfortable with what they are doing until her own health issue makes her see things differently. As she struggles with dementia, her friends respond with grace and one of the most simultaneously funny and heartwarming moments in any movie this year. Growing old is not for sissies. But this movie shows us that we do not be afraid to be honest about it, and to smile through our tears.

Parents should know that this movie deals with end of life issues and assisted suicide and includes some nudity and sexual situations.

Family discussion: What can we do to make end of life issues easier for people who are dying and their families? Do you agree with the characters in this film?

If you like this, try: “A Matter of Size”

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I’ll See You in My Dreams

Posted on May 21, 2015 at 5:55 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for sexual material, drug use and brief strong language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Some mild peril, sad death
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	May 22, 2015

Blythe Danner gives a performance of exquisite sensitivity in “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” the story of a lonely widow. She plays Carol, a singer-turned teacher who retired 20 years ago after her husband died. Her friends in a nearby retirement community urge her to join them but she prefers to stay in her home, her primary companions her dog and her glass of white wine.

The movie begins by taking us through a day we surmise is just like hundreds of others. She plays cards with friends, she plays golf, she feeds the dog, she sips wine and watches television. She keeps busy and she is not unhappy. She has plans, and she has fun, but she does not have much of a sense of purpose. When a rat invades her home, it is unsettling. She asks her new pool cleaner for help.

His name is Lloyd (Martin Starr), and he is lost in a way that makes her feel able to talk to him. Her feelings toward him are not maternal or romantic. But he is smart, and funny and self-deprecating and he was willing to help her with the rat. And he is newly back in town and living with his parents, so he can use a friend, too. When he tells her about going to do karaoke, she agrees to go with him.

A speed dating event with her friends is a hilarious disaster, but that may make an overture from a handsome stranger named Bill (Sam Elliott) seem more appealing. Writer/director Brett Haley has a good sense for the way people who have no time for trivialities get to the point with each other, wasting little time on getting-to-know-you trivialities. Carol’s conversations with Lloyd and Bill are direct without being intrusive, and especially without being judgmental. When she is with her friends, there are easy exchanges that reflect the kind of connection based on the shared experience of being an older woman. A scene where they all get high on one friend’s medical marijuana is completely charming.

It is almost beyond belief that this is Danner’s first romantic lead in a film. She is breathtaking. Haley wisely just leaves the camera on her beautiful face as she sits with her beloved dog while he slowly stops breathing in the vet’s office. Her grief is devastating. Her devotion is deeply moving. Her performance of “Cry Me a River” in karaoke is also magnificent. The incandescence she brings to the story of a woman who is still struggling for connection makes this one of the most touching performances of the year.

Parents should know that this movie has strong language, drinking and drugs, sexual references and situations, and a sad death.

Family discussion: What do we learn about Carol from the karaoke scenes? Why did she become friends with Lloyd? How is dating different for older people than for younger people?

If you like this, try: “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and its sequel

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Drama Movies -- format Romance

Mad Max: Fury Road

Posted on May 14, 2015 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant, intense, and graphic violence, guns, explosions, crashes, some disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	May 15, 2015

Copyright Village Roadshow Pictures 2015

Mad Max (Tom Hardy, taking over from Mel Gibson) stamps on a two-headed lizard and then chews its head off. And that’s just in the first minute. That master of apocalyptic junkyard anarchy, George Miller, is back, bigger, wilder, madder than ever with this fourth of the Mad Max movies, all set in a post-apocalyptic desert dystopia of deprivation, chaos, rust, and brutality. In this world, all anyone has ever known is loss and despair. There is no hope, no thought of any possible way to learn or create. At one point, a character points to something completely unfamiliar to him, calling it “that thing.” It is a tree.

The first three films were about the fight for gasoline to fuel the vehicles pieced together from the wreckage. This one is about another, even more precious fluid: water. Other precious fluids come into the story as well, including blood and breast milk.

A brutal dictatorship has taken over, controlling access to all of that. All are the preserve of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, with the right crazy eyes for the role), who lives literally above everyone else in a place known as The Citadel, maintaining control with his army of War Boys, all with shaved heads and powder-white skin and all convinced that their destiny is to die for Immortan Joe and be transported to paradise in Valhalla. Immortan Joe also maintains a harem of impossibly long-legged, lovely young woman. His chief lieutenant is Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a fearless woman with a mechanical arm, so much the central focus of the film that it should have been named for her. When Furiosa escapes with Immortan Joe’s women, including his pregnant “queen,” Joe and his peers come after them, in a convoy of tricked-up vehicles, all made to destroy. Everything is in shades of burnt-out umber except for the bright red suit of a guy shredding an electric guitar to keep everyone angry.

One of the War Boys is Nuz (Nicholas Hoult), who has brought along his “blood bag.” That would be Max, who was captured by Immortan Joe’s troops and kept alive only to serve as a blood donor. Nuz did not want to be left behind but had not yet finished getting his transfusion. So Max is manacled and attached to the front of Nuz’s car. Max ends up with Furiosa and the young women, who are seeing the “green place” where Furiosa was born.

Miller is a master of cinema, and his staging and cinematography on the action scenes are shot through with throbbing, raging, adrenalin that contrasts with the stoicism of Max and Furiosa. Miller has said that the Edge camera car is the most exciting technological innovation in his career. It allowed him (he operated it himself) to put the camera in the middle of the action. He does not like to use CGI, preferring “practical” (real) effects, and the grittiness is so palpable we feel we are inhaling dust.

Hardy is excellent, though, as with Bain, his face is masked for much of the film. Theron is more incendiary than the film’s mountainous fireballs, creating a character with a rich, complicated history in the way she fights, in the determined set of her brows, in the way she looks at the helpless young women, thinking about where she has been and what she has seen. The action makes our hearts beat harder, but Miller’s ability to create characters that transcend the crashes and explosions and themes that resonate all too sharply with contemporary conflicts, are what can make them beat more fiercely.

Parents should know that this film has non-stop apocalyptic action, peril, and violence with many characters injured and killed and several graphic and disturbing images, as well as some strong language, some nudity, and references to domestic abuse.

Family discussion: Why won’t Max tell Furiosa his name? Why did society become so savage? Why was one community different?

If you like this, try: the first three “Mad Max” movies and Welcome to Wherever You Are, A Documentary Celebrating the MAD MAX Mythology

Noble

Posted on May 7, 2015 at 5:57 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, including some violent and sexual situations
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Gang rape, child abuse and child homelessness, war scenes
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	May 8, 2015

Christina Noble is an Irish woman known as “Mama Tina” to thousands of Vietnamese children and their families. Her own childhood was one of poverty, abandonment, loss, and hardship, but her resilience and determination led her to give children half a world away the help she never had herself. This film tells her improbable story and conveys her endless charm, her engaging spirit, and the extraordinary difference that one person can make in the world.

Noble is played by three different actresses to show us her life as a child, a teenager and young mother, and as a woman in her 40’s, her children grown, who follows a dream to go to Vietnam and help the homeless children of Vietnam. We first see her skipping school at age 10 to sing Doris Day songs in a bar (played by Gloria Cramer Curtis), and running from the truant officer. Her mother dies and her father all but abandons the children who are eventually split up. Christina ends up at a convent school. As a teenager, she is played by the radiant Sarah Greene (“Penny Dreadful”), and undergoes a second cruel abandonment by her father, a gang rape, a pregnancy, and then is forced to give up her child through the same kind of forced adoption program documented in “Philomena.” She finally falls in love, gets married, and has more children, but her husband is cruel and abusive.

The story moves back and forth in time to give us a greater understanding of Christina’s courage and of her faith in God, in her purpose, and in her ability to make something better out of what she has. Irish star and stand-up comedian Deirdre O’Kane (“Moone Boy”) gives a smashing performance as the grown-up Christina, fearless and always frank, whether confronting a child molester, getting a smile from a dour desk clerk, asking for money from every corporate representative trying to do business in Vietnam or challenging God to do a better job or at least get out of her way and let her get on with it. And her indomitable spirit and merry heart make this remarkable story vivid, true, and touching.

Parents should know that this film includes themes of deprivation and abuse, including the loss of a parent, abandonment, gang rape, child molestation, child homelessness, and a character being forced to give up her child. There is some strong language, drinking, and smoking.

Family discussion: Why was helping the homeless and orphaned children of Vietnam so important to Christina Noble? What made it possible for her to survive the loss, abandonment, and abuse of her early years? How can you learn to be more resilient?

If you like this, try: Noble’s book, Bridge Across My Sorrows, and another real-life-inspired story, “Mary and Martha”

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