The Gunman

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 5:43 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong violence, language and some sexuality

Stars too often produce the kind of movie they want to star in, instead of the kind of movie anyone wants to watch. Co-writer/producer/star Sean Penn is clearly trying to make The Gunman a thinking person’s thriller. You can hear the pitch: a serious look at the exploitation and corruption of emerging economies with lots of slammin’ action! And a chase scene/shootout set at a bullfight!

Unfortunately, it fails as both political drama and action movie. The romance isn’t much, either. Its primary interest is in the many opportunities to see how buff Penn has become. If he had applied as much attention to beefing up the script as he did to beefing up his arms and abs (and showing them off in a surfing scene and a shower scene), the movie would have been much more than this week’s AARP action thriller. Instead, he hired Liam Neeson’s “Taken” director to stage a lot of shootouts in various locations. Been there, seen that, it was better.

Penn plays Jimmy, part of a team providing security in 2006 for humanitarian relief workers in the Republic of Congo, where we are informed that corruption and unrest are rampant in “the world’s deadliest conflict since WWII.”

Jimmy is very much in love with a gorgeous doctor with a beatific smile and gloriously tousled curls named Annie (Jasmine Trinca). She is so beautiful and adores him so completely that we know the moment she says, “See you later,” something will intervene. In case we missed that portent, Jimmy says, “I got a feeling we’re going operational.” He and his team have what we will learn is a “parallel contract with the mining interests.” Machete-wielding marauders create terror everywhere. But corporations with huge revenues at stake are sometimes the beneficiaries of unrest, and sometimes the cause of it. Jimmy is soon “into the wind” following assassination of a political leader who was cancelling all existing agreements with corporations extracting valuable minerals.

Eight years later, Jimmy is back helping to dig wells when three killers come after him, and he realizes that the powerful people who hired him to murder to protect their interests may now have decided to hire someone else to protect their interests further by making sure he never tells anyone what he did for them.

There is some potential in the premise, but it is quickly jettisoned for mind-numbing run-with-a-gun shoot-em-up scenes as battalions of Kevlar-vested guys with automatic weapons come after him. Somehow, he always manages to not only run between the bullets but overpower and outsmart the bad guys, even though he is suffering from brain damage and headaches, except when he isn’t.

He visits his former colleagues so that they can either help him out or try to kill him. Meanwhile, Annie serves the retro girlfriend role: unquestioning adoration, taking her clothes off, hiding behind him, and being taken hostage. And Idris Elba is wasted in a small role that primarily consists of a speech about building a treehouse, but at least he gets to talk about something, which is more than you can say about the Africans in the film. For a movie that is supposed to be politically significant, it’s awfully retro-colonialist.

In the closing credits we are helpfully informed that despite the climactic bullfighting scene, Barcelona no longer allows bullfighting within its jurisdiction. No such disclaimers are made about the various atrocities — political, corporate, or cinematic.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong violence with many characters injured and killed, assorted different weapons, torture, execution and assassination, references to rape, a sexual situation, drinking, smoking, pharmaceuticals, and constant strong language.

Family discussion: How did Jim, Cox, Felix, and Stanley respond differently to the choices they made? What efforts are underway to provide more transparency in the impact that multinational corporations have in emerging economies?

If you like this, try: “Blood Diamond” and “The Constant Gardener”

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Merchants of Doubt

Posted on March 5, 2015 at 5:30 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for brief strong language
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Discussion of tobacco
Violence/ Scariness:	References to injury and environmental degredation
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 6, 2015

Do you remember the tobacco executives standing up before a Congressional Committee, their right hands raised, each of them swearing that they did not believe that tobacco caused cancer? That was in 1994, three decades after the US Surgeon General’s report showing the adverse health effects of cigarettes. Any other consumer product with that much proof of its destructive impact would have been restricted or banned long ago. But the tobacco industry was able to delay or prevent meaningful government action through a series of public relations maneuvers and strategic lobbying and campaign contributions. Ultimately, tobacco consumption was reduced in the United States. Television ads were banned. Warning labels were required. Very big fines were assessed following lawsuits that revealed a history of intentional deception as toxic as cigarettes themselves.

But the legacy of using corporate money to undermine science and thus to undermine public policy as well may be the most devastating effect of all. As documented in “Merchants of Doubt,” based on Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, corporations have used distraction, delay, and downright deceit to create pretend opposition to scientific findings. Their tactics have included those as sophisticated and complex as the creation of fake “public interest groups” with secret funding by corporations and their trade associations, to those as simple and old-fashioned as releasing the private contact information of the scientists and encouraging a barrage of bullying threats and personal attacks.

One of the film’s most devastating segments deals with a two-year, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by two Chicago Tribune reporters about how the tobacco companies thwarted potential regulation by fraudulently shifting the blame for home fires from cigarettes to the failure of furniture to be coated with toxic flame retardant chemicals. Fake experts and fake studies work because no one, neither the journalists who are hard-wired to present “both sides” nor the law-makers and regulators who are often looking for a way to justify the decisions their corporate funders are supporting, ever make an effort to find out the experience, expertise, reputation, or conflicts of interests of these industry-supported “experts.”

The focus now is climate change, with more than 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists agreed that it is a severe, even critical problem and millions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel industries to distort, delay, and deceive. In the film, former Congressman Robert Inglis, who identified himself as having been elected from “the reddest county in the reddest state in the country” (South Carolina), and who considers himself a hard-core conservative, lost his bid for reelection because, after a visit to Antarctica where he witnessed the evidence of climate change, he was considered a traitor, perhaps less by his constituents than by the industry funding anyone who would oppose government action on climate change.

No matter what you think about tobacco, climate change, or fire retardants, this is an essential film because it addresses the key issue of trust. Whatever policies you support, everyone should agree that they must be grounded in the clearest and best-documented facts. Who can we believe? What questions should we ask? As Senator Whitehouse said last week, “You can believe every single major American scientific society, or you can believe the Senator with the snowball.”

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Documentary Movies -- format Politics

The Rewrite

Posted on February 5, 2015 at 5:53 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
Profanity:	Some strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 6, 2015

Sometimes all we want from a movie is Hugh Grant delivering witty, self-deprecating lines about his empty life and bad choices as he learns to find his heart and soul. You know, the cinematic equivalent to eating a pint of Rocky Road ice cream, wearing your comfiest pajamas. And every so often, we are lucky enough to get one. Writer/director Marc Lawrence understands exactly what we want from Grant in a romantic comedy. He gave us the underrated Music & Lyrics (its best moments include a wildly funny, spot-on version of a 1980’s music video and the delightful Kristen Johnson). He wrote “Two Weeks Notice,” in which Grant was so good it was possible to ignore the failures of the script. He even made Grant look good in the otherwise irretrievably awful Did You Hear About the Morgans? Here he has created just the right part for Grant as Keith Michaels, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who has had a string of flops and has now lost his family, his money, his self-respect, and any possible chance of a writing job in Hollywood, for which self-respect is not only not a necessity, but in fact is a liability.

The only prospect Michaels has of cash coming into rather than out of his bank account is accepting an offer to teach screenwriting at a liberal arts college in upstate New York where it rains all the time. The idea appalls him, but his long-suffering agent and his empty bank account persuade him to accept. He arrives determined “to do as little as possible while carrying on with this charade” but be miserable anyway. After he has sex with one of the students he realizes that college girls are lovely and young enough to see him as glamorous. After he insults one of the faculty members (Allison Janney, criminally underused as a humorless Jane Austen specialist who has never heard of “Clueless” or seen any of the movie adaptations, as if there was such a thing), he is reminded that he is, in fact expected to attend class and convey some information and guidance to the students. So, he selects his class on the basis of looks (the girls have to be what for reasons of civility we will just call pretty and the boys have to be what we will call not much of a threat as competition). In other words, he is using the class as a sort of analog version of Tinder.

It turns out that one of the students has written an excellent screenplay, which reminds him that he is capable of recognizing good work and a good opportunity to get back to Hollywood. He sends it to his agent asking her to offer it only if he can produce, not because he has any ideas or expertise but because it is leverage. And it turns out that one of the students is not young and pliable but certainly lovely. Her name is Holly (Marisa Tomei) and she is a single mom, too down to earth to qualify as a manic pixie dream girl, but certainly a life-force, filled with optimism that (thankfully) is not the usual mindless bubbliness but thoughtful and hard-won.

The film never takes itself too seriously, with winks at the audience including Grant’s character buying Jane Austen movies for a colleague (presumably including his own “Sense and Sensibility”) and watching his Oscar acceptance on YouTube (a real-life clip of Grant’s own Golden Globe win). There are no surprises, but sometimes, with a movie like this, that’s just what you want.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, sexual references and situations including professor/student sex, drinking and drunkenness.

Family discussion: How does the script for this film follow the principals Keith teaches his students? Why is Holly cheerful?

If you like this, try: “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and “Music & Lyrics”

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Comedy Movies -- format Romance

Seventh Son

Posted on February 5, 2015 at 5:41 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense fantasy violence and action throughout, frightening images and brief strong language
Profanity:	One strong word
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant fantasy-style violence and peril with dragons, knights, swords, fire, falls, punches, and sorcery, characters injured and killed, some grisly images
Diversity Issues:	Most of the good guys are white and many of the bad guys are non-white
Date Released to Theaters:	February 6, 2015

If “The Big Lebowski” fans ever imagined a re-teaming of Jeff “The Dude” Bridges and Julianne “Maude” Moore, it is unlikely that they would have come up with the idea of this sword-and-sorcery epic based on the first of the the 16-volume Last Apprentice series by Joseph Delaney. They’re a long way from Lebowski-land in this epic saga of the last of the knights sworn to fight witches and the powerful witch he once loved and must now defeat. The fight scenes are exciting, the visuals and special effects are impressive, and it is fun to see two big actors take on these scenery-chomping roles.

It takes place in olden times, “when legend and nightmare are real.” Bridges, in full sensei whose bark is worse than his bite but his bite is pretty rough mode, plays Gregory, the last of “a order of noble knights, combatting the darker forces.” He has had a series of apprentices, but it is a high risk job, and they keep getting killed. Most recently, following a rollicking bar fight involving a full goblet (“The trick is not defeating them with a cup. The trick is not to spill.”), Master Gregory loses his best apprentice (Kit Harington) and has to find a new one. They are not easy to find. Only a seventh son of a seventh son has the ability to combat magic. Tom Ward (Ben Barnes) has that credential, but does he have what it takes? He cannot seem to hit the target with his knife. Master Gregory usually has years to teach his apprentices what they need to know but this time there is just a week until the blood moon, which will unleash the powers of the most dangerous witch of all, Mother Malkin (Moore, decked out with fancy eyelashes and creepy long fingernails). Years before, Master Gregory had captured Malkin, locking her in a cage and sprinkling the perimeter with salt. But she has escaped, stronger than ever, and this time he cannot risk showing her mercy and allowing her to live.

It is possible that Tom has already made the same mistake. If she was not so young and pretty, would he have rescued the girl accused of being a witch and set her free? Her name is Alice (Alicia Vikander). Does she like him or is she a spy? Meanwhile, Mother Malkin is putting the band back together, bringing in a Benetton ad array of multi-ethnic bad guys. There are also some other fantasy characters who show up to the party, including Master Gregory’s loyal sidekick Tusk, with a jaw like a wild boar, and a gigantic CGI Boggart, who chases our heroes into the steepest jump off a cliff into the rapids since “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” And this one’s in 3D.

Parents should know that this film includes constant fantasy-style peril and violence with monsters, fire, swords and other weapons, sorcery, and fighting, characters injured and killed, some disturbing and grisly images, brief strong language, drinking and jokes about alcohol, and kissing and an implied sexual situation.

Family discussion: What did it mean to call Mother Malkin “a slave to darkness, not its queen?” Was Master Gregory too tough on Tom?

If you like this, try: “Dragonslayer,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Stardust”

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Drama Fantasy Movies -- format

Black Sea

Posted on January 29, 2015 at 3:51 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language throughout, some graphic images and violence
Profanity:	Constant strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended, intense, and graphic peril and violence, many characters injured and killed, some accidentally, some intentionally
Diversity Issues:	Diverse cultures
Date Released to Theaters:	January 30, 2015

Two comments made by characters in this film summarize what it is that makes submarine stories so instantly compelling. “Outside is just dark, cold, and death,” says one. “We all live together or we all die together,” says another.

Submarines are the setting for the ultimate locked room story, the purest form of human interaction, with a small group of people (usually all men), cut off from everyone else. You can’t call the cops, appeal to higher authority, or run away.

This submarine story ramps up the conflict. In most cases, the crew may have some conflicts about how to proceed but everyone is literally on board with the task, whether exploration or military action. But “Black Sea” adds the most divisive element of all: greed. This crew, half British, half Russian, is going in search of lost Nazi gold at the bottom of the Black Sea, with 40 percent going to the rich guy who financed the expedition and the rest to go to everyone on board. None of these people are American, but just to make sure we get the message about the value of a huge pile of gold bars, Captain Robinson (Jude Law, with receding hairline and Scottish brogue) counts it up in dollars.

It’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” with a bit of “Moby Dick” and “The Towering Inferno,” plus some Occupy Wall Street thrown in for good measure.

We first see Robinson getting laid off. It has nothing to do with his performance, he is assured. It’s just that they don’t need sub captains or even subs any more. They have better ways of doing marine salvage. They give him a paltry £8000 and the job he has had all his life, the one he lost his wife and son by being away too much, evaporates. “They want me to flip burgers,” he says. Everything he has devoted his life to seems lost.

Then a friend tells him “I think I knew a way not to be like this.” He knows about missing gold, and puts Robinson in touch with the representative of the wealthy man who will fund the operation, at least to the extent of a rusty old tub of a Russian submarine, in exchange for 40 percent.

Robinson assembles the crew, understanding that it is a volatile mix. “He’s a psychopath, but he’s an incredible diver, half man, half fish,” he says about one member of the crew. When the one who told him about the gold commits suicide, Robinson replaces him with an 18 year old who has never been to sea. They also bring along the man who negotiated the deal on behalf of the wealthy American (Scoot McNairy), who has no experience at sea and suffers from claustrophobia. Also arrogance and a highly questionable sense of integrity.

Director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) skillfully navigates the narrow corridors of the decrepit submarine as the tension builds, though equipment problems, crew battles, and the overheated impact of all that money. Suddenly, people who would think themselves wealthy with thousands of pounds are calculating how much more their share of the gold would be with a smaller number to divide it among. The political overlay and flashbacks to Robinson’s (possibly imagined) idyll with his family are heavy-handed and at least one of the plot twists is preposterous, but the fundamentals of the story and that irresistibly cramped and isolated setting keep the tension level high.

Parents should know that this film includes constant very strong language, extended and peril and violence with many characters injured and killed, fighting, knives, guns, some very disturbing images, and mild sexual references.

Family discussion: Why was Robinson so protective of Tobin? Do you think he was a good captain?

If you like this, try: “The Hunt for Red October,” “U-571,” “K-19: The Widowmaker,” and “Crimson Tide,” and, for a change of tone, “Operation Petticoat”

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Drama Movies -- format Thriller