Delivery Man

Posted on November 21, 2013 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual content, some drug material, brief violence and language
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character grows marijuana, alcohol, hard drug abuse treated seriously but irresponsibly
Violence/ Scariness:	Fight, drug abuse
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	November 22, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00GEKO51U

The undeniable sweetness of “Delivery Man” makes its inherent silliness just about forgivable. Or, it just might be the sense of relief that Vince Vaughn is finally making a movie that is just silly instead of crass and stupid like “Couples Retreat,” “Four Christmases,” “Fred Claus,” and pretty much most of what he’s done since “Wedding Crashers.”

Vaughn plays his usual likeable shlub, this time Dave, the son of a butcher. His brothers work in the store with their father, but all Dave can do is drive the delivery truck, and he does not even do that very well. “It’s like every day you find some new way to push the limits of incompetence.”

He also has the usual long-suffering girlfriend, a cop named Emma (Cobie Smulders), who, like all girlfriends in these arrested development movies, has only one responsibility in the story, which is to look beautiful when she tells him that it’s time for him to grow up. It turns out that she is pregnant, and she does not believe he has it in him to be responsible enough to be a dad.

In the midst of all this, he discovers that he already is a dad, at least in the strictly biological sense. Some time ago, he was a “very, very frequent donor” at a sperm bank, which carelessly made it available to many more women than its guidelines allowed. A lawyer shows up in Dave’s apartment to tell him that he is the biological father of 533 children, and 142 of them have sued the facility to find out the identity of the mysterious “Starbuck” whose genetic heritage they carry. Starbuck is not related to the coffee shops or the Moby Dick character who inspired their name. It is the name of the French-Canadian film adapted by its writer-director for this remake, and the name of a legendarily productive stud bull.

Dave is known only as “Starbuck” to the progeny, and his anonymity is guaranteed by the terms of his donor agreement. His best friend is Brett (Chris Pratt, a highlight of the movie and quickly becoming one of our most indispensible comic actors), a lawyer who is beleaguered by his four young children. “My children cannot pick up the frequency of my voice,” he explains, exhausted. Brett gives Dave the folder of information on the 142 plaintiffs and tells him not to open it. What was he thinking?

Dave reads just one file, and is thrilled with his connection to a very accomplished young man. So he takes out another one, and then another, and finds that many of them need help. And he finds that helping them gives him a great sense of satisfaction and purpose. Most don’t need much help. Dave covers a would-be actor’s day job (badly) so he can go on an audition. He warns off catcallers harassing a young woman in a short skirt. He helps an inebriated kid get home. These are in the trailer and are fairly cute.

Some have serious problems. One is a drug addict. One is severely disabled and cannot communicate. These are handled superficially at best and downright irresponsibly at worst.

It’s all just a matter of time before everyone finds out, generally in the most awkward of ways. Cue the fake Jay Leno monologue. But babies are heart-tugging, even twenty years later, and the longing for family from both the children and their bio-dad is so touching that even the most preposterous resolution somehow seems just fine.

Parents should know that the film is about a man who fathered more than 500 children through a series of donations to a fertility clinic and it includes explicit references and crude jokes about producing samples and fertility treatments. Characters use strong and crude language, drink, grow marijuana and abuse harder drugs (the movie implies that addicts can quit easily without any help), and there is some brief violence.

Family discussion: How should Dave prove that he “deserves” to be the baby’s father? What did the children want from the lawsuit? How did he help them?

If you like this, try: “Baby Mama”

The Christmas Candle

Posted on November 21, 2013 at 9:58 am

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for mild thematic elements
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild peril, sad stories, tense confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 22, 2013

Former Presidential candidate Rick Santorum is now in the faith-based movie business and his first film is based on The Christmas Candle by Max Lucado.

Just before the holidays, a progressive young clergyman named David (Hans Matheson) takes over a church in a small village called Gladbury in late 19th century England. The town is known for its miracle — every 25 years an angel appears to touch one of the candle maker’s Christmas candles. Whoever lights that candle receives a miracle. This year, there is tremendous anticipation and there are many in the town who want the miracle for themselves, including the candle maker and his wife. David encourages his parishioners not to wait for a miracle but to help each other through kindness, generosity, humility, and love. And soon the village creates a more connected community and a more welcoming environment.

The evident sincerity of the production is appealing but it cannot disguise a not-ready-for-prime-time amateurish quality in the superficiality of the writing and pedestrian direction. It is awkward and uneven, but it is also a little less sugary than most faith-based family fare. Lesley Manville gives a subtle and touching performance that transcends the clunky dialogue and over-constructed plot and Susan Boyle looks very natural in 19th century garb and sings beautifully. The emphasis on helping others rather than wishing for a selfish miracle is most welcome, though disappointingly undercut in the final half hour.

Parents should know that there are some mature themes, including an out of wedlock pregnancy and family estrangement.

Family discussion: What would you wish for? Who can you help?

If you like this, try: “Christmas with a Capital C”

Paradise

Posted on November 14, 2013 at 11:06 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for sexual material, substance abuse, some language, and thematic elements
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Some peril, references to a tragic accident.
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	November 15, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00FJVCERC

Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) tries directing for the first time with “Paradise,” based on her own script about a girl from a very conservative religious background whose faith is challenged after a terrible accident. Even she acknowledges that she is better as a writer than a director — she has already said she does not plan to direct again. It isn’t that it is poorly directed. It is more like barely directed. She met the first task of a director exceptionally well, picking an excellent cast and giving them roles that allow them to make some surprising choices. It would be nice to see a version of this story where the director made some surprising choices, too.

Julianne Hough plays Lamb (as in “lamb of God”), a sheltered young woman from a devout Christian community. After a devastating plane crash that left her with burn and skin graft scars over much of her body she feels that everything she thought she understood about the world no longer applies. So, instead of donating the money she received in compensation for her injuries to her church, she decides to go as far in the opposite direction as possible. She goes to Las Vegas.

Some people do not have the gift for sin. There is a lot of charm in some of the film’s early scenes, as Lamb checks transgressions off her list that include rhythmic moving to music and getting a microscopic tattoo. Lamb meets a British bartender (Russell Brand, raffishly engaging) and a singer (Octavia Spencer) who take her out in part to enjoy seeing her reaction to the debaucheries of Las Vegas and in part to protect her from them.

Cody tweaks or avoids the usual Vegas tropes. She gets nicely meta, with Spencer explaining why she is not going to be the “magical Negro” stereotype minority character whose purpose in the story is to bring a greater humanity to a white person. And Brand gets to add a bit more depth to his usual persona. Lamb is an endearing character. It is fun to see her get a little wild and satisfying when all three characters and some unexpected others show that they already have the greater humanity they need.

Parents should know that this movie is about a young woman who wants to explore sin and it is set in Las Vegas. There is more discussion of sin than portrayal of it, however. The movie includes some strong language and risky behavior and discussion of tragedy and a sad death. A character is a prostitute and characters drink to deal with stress.

Family discussion: Which character changes the most? If you had Lamb’s money, what would you do with it?

If you like this, try: Hough’s remake of “Footloose”

Related Tags:

Comedy Drama Movies -- format

The Counselor

Posted on October 24, 2013 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for graphic violence, some grisly images, strong sexual content and language
Profanity:	Very strong, explicit, and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drugs and drug dealers, drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and disturbing violence with characters injured and murdered, decapitations, guns, sexual violence
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 25, 2013

Cormac McCarthy’s spare, bleak, and very literary prose has made for some compelling cinema, most effectively in No Country for Old Men and The Road and the adaption of his play for an HBO movie, The Sunset Limited. In his first original screenplay, he shows his flair for dialog that is half gangster, half poetry, but he is still more writer than visual story-teller. He needs to learn to trust the audience. If you show something, you don’t have to tell it, and you certainly don’t have to tell it more than once. Some good ideas and some gorgeous talk get lost in an awkward, over-the-top, you’ve got to be kidding me mess. Other writers are better at adapting his ideas for film than he is.

Michael Fassbender plays the title character, a handsome lawyer with a lot of low-life clients and a gorgeous girlfriend (Penélope Cruz) who adores him. What he does not have is a name. We never hear him called anything but “counselor.” He does have — a very bad combination — a plan to get a lot of money very quickly, some friends and clients involved with some very bad people, and a wildly unrealistic notion that he can veer off of that path of what’s legal just one time and then get right back on. If you have any confusion about what happens next, check your ancient Greek dramas with the hashtag #hubris. Or, just listen to the loving description of a method of killing people from Reiner (Javier Bardem) that involves a wire noose that tightens inexorably around the neck. METAPHOR ALERT. Don’t even get me started on the diamond seller the counselor visits to buy an engagement ring, the one who explains that in the world of diamonds, what we look at are the imperfections, sells him a cautionary stone, and tells the counselor, “We will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.”

Renier also has a girlfriend named Malkina (Cameron Diaz) who not only MORE METAPHORS COMING loves to watch her pet cheetahs chase and devour jackrabbits but has cheetah-themed tattoos and eye make-up, a gold tooth, and an amber ring the size of a cheese sandwich. She also brings new meaning to the term “auto-erotica” in a crazynutsy scene narrated by Bardem that is literally over-the-top. Note: Diaz is very limber and has lovely long legs. “I asked her whether she had ever done anything like that before and she said she had done everything before,” Renier says, a little dazed. Also, the drug smuggling involves trucks carrying human waste and occasionally a dead human body. On the side, it says, “We pump it all!” Is it just me, or is that a METAPHOR, too? Did I mention Renier lives in a glass house?

Ridley Scott’s direction, the cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, and outstanding performances keep the movie watchable, even when it isn’t working, until the literary pretentiousness overcomes it with a series of speeches near the end that tip the scales from poetic, and ironic to purplish and self-parodying. In small roles, Rosie Perez, Rubén Blades, and Natalie Dormer create vivid characters who evoke the work the counselor thought he could keep himself apart from and does not realize he has already been changed by. “If you think that, Counselor, that you can live in this world and not be a part of it, you are wrong,” Renier tells him.

McCarthy knows this is a world where the problem that brings you down is one that in normal world would be quickly explained and quickly forgiven. These people do not believe in explanations. “They’re a pragmatic lot. They don’t believe in coincidences. They’ve heard of them. They’ve just never seen one.” There are no second chances. And then, as Renier explains, “it’s not that you’re going down. It’s about what you’re taking down with you.”

I enjoyed the elliptical epigrams tossed around by the characters, especially Brad Pitt’s cowboy, a loner who has a bit more perspective than the others. “How bad a problem?” the counselor asks the cowboy. “I’d say pretty bad. Then multiply it by ten,” he answers. These are people who expect they are being listened to by law enforcement, so it makes sense that they would corkscrew their communications. And it was fun to see the actors having fun with their roles, especially Diaz, with her asymmetric hair, cut to a point that looks like it could etch metal, swanning into a church to try out this confession idea she had heard about. With all the flamboyance, though, the movie’s best moments are the quiet ones. Everything ends up turning on a decision that was not really a mistake. And the most terrifying moments are not the ones with spurting blood or automatic weapons. They are a quiet phone call and a simple, “Hola!”

Parents should know that this film is an extremely violent crime drama with very disturbing and graphic images including decapitation. Many characters injured and brutally killed. It includes guns, crashes, drug dealing, drinking, smoking, very explicit sexual references and situations, and very strong and crude language.

Family discussion: Who suffered the most? Why do we never learn the counselor’s name?

If you like this, try: “No Country for Old Men” and “The Lincoln Lawyer” and the books of Cormac McCarthy and James M. Cain

Related Tags:

Crime Drama Movies -- format Thriller

The Fifth Estate

Posted on October 17, 2013 at 6:05 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some violence
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some violence including murder of two people and footage of military killings
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 18, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00BEIYRYM

In late medieval times, when people first began to divide each other into groups defined by status and power, they began to speak of a “first estate” (the clergy), a “second estate” (the nobility, which also at the time meant the government), and a “third estate” (the common people. Later, the “fourth estate” was added to describe journalists and what today we call news media. Julian Assange, the Australian teenage hacker turned founder of Wikileaks is singular, unprecedented, gui generis. He collects masses of “secret” data and publishes it without editing, digesting, analysing, or redacting any of it. And so, this movie, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the white-haired Assange, is called “The Fifth Estate.”

This movie, from director Bill Condon (“Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls”), and based on a book by Assange’s now-estranged former partner Daniel Berg (played in the film by “Rush’s” Daniel Brühl) at times feels as though it is un-digested and un-analyzed. As a government official forced to resign due to some of the disclosures says near the end of the film, “I don’t know which of us history’s going to judge more harshly.” I would advise anyone interested in Wikileaks to begin with the documentary, “We Steal Secrets: The Wikileaks Story,” directed by Alex Gibney.

Assange says that he has two goals for what he calls “a whole new form of social justice.” He says he wants transparency for institutions and privacy for individuals. The problem, or, at least, one problem is that institutions are made up of individuals. And so, when one of Wikileaks’ early scoops is a list of British members of the far right “National Party,” it does not bother him that the members’ contact information is disclosed. Assange is an absolutist. He refuses to edit or redact (remove identifying information from) any of the documents he publishes. “Editing reflects bias,” he says. He is also something of a monomaniac and a megalomaniac, at least in the view of his one-time colleague. According to this film, he grew up in an odd Australian cult called “The Family,” with severe beatings, and has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. He is very protective of his own privacy as he exposes the secrets of others. And, as they say, just because you’re paranoid does not mean they’re not really out to get you. Once Assange starts exposing the secrets of the wealthy and powerful, they start coming after him, and the thing about being wealthy and powerful is that they have the resources to inflict a lot of harm. Two of his sources are murdered.

Condon does his best to minimize the scenes of people staring intently into monitors while they bang on the keyboards. He has some nice visualizations to evoke the experiences, some fantastic, some just the rocky topography of Iceland, one of many places Assange hid. And he takes a balanced approach. Everyone would agree with some of what Assange has uncovered. And everyone would object — even be horrified — by something he has done. Both sides quote Orwell. Big Brother is watching. Like “The Social Network,” the movie focuses on the rise and fall of the friendship and partnership more than the impact of the product they were working on. In this case, that is in part because we don’t know what that impact will be. But in this case, we do know that the impact is transformational. This is not some Facebook advertiser using an algorithm on your status posts to figure out what to sell you. This is a 22-year-old destroying the confidentiality that allows candid conversations between diplomats, including information about the foreign nationals who are giving them information.

Assange explains early in this film that the program he has developed to protect the identity of the providers of leaked documents is to drown them in false and phony data. He can say that editing reflects bias, but in the case of terabytes of information dumped in undigested and unredacted form, the data dump can be just as distorting. Like the journalists Assange worked with on the Bradley Manning material, this film tries to put some shape and perspective on a story that is still too big and too new to frame as a definitive narrative. But it is an absorbing story and as good an assessment as we can get for now.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, violence including shooting and wartime scenes with some disturbing images.

Family discussion: What is the answer to the State Department official’s question about whose side history will be on? Who should decide what gets released? If Wikileaks makes other organizations accountable, who makes Wikileaks accountable? Do you agree with the two things Assange says you need to have to succeed?

If you like this, try: the documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” read up on the most recent leaker, Edward Snowden, and take a look at the Wikileaks page