Howl

Posted on October 14, 2010 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	NR
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language with sexual references, some crude
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 15, 2010

In the post-WWII era of peace and prosperity — and the Cold War and the blacklist and conformity — a small group of writers found much to terrify and infuriate them. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” one of them wrote, the beginning of a barbaric yawp of a poem of fury and protest called “Howl.” His name was Allen Ginsberg.
This movie is not the story of Ginsberg (smoothly played by James Franco), who would go on to become one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed and influential poets, though he is affecting, even at times electric. It is the story of the poem itself, taking us back and forth between three key moments. First is Ginsberg’s own performance, reading the poem aloud in a small, smoky club. Second is an interview two years later with a now-bearded Ginsberg in his apartment. And third is a courtroom, where the obscenity charges brought not against Ginsberg but against his publisher, fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were being argued.
“Experts” (Mary-Louise Parker, Alessandro Nivola, Jeff Daniels) debate the literary merit and destructively prurient content of Ginsberg’s work on the witness stand. The prosecution (David Straithairn) argues that the poem is so detrimental to the minds of Americans that it should not even be seen. For the defense, Jake Ehrlich (“Man Men’s” Jon Hamm), with a natty four-cornered pocket square handkerchief, who shows the court that far more important than any expert’s opinion on the value of Howl as a work of art is the freedom for Americans to decide that issue for themselves.
And for me at least, that is where the real poetry is.

(more…)

Never Let Me Go

Posted on September 23, 2010 at 6:44 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some sexuality and nudity
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Disturbing theme, some images of medical procedures and injuries, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 24, 2010

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, about a butler who devoted his life to service without questioning his master’s authority or the validity of his judgment became a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. And now his book, Never Let Me Go is a movie that while very different in genre addresses some of the same themes. Once again, the setting is the English countryside, and once again the main characters are born into a life of service that they do not question.

It’s a science fiction story without a single lab coat, spaceship, or gizmo. It isn’t even set in the future, but the recent past. It appears very much like the world we knew in the the 1980’s, but we are told before it begins that a medical discovery in 1952 has led to life expectancy of 100 years in 1967.

Then Kathy H. (Carey Mulligan of “An Education”) starts to tell us her story. She is a “carer,” and thinking back on her childhood at a school called Hailsham. As we go back to see her there with her friends Ruth and Tommy, it all seems perfectly normal at first. But there are some elements that seem strange. The headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) makes the usual speech after finding cigarette butts at the school, but why does she emphasize that for these children especially “keeping yourselves healthy is of paramount importance?” Why do they seem to have no families or even last names? And what is that panel on the wall that beeps when they casually touch their wrist to it every day as they come back indoors?

The excitement in the children’s lives comes from the visits by “Madame,” who examines their artwork and selects the items she thinks are the best for her gallery, and even more on the rare opportunities they have to buy trinkets with the tokens they are given for good behavior. They are very happy when they hear they are getting a “bumper crop” and enjoy their treasures but to our eyes the items look like garage sale cast-offs. These are not poor children; they attend school in an almost-idyllic countryside setting. But they do not seem to have anything.

Just once, a teacher tells them the truth, and then she is fired. SPOILER ALERT: the secret not fully revealed until the end of the book is disclosed much earlier in the movie so I am going to include it here. If you don’t want to know, skip this paragraph. The fate of these children has already been decided. They have been bred for use as spare parts. They are to be kept healthy and happy like farm animals until, in their 20’s, they will become “donors.” And after three or four “donations,” they will “complete.” Their purpose is to give of themselves literally and ultimately to keep others alive.

Director Mark Romanek (“One Hour Photo”) understands that just as “Rosemary’s Baby” tapped into a whole new category of dread by putting a Gothic story in modern Manhattan, giving us an alternate reality that seems so familiar to us is eerie and unnerving. It is not familiar through experience, set in the recent past. But it is also familiar through movies. The accents and Hailsham setting lull us into a Merchant-Ivory/Masterpiece Theater civilized world of tea being served at four. The fact that the truest horror happens off screen is haunting. When the headmistress says, “We were answering questions no one wanted asked,” it is as devastating as any gory attack by zombies or aliens. When the characters show their humanity by hoping for a better outcome, we see how much has been taken from them because they have no idea of how to insist on it.

The title comes from a “bumper crop” treasure, a used audio cassette by a torchy 60’s singer (performed by Jane Monheit), given to Kathy by Tommy. She plays it over and over. What does it mean to have someone who wants to hold on to you that way? Kathy knows how it feels to care deeply about someone. She loves Tommy. As they grow up, though, it is Ruth who becomes his — what? Girlfriend does not seem the right word as they have little sense of what that means. Ruth does tell Kathy that she will not let Tommy go. But then things change and as she has to let go of so much more, she thinks about what she can leave behind, what will give her life meaning beyond the limited scope that has been set for her.

Romanek, best known for music videos, is stronger on visuals than with story. He does very well in creating a world so believable, so thoroughly familiar and sturdily institutional, that the slight variances from what we know quickly seem natural. Like the people who proposed and approved and benefit from this system, the ones who are never seen and hardly referred to, we can watch without considering too deeply the consequences and significance of what we see — for a while.

The three sections of the film are starkly different in architecture and color scheme. Hailsham shows a little of the benign neglect of institutions that have existed for hundreds of years and are expected to be around forever. After graduation, they move to “cottages,” rural, rustic, remote. They make shy ventures into the world but can barely order a soda in a restaurant and feel most at home on a beach where an abandoned ship washed up on the shore somehow seems to resonate with them, an empty vessel, once useful, with nowhere to go.

Legendary

Posted on September 9, 2010 at 6:07 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for suggestive material, brief partial nudity and some fighting scenes
Profanity:	Some crude high-school insults
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character abuses alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Some fights, bully
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 10, 2010

A skinny teenager wants to wrestle in this unpretentious film with a predictable storyline (it even gives away the ending in the first minute) but benefits from some sharp dialog and the always watchable Patricia Clarkson.
Cal Chetley (Devon Graye) has a lot of spirit and a great relationship with his widowed mother (Patricia Clarkson) — until she finds out that like his late father and estranged brother he wants to join the wrestling team. She points out that he’s a beanpole while his brother Mike is “built like a car.” But he has been picked on by a bully and would like to be able to defend himself physically as well as he does verbally. And joining the team gives him a reason (and an excuse) to try to repair the connection to Mike (the WWE’s John Cena).
It’s your basic sports plot. There’s the meet where he fails miserably. There’s the secret hold he has to be ready to learn. The wrestling and the relationship between the brothers seems to make progress and then hits some obstacles on the way to the big meet.
It may satisfy wrestling fans but it is unlikely to make the sport compelling to anyone who is not already knowledgeable. It is more likely to make some new fans for Graye, who is instantly likable as he stands up to a bully, gently teases his mother about her date, and even more gently helps his friend Luli (Madeleine Martin in the film’s weakest performance) understand that she is not valuing herself enough. Cena is well cast as a big guy who keeps a lot inside, and Danny Glover plays a helpful guide who somehow always shows up when he is needed, though no one ever sees him but Cal. Clarkson makes the mother real and touching, bringing a wry affection and touching pride to her moments with Cal and a fierce urgency to the family tensions. Her scene with Martin, as two women living in male-dominated households, is a highlight that reminds us where the real victories are.

(more…)

Related Tags:

High School Movies -- format Sports

Nanny McPhee Returns

Posted on August 19, 2010 at 5:58 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for rude homor, some language, and mild thematic elements
Profanity:	Some crude schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	References to wartime violence and apparent tragic death of a father, bomb dropped on home, parental divorce, comic peril and violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 20, 2010

For the first half of this movie, the children in the audience were completely on board, laughing when the children on screen were covered with mud and various kinds of animal poop, delighting in seeing them naughtily fighting with each other and then, when Nanny McPhee (screenwriter Emma Thompson) stamps her magical staff on the floor, each fighting himself. By the time the piglets were doing an Esther Williams-style synchronized swim number, the kids in the theater were extremely happy.

And then something happened that took the movie in another direction and the audience enthusiasm evaporated. This sequel to the 2006 original places the character inspired by Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda stories in a WWII setting as Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is trying to keep the family farm going with the help of her three children while her husband is fighting in the war. It is quite a struggle, especially because her brother-in-law is doing everything he can to make her fail so she will have to sell the farm. He has to pay his gambling debts or, two female enforcers tell him, they will remove his liver. Isabel also has to care for her niece and nephew, sent out of London to keep them away from the bombing during the Blitz. They are snobbish and selfish and there is an instant war between the cousins.

Enter Nanny McPhee, all in black, with a body like a linebacker, two enormous moles, a snaggletooth, a jowly chinline, and a bulbous nose. She explains she has been sent by the Army and she goes to work, banging her staff and bringing on the magic to teach the children five lessons. When she is not wanted but needed, she must stay. When she is wanted but not needed, she must go.

Nanny McPhee teaches the children to stop fighting and to share and cooperate. But then things get much worse when they get some very bad news and they must show resolve, courage, and faith before she will be no longer needed.

The movie is very uneven in tone and in quality, with charming nonsense colliding with what appears to be devastating tragedy. Children young enough to enjoy the silly pratfalls will be uncomfortable and possibly upset by discussions of death, war, and divorce. There is something jarring, even in a fantasy film, about children having to defuse a bomb as the adults are helpless. The timing is off so that even some of the comic set-pieces fail, like an extended bit about disappearing pens and a gruesome all-female hit squad who wander in like extras from “Sweeny Todd.” Thompson is always magic on screen, but here she is more wanted than needed.

Salt

Posted on July 27, 2010 at 10:24 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant peril and violence, shooting, fighting, explosions, torture, some graphic images, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Very strong female character
Date Released to Theaters:	July 23, 2010

“Salt” is the story of a CIA agent with an exemplary record who is accused by a mole of being a Russian spy, part of a cadre trained as children to infiltrate America by living normal lives until ordered into action. Angelina Jolie plays the title character, Evelyn Salt, bringing all of her Angelina Jolie-ness with her, for better and worse. She continues to explore the fearless action star stunt daredevil side she showed in the “Tomb Raider” movies and “Wanted” and the intensity of a wronged but fierce and fearless woman she showed in “The Changeling” and “A Mighty Heart.” And there’s the inevitability of her real tabloid-fodder life spilling over into the story as well, the wild child with her knives and Ã©pater le bourgeouis attitude evolving into the glowing madonna working tirelessly for the world’s children and happily devoted to her own highly photogenic six.

And so, when the movie opens, showing us Salt/Jolie being tortured by North Koreans, wearing nothing but her scanties, all of that comes along with whatever we are learning about her character. She is fierce and brave and will do anything it takes to protect her home. Once she is rescued, she holds it together until she sees who it was who insisted on getting her out, not the CIA, which has strict procedures for calculating the greater good, but her German boyfriend Mike (August Diehl), a scientist specializing in spiders.

Five years later, she has a desk job at a CIA cover organization and is getting ready to celebrate her wedding anniversary when a Russian guy shows up with an offer to provide information. He says that Salt is a Russian spy and is about to kill the Russian president (yes, I know that does not seem to make much sense). Her long-time colleague Ted (Liev Schreiber) believes she is telling the truth when she says she is loyal to America. But another official named Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wants her investigated. Salt runs. It could be because she thinks Mike is in danger or because she does not trust Peabody. Or it could be that the Russian was right.

The chase and fight scenes are well staged, especially when Salt leaps across the tops of trucks as they race along a highway. But the absurdity of the plot is made even harder to accept because Jolie’s dignified diligence seems so out of step with the film’s tone. The Jolie of “Tomb Raider” and even “Gone in 60 Seconds” knew how to have fun on screen. But the wild child era is over, and even in film these days, Jolie seems to want to go for the gravitas. If so, this is the wrong movie.