The Hedgehog

Posted on August 18, 2011 at 6:59 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Shocking and very sad death
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, class prejudice
Date Released to Theaters:	August 19, 2011

It’s hard to imagine a less cinematic novel than The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Author Muriel Barbery is a professor of philosophy, and the book reads more like a series of essays than a story. What made it work was the way Barbery created engaging voices for the two characters considering all those abstruce and arcane philosophical and literary concepts. The movie gives us those characters without the ideas. It is pleasant enough but it is like a frame without a picture.

The two characters, a middle-aged woman and an 11-year-old girl, barely know one another but they have three important things in common. They live in the same building. They are both autodidacts with prodigious intelligence. And both are invisible to everyone around them. Renee (Josiane Balasko) is the building’s concierge. No one pays any attention to her unless they need something and that is fine with her. She has a hidden room filled with books and her inner life is rich and satisfying. The husband who may not have understood her but truly appreciated her has died. She has just one friend, a warm-hearted woman who has no idea that Renee has read more than most college professors. Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic) feels so isolated by the superficial concerns of everyone in her family that she cooly decides to kill herself on her 13th birthday.

The way that these two discover each other and the sweetness of their friendship is touching. Balasko and Le Guillermic bring a lot of intelligence and sensitivity to their performances. Togo Igawa is lovely as Mr. Ozu, a new resident of the building, but his character is too perfect a Prince Charming to make his relationship with Renee meaningful. And, as with the book, the ending is jarring and unearned. Without the depth of the book, it seems like an arty Hallmark movie.

Zookeeper

Posted on July 7, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some rude and suggestive humor and language
Profanity:	Fake swearing ("frickin'") and some crude potty language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, reference to abuse of animals
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	July 9, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	October 11, 2011

This is a movie about how Kevin James can do so much better, but Kevin James can do so much better than this movie. In the film, he tries to change his life to be worthy of a woman he thinks he loves. In the audience, we want him to stop making movies about what a shlub he is.

James and a team including some of his “King of Queens” writers have produced a dull and oddly mean-spirited movie about a zookeeper who takes advice about dating (or, as the animals call it, “mating”) from the talking animals at his zoo.

The woman he likes is a fashion designer named Stephanie (the game and able Leslie Bibb), who dumps him in the first five minutes of the film after a proposal. Still heartbroken five years later, Griffin (James) sees her again. At first, he resists her indications of interest but then, just as he begins to respond, another old boyfriend enters the picture (Joe Rogan as Gale). The animals decide to reveal their secret power of speech so they can give Griffin some guidance on how to get Stephanie back. As you can imagine (and as perhaps you would rather not), the animals have their own ideas about how to attract the opposite gender. Since, except for the bickering lions (voices of Sylvester Stallone and Cher!), none of them appear to have significant others of any species, their advice is of questionable value. Nevertheless, this gives us an opportunity to see James walking like a bear and marking his territory like a wolf. Thankfully, he does not follow the monkey’s direction about what to throw.

But there isn’t much more to be thankful for. Adam Sandler (who provides the voice of the monkey) produced, which means it’s yet another slacker no-effort film, with another soundtrack filled with 80’s songs not to make any point or for any particular purpose but just because that’s the last time Sandler listened to the radio. And despite its superficial endorsement of being yourself and doing what you love, that over-done message is eclipsed by a weird turn in the third act. Griffin takes advice from the animals that seems to have been stolen from Mystery the Pickup Artist. They tell him to keep Stephanie off-balance by alternating insults and affection to make her insecure — and it works, not just on her but on others as well. There is a cliched race-t0-the-airport scene which makes no sense in an era of cell phones, but it does show us what and who is important to Griffin — until a pointless and distracting detour just so he can hit someone along the way that undermines that message as well. Griffin does some things he is not proud of but makes no attempt to fix his mistakes. The film seems to suggest that it is all right, even a sign of strength and confidence to hurt someone’s feelings.

The PG rating should not be a signal that this is a kids’ movie. Children will not be very interested in Griffin’s romantic adventures or the night out on the town he gives to the zoo’s melancholy gorilla (“Send some fried zucchini to that table of secretaries,” he tells the waitress). It’s downright smarmy, with the use of fake swear words like “frickin'” to keep the MPAA ratings board at bay. Poor Ken Jeong for the second week in a row is stuck in a humiliatingly shrill, borderline racist caricature as a snake specialist and Donnie Wahlberg is wasted as an animal-abusing zoo staffer.

James is a talented and appealing performer and even this mess can’t hide the radiant beauty and class of Rosario Dawson as a warm-hearted zoo vet. There are a few nice moments when Dawson sails across a dance floor on acrobat’s streamers and a few it-could-have-been-worse moments when it turns out that Griffin is not the usual comedy movie incompetent. He has a nice relationship with his brother and is good at what he does. But James and Dawson could be so much better doing something else.

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Monte Carlo

Posted on June 30, 2011 at 6:10 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for brief mild language
Profanity:	Brief mild language ("hoochie," etc.)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some comic peril
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	July 1, 2011

It’s the Princess and the Pauper with Disney star Selena Gomez and two Gossip Girls in a story about a Texas waitress who takes the place of a selfish heiress in the glamorous title city. There’s also a touch of Cinderella (though the fairy godmother is unwitting). And it is filled with flouncy pretty dresses and bouncy pop songs to delight tween Disney channel fangirls.

Gomez plays Grace, a high school senior in Texas. She and her best friend Emma (Katie Cassidy) have been saving the tips from their waitress jobs and finally have enough to go to Paris. At the last minute, her mother and her new step-father insist that her step-sister Meg (Leighton Meester) go along. Grace and Meg have a strained relationship that quickly gets much more strained once they arrive. The hotel is dingy and cramped and the tour is brusque and rushed.

The girls are enjoying the top of the Eiffel Tower when they miss the tour bus and get caught in a downpour. When they duck into a luxury hotel for shelter, Grace is mistaken for a spoiled British heiress named Cordelia Winthrop Scott (also Gomez, clearly having much more fun as the imperious young woman with an accent like a “mean Mary Poppins”). Cordelia is supposed to be on her way to Monte Carlo for a fund-raiser to repair her reputation as a party girl. The girls overhear her telling a friend she will leave the hotel without checking out and decide Grace should take her place for one night, rationalizing that the room is already paid for. But one thing leads to another and soon the girls are in Monte Carlo, selecting designer clothes from Cordelia’s luggage so they can go to the ball and meeting charming princes. Well, one is a prince and two are charming.

There’s also a zillion-dollar diamond and sapphire necklace that is not always where it is supposed to be. And it turns out that Cordelia is scheduled to play polo.

“I like the way they come down the stairs,” sighed the 9-year old girl sitting next to me. It doesn’t take much more to enchant the target audience than seeing the girls in their party dresses coming down the steps in slow motion on the way to the ball. But this movie, thankfully gives us a little bit more. The girls each have enough of a personality and story to keep it from getting too silly but not enough to keep it from being a fairy tale, at least the kind that will make dreams come true for some tweens who are too often neglected by the people who make movies.

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Comedy Movies -- format Romance

Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer

Posted on June 11, 2011 at 9:43 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild rude humor and language
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild comic peril, brief footage of zombie movie
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	June 10, 2011

It’s the last day of third grade and redheaded Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) is looking forward to the greatest summer ever. She has big plans for herself and her three best friends, a summer of dares and thrills and adventures. But she is crushed to discover that two of her friends have their own plans. One is headed for circus camp and the other to Borneo. Worse than that, her parents have to leave to help her grandparents move, and she will be stuck at home with her pesty, Bigfoot-obsessed brother Stink (Parris Mosteller) and an aunt she does not even know (Heather Graham as the free-spirited Aunt Opal). Instead of the best most not-boring thrilladelic summer ever, it looks to be a bummer summer all the way, death by “starvation, boredom, and Stink-dom.”

Judy has some setbacks and learns some lessons, as the fans of book series by Megan McDonald know. Director John Schultz (“Aliens in the Attic”) provides some visual bounce; it looks like a school notebook covered with glitter and stickers. But the individual episodes play like skits and there is much too much bodily function humor (lessons: don’t eat a lot of junk food and a blue sco-cone before getting on a roller coaster called the Scream Monster — or sit next to someone who did and never make your picnic sandwiches near someone who is storing Bigfoot poop). Most important, Judy comes across as a unredeemed, self-centered brat, and nothing she learns in the course of the film is about more than having fun and winning a pointless competition with your friends. These are what we call first-world problems.

Last year’s Ramona and Beezus was charming and delightful and heartwarming. Like Judy Moody, it is based on a beloved book series about a little girl in the suburbs with a free-spirited but doting aunt, with some silly adventures and lessons learned, but it is a far better film in every category. The best I can say about this one is that children will enjoy the gross-out moments and comic disasters and everyone else will enjoy looking at the very pretty Heather Graham. As a movie, though, it’s a bummer.

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Beginners

Posted on June 9, 2011 at 5:55 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some sexual content
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness:	Very sad death from cancer, loss of parents, grief
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	June 10, 2011

Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is engaged in the saddest of tasks, clearing out his late father’s home, choosing what to take, what to give away, what no one will want. He brings his father’s dog home with him, giving him a tour. “This is the bathroom,” he says. “This is the dining room, where people come and eat sometimes.” But it is clear that no one comes to eat there. Oliver, a graphic designer, is a loner and in his grief he is even more isolated from the rest of the world.

Writer-director Mike Mills (“Thumbsucker”), a graphic designer himself, based this film on his own experience. His father came out at age 74 for the first time and lived an enthusiastic and joyous life as a gay man until he died. He tells the story impressionistically, going back and forth between Oliver’s quiet, if sometimes conflicted, support of his father’s new experiences and relationships and then his illness and months after his father’s death, when he meets an actress (Melanie Laurant of “Inglourious Basterds” and “The Concert”), falls for her, and struggles to overcome his sense of loss and learn from his father’s ability to give himself wholeheartedly to a relationship. There are flashbacks, too, showing us Oliver’s spirited if complicated mother (the superb Mary Page Keller), who was married to his father for 44 years. And Oliver mingles in details of history and even cosmology as he tells us what happened. It works beautifully. Mills tells the story with delicacy and tenderness — and with humor. The best lines are given to the dog.

Christopher Plummer is outstanding as Oliver’s father Hal, who has no regrets about his marriage but is determined to make up for the time he could not be fully himself. He calls Oliver in the middle of the night to ask what kind of music he heard in a club. “House music,” he repeats, writing it down, to make sure he knows how to ask for it the next time. He has gay pride meetings in his home. He falls in love with a man and invites him to move in, understanding that his new lover will not be monogamous. Oliver’s reaction is mixed admiration, envy, and a kind of sibling rivalry, and McGregor is an understated marvel in showing us all of that and more, without a word.

After Hal’s death, Oliver goes to a costume party, dressed as Freud. He meets Anna, who has laryngitis, and communicates only through writing. A romance begins, but Oliver will have to allow himself to take the risk of loving her, and sharing himself. At work, even though he knows the client who just wants an album cover will hate it, he has insisted on submitting a series of drawings about the history of sadness. Can he make sense of his own history of sadness?

Tenderly told and exquisitely performed, this is a gentle wonder, with characters we root for and emotions we believe in.

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