A Liar’s Autobiography

Posted on November 10, 2012 at 10:50 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong and crude sexual content including graphic animated sequences, strong language and some violent images
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and alcoholism
Violence/ Scariness:	Violent images including severed limbs, sad death
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	November 9, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00A3A3SRE

Graham Chapman was the Monty Python troupe member most often referred to by the others as “the dead one.” This affectionate tribute, narrated by Chapman himself in excerpts from the audio version of the memoir he wrote before he died of throat cancer in 1989. Like the Python movies, it is is made up of skit-like segments, but it only briefly reaches anywhere near their level of sublime comic anarchy. Even with a quick moment of lunacy with Cameron Diaz providing the voice of Sigmund Freud.

The segments are animated by a widely varied group of artists, occasionally recalling Terry Gilliam’s inspired paper cut-out interstitials but more often just needlessly crude and sometimes downright dull. But the real problem is that Chapman may have been an interesting person and certainly led an interesting live but he clearly had neither the interest nor the ability to share very much with anyone. Instead we get a tedious litany of too much sex, too much alcohol, and the emptiness of the life of a celebrity. He comes across as superficial, bitter, selfish, and dull.

Chapman tells us he was born during a German bombing attack and we see a possibly fictitious incident where he was traumatized by the severed limbs of the people who were injured and killed. Then he goes to school and his parents don’t understand or fully appreciate him and he has sex with women but really wants to have sex with men, and then he has sex with men, and then some sex with women again but mostly with men. In one of the segments we get to see from his perspective as he continues to smoke his pipe through some joyless sexual encounters. He has contempt for just about everyone, especially those who are overly impressed with celebrities (including himself).

The movie comes to life only at the very end, when we see footage from Chapman’s funeral, with the eulogy from John Cleese. As the other Pythonites look on, Cleese says, “I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only 48, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say: nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries. And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn’t, if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him, but mindless good taste.” I’d add, anything for him but this dull and sour tribute. Much better to watch the parrot sketch again.

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Brooklyn Castle

Posted on October 18, 2012 at 2:43 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	All Ages
MPAA Rating:	PG for some language
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 18, 2012

I.S. 318 is a below-the-poverty-line inner city junior high school. And its students have won more national chess championships than any other in the country. So this is a touching and inspiring story of triumph and what can be accomplished in spite of the most daunting of obstacles if there is someone who believes in you. And it is a story of the joys of intellectual passion and a game that goes back centuries, even in an era of saturation in digital media. There is much of what you expect — gifted kids, dedicated teacher, tense anticipation, thrilling victories. The characters are endearing and their stories are stirring.

This movie is also frank about the vulnerability of these programs. We see so much that is made possible by so little, and how fragile even that little can be. These children have endless spirit, skill, and devotion. They can solve complex mathematical puzzles that involve intricate, multi-step strategies. But the adults around them may not be able to show the same level of commitment or ability to think ahead to enable these kids to continue to benefit from the chess program.

Parents should know that this film includes the portrayal of children in difficult circumstances and some schoolyard language.

Family discussion: What do you have to be good at to succeed in chess? What makes this chess program so important to the kids?

If you like this try: “Mad Hot Ballroom” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer” — and try a game of chess!

Hotel Transylvania

Posted on September 27, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some rude humor, action, and scary images
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Funny-scary monsters
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	September 28, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0034G4OYA

What scared me most about “Hotel Transylvania” was the prospect of another film starring Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg. Their last collaboration was “That’s My Boy,” by far the most excruciatingly painful experience I’ve had at a theater this year. Thankfully, just providing voices for this PG animated horror comedy written by five other people, Sandler and Samberg are charming. It is a sweet, funny story about monsters who want to enjoy a peaceful life far from humans and the human who finds them anyway.

Sandler plays Count Dracula, a doting if over-protective vampire father who builds the hotel as a refuge so he and his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) can be safe from scary people with their pitchforks and torches. Dracula croons a tender lullaby: “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, papa’s going to bite the head off a bird.” Next to the changing table is a coffin-shaped diaper pail.

Mavis gets a little older, with cute little baby tooth fangs, and her caped father makes sure she’s wearing a helmet before he teaches her how to transform into a bat and fly. The hotel is a castle surrounded by a haunted forest and a graveyard populated by the undead. “Human-free since 1898,” the hotel proudly proclaims. And so things stay for over a century.

This Dracula has no need for human blood (“it’s so fatty and you don’t know where it’s been”). He relies on synthetic. All he wants is to take care of his guests, give his daughter a wonderful 118th birthday party, make sure she never leaves home, and never, ever see a human. But then, just as all of the monsters have arrived for the party, an easy-going bro with an enormous back-pack walks in. His name is Jonathan (Samberg), he thinks the monsters are cool, and he likes Mavis’ goth-girl vibe. This is worse than torches and pitchforks. A human who wants to get rid of monsters is one thing but a daughter who might fall in love with one is even scarier. And yes, there a wink at “Twilight.”

Of the three animated horror 3D comedies this fall, “Hotel Transylvania” is the least aesthetically ambitious, the most accessible for younger children, and the closest to the comfortingly silly scares of “Scooby-Doo.” Like this film, “ParaNorman” (now in theaters) and “Frankenweenie” (opening next week), the focus is on showing us that what we think is scary really is not very frightening after all. Of the three, this one has more all-out comedy, much of it coming from the monster-fied setting and the ghoul-ification of ordinary life. At Hotel Transylvania, the Do Not Disturb signs hanging from the doorknobs are shrunken heads — very outspoken ones. Mavis likes to eat “scream” cheese, which amusingly rises up from the cracker to let out a squeal as she takes a bite. Guests are greeted by zombie bellman, a Jack Pumpkinhead doorman, and a skeleton mariachi band with hats and sarapes. When the Invisible Man (David Spade) attempts to play charades, it is a hoot.

First-time director Genndy Tartakovsky was a storyboard artist on films like “Iron Man 2,” so he has an exceptional understanding of the mechanics and timing of the action sequences, and 3D adds a vertiginous thrill to a chase on flying tables and a touch of claustrophobia to a maze of underground corridors. It is telling that both of those highlights involve the most vivid vampire/human relationship at the heart of the story — Dracula and Jonathan. Despite a lot of talk about romantic “zing,” the bromance is much more real than the love story. And when they leave the castle for that most overused of climax cliches, the race to the airport, the story sags.

Top voice talent includes Kevin James as a sweet-natured Frankenstein and Fran Drescher as his bride, Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon as the Wolf couple with innumerable cubs, and Ceelo Green as the outgoing Mummy. But the real stars are character designers Carter Goodrich (“Despicable Me”), Greg Kellman (“Madagascar”), and Carlos Grangel (“King Fu Panda”), whose monsters pay affectionate homage to their origins but are so endearing that families may want to pay a visit to have room service deliver an order of scream cheese.

Parents should know that the monsters in this movie are intended to be more funny than scary but there are some grotesque and macabre images that may be frightening to young or sensitive children as well as some potty humor and peril.

Family discussion: Why was Dracula so afraid to let Mavis leave home? How can parents know when their children are ready for more responsibility? Which monster was your favorite?

If you like this, try: “ParaNorman,” “Monster House,” “Monsters vs. Aliens,” and “Scooby-Doo”

Trouble With the Curve

Posted on September 20, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for language, sexual references, some thematic material, and smoking
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and scenes in bars
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 21, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B009AMAK0E

“Trouble with the Curve” pitches softballs to power hitters. It has major league players and a bush league script.

Clint Eastwood plays — surprise! — a grumpy old guy, a role he is too comfortable in, on and off screen. Here he is Gus Lobel, the John Henry of the Moneyball era. He is a baseball scout who relies on his instincts and experience while the youngsters look at metrics and formulas. His approach may be out of fashion, but the old-timers believe in him. The problem is that he is losing his eyesight. As he prepares to go on one last scouting trip, to watch a talented but arrogant power hitter, his friend (John Goodman) asks Gus’s estranged lawyer daughter (Amy Adams) to accompany her father on the road. Her name is Mickey, as in Mickey Mantle and the senior lawyers at her firm are about to decide between her and an ambitious fellow associate for a big promotion. She decides to go, bringing her laptop and a bunch of resentments and abandonment issues as well. And on the road they meet up with Johnny (Justin Timberlake), a former player turned scout, hoping to become the team’s radio commentator.

This is a “guy cry” movie. Guys can feel manly going to see it because it stars Clint Eastwood and it is about baseball and the individual literally against the machine, raging at the dying of the light and all that good stuff, so they don’t mind tearing up a little, or sitting through the romantic portion. While Matthew Lillard as Gus’s young rival explains that “these programs are an essential tool in evaluating today’s talent,” Gus knows that even if he can’t see talent, he can hear it. He’s been watching so long that he can tell from the crack of the bat whether a batter is hitting a fastball or a curve. And just as we know that the preening young prospect will need to be taken down a notch, we know that the guy in the suit who tells Mickey he wants to move their relationship forward because “we’re perfect on paper” will be gone by the second act. As will Mickey’s vegan cuisine, no match for a minor-league hot dog. And Timberlake’s shirt.

There’s nothing new or surprising here, except perhaps when things get completely over-the-top at the end. Oh, and Eastwood singing on screen for the first time since “Paint Your Wagon,” when he visits his late wife’s grave to attempt “You Are My Sunshine” with a gravelly warble.” “As you know, to hit the magical 300, you fail seven out of ten times,” Timberlake explains. This film is entertaining, but not especially memorable. Maybe it bats around .240.

Parents should know that this film has some strong and crude language (including the r-word), sexual references, a reference to child molestation, drinking and drunkenness, and a lot of smoking.

Family discussion: Why was it hard for Gus and Mickey to tell each other how they felt? Compare this movie to “Moneyball” – which approach to finding new players is the right one?

If you like this, try: “Field of Dreams” and “Gran Torino”

The Master

Posted on September 20, 2012 at 5:58 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, and language
Profanity:	Extremely strong, explicit, and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Smoking, drinking and drunkenness
Date Released to Theaters:	September 21, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B008V0OKGG

In the sixth movie from virtuoso writer-director P.T. Anderson (“There Will be Blood,” “Boogie Nights”), we see Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) pause on the dock to look at what seems like the ultimate dream of civilization, a party on board a luxurious yacht filled with light, glamour, elegance, and belonging. He served in the Navy in WWII and his adjustment to civilian life has been troubled. Now, after losing his jobs as a department store portrait photographer and a field worker, with no connection to any thing or person or place or plan and no special skill except for the ability to make very potent alcoholic drinks out of whatever chemicals are at hand, the glow of the party and the people on the ship draws him in with a combination of the exotic and the familiar. He hops over the railing like an experienced sailor and somehow both improbably and inevitably he is taken in by the group and its leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman), called Lancaster Dodd by the authorities but Master by everyone else.

The party is for Dodd’s daughter, who is getting married. The Master himself is performing the ceremony, but more than that, as we will see him do throughout the story, he acts as a full-time master-of ceremonies as much as he is a teacher or leader of what seem to be a perpetual group of rapt followers. He invites Freddie to join them, and to keep making his powerfully intoxicating (and memory-destroying) elixer.

The Master’s acolytes are subjected to a series of private and public interviews, where they are asked to reveal the most intimate details of their lives, and seemingly random and sometimes humiliating tasks. The followers sit in chairs as though they are watching a play as Freddie paces back and forth between the window and the wall, ordered to describe what he sees. The Master, who describes himself as to Freddie as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher, but above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.” Self-aggrandizing, pompously un-pompous, and demonstrably false on its face. If Dodd was in fact inquisitive, he would have noticed that Freddie is not at all inquisitive. He operates entirely on instinct and lives almost entirely in the moment, musing only about his lost love, a 16-year-old neighbor he romantically idealizes though he has not seen or contacted her for years, and about his most animalistic carnal urges. At the group’s evening gathering, he imagines all of the women naked — old, young, even the pregnant wife of the Master (Amy Adams).

It is sumptuously photographed in 70mm (try to see it on the big screen it was shot to fill), and has a jumpy, provocative score by Jonny Greenwood punctuated with retro standards from the American Songbook. Ella Fitzgerald sings “Get Thee Behind Me Satan” as Freddie tries to keep his impulses in check. The performances are breathtaking in their scope, commitment, intelligence, and humanity. The frequent clashes of styles between Phoenix’s nearly feral Method approach, Hoffman’s more thoughtful, structure, and Adams’ iron-willed emotionalism are like timed flares going off to illuminate the story. Freddie is referred to repeatedly as an able-bodied seaman but his body seems anything but able. He is dark, stiff and hunched over, his elbows awkwardly extended back with his hands on his hips as his shoulders bend forward, his mouth twisted to one side when he speaks. Hoffman’s blondness, brilliantly photographed by Mihai Malaimare Jr., makes him seem leonine. He moves like a big, magnificent cat. As in Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” this is the story of a group of people who create a sort of family. As in his “There Will Be Blood,” it is the story of two men held together by a complicated and sometimes toxic blend of fear, respect, longing, and power. There is a chilliness and remove that keeps the struggle from feeling personal. Perhaps it is a metaphor about post-WWII America, overwhelmed by its own success, audacious, overconfident, careless, and, as ever, struggling between head and heart, past and future, body and soul.

Parents should know that this film has very explicit sexual references and situations, including pornography, very explicit nudity, very strong language, and some disturbing themes.

Family discussion: Why did Dodd want to keep Freddie in the group? What did they have in common? Why was Helen upset by the change from “remember” to “imagine?”

If you like this, try: “Magnolia” and “There Will Be Blood” by the same writer/director

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