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:

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.

The Kids are All Right

Posted on July 15, 2010 at 6:01 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some teen drug and alcohol use
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug use, by adults and teens, adult abuses alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family confrontations, scuffle
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	July 16, 2010

Life is messy, and one of the ways we try to make sense of it is through stories. With their selection of detail and events and resolution — whether a happy or a sad one — they give us a sense of structure and logic and catharsis. They help us sort through life’s ambiguities and complications, even if only for a couple of hours.

At least, that’s what stories do most of the time. Once in a while, they are content just to reflect back to us the very messiness and ambiguity we are experiencing. And when they do it well, they give us a sense of recognition that is in its own way cathartic. This film manages to do that and to be subtly subversive, lulling us across some of our own internal boundaries with its matter-of-fact portrayal of family life.

Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a long-time couple who have each given birth to a child, biological half-siblings because both women used sperm from the same anonymous donor, selected as optimal on the basis of his profile. Now the children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska of “Alice in Wonderland”) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson of “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) are teenagers and curious about their biological father. So, without telling their moms, they contact him.

He is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), an organic farmer and restaurateur whose free-spirited approach to life is very appealing to two teenagers emerging from a home that is rather hot-housed by comparison. Nic and Jules have created a deeply nurturing, “Let’s talk about our feelings” environment that feels claustrophobic and intrusive to their children, especially Laser as the household’s only male. In a brief but beautifully filmed scene that opens the film, Laser looks on with a mixture of curiosity and longing as a friend casually roughhouses with his dad, captivated by this particularly male kind of communication. It may be in part this emotion that keeps Laser connected to a friend his moms correctly believe to be a bad influence.

Paul is an enticing figure for the teenagers, comfortable with his maleness and easy-going. And Paul himself is enticed by Joni and Laser, who surprise him with a sense of connection and stability he did not realize he was missing. Just as they are separating from overshare central in the house they grew up in as a normal part of adolescent search for identity, he is drawn to the road he did not quite realize he chose not to take. And this plays out in ways that threaten everything the family has built.

The title focuses on the kids, but the movie is really about the adults. The small miracle of this film is its portrayal of a long-term marriage, its perspective unadorned but sympathetic, satiric but tender. The dynamic of affection, distraction, familiarity, and frustration is deftly portrayed. The expectation of the movie is that audiences will take for granted that a same-sex relationship is just like every other relationship we have experienced and seen portrayed, and if there is any surprise at all it is how quickly we do.

And then, just as we get comfortable with the familiar discomforts of the relationship, it all gets turned upside down and we and the characters are asked to jettison yet another level of expectations and boundaries.

Bening and Moore are magnificent. It is a pure pleasure to see women with real faces on screen. They hold nothing back in allowing themselves to be seen fully in every sense of the term, opening themselves up with breathtaking generosity of spirit. The kids are all right in this film; the grown-ups are even better.

Related Tags:

Drama Family Issues Movies -- format

Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 8:29 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Reference to mob hit
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, ethnic slurs
Date Released to Theaters:	May 7, 2010

As print media crumbles and broadcast and cable media splinters, documentaries have become one of the most thorough and dependable formats for delivering long-form journalism. From the acid (in both metaphorical senses of the word)-tinged advocacy of Michael Moore and his imitators to the more straightforward, even-handed work of Irena Salina and Joe Berlinger, see-it-now, show-it-don’t-tell-it films, more widely available than ever before online and through Netflix, literally bring these stories home. Alex Gibney, whose brilliant work on “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side” (about interrogation abuses in Iran), once again uses one disaster to illuminate more fundamental structural flaws with “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”

The Jack Abramoff story is epic, even operatic, a classic story of the rise and fall of an ambitious man with a tragic flaw. He was an idealistic young man who became first corrupted and then a corrupter. It has the satisfying arc of a feature film (and is set to be one, with Kevin Spacey as Abramoff), but it is far more than a rise-and-fall or even a catch-the-crook film. It is entertaining but it is also a sober and sobering depiction that focuses less on the failures of the individuals than the failures of the system that did more than let it happen. This film argues that corruption is inevitable.

Abramoff was a college Republican whose passion and ability to attract supporters — political and financial — quickly brought him to the attention of party leaders. At some point, he surrendered principle to greed. He took more than $25 million in lobbying fees. And then what he didn’t keep he paid out illegally. Gibney does an excellent job of making a complicated story both clear and engrossing. He is even-handed, allowing participants like former Congressman Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who pled guilty to corruption charges and spent 17 months in prison, and Neil Volz, his former chief of staff, to tell their own stories.

The stories are shocking. I don’t know which is worse, how much money was taken from the unsuspecting clients, mostly Indian tribes, or how little it took to get crucial support from key members of Congress. A golf outing, a free dinner, a $25,000 contribution could mean hundreds of millions of dollars from casino revenue, especially if the competition could be shut out. Sweatshops on Saipan were characterized as free enterprise. Favors were traded. Abramoff dubbed appropriations committee the called “the favor factory” and he was very good at finding ever more pockets to stuff favors in. He was also very good at creating more pockets of his own for receiving money. Ultimately, his office set up a phony think tank to receive contributions in excess of the money given to them for lobbying. It was run by a lifeguard out of a house on the beach. Needless to say, no thinking went on.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, invalidating much of John McCain’s campaign finance reforms and making it possible for unlimited corporate lobbying and other political expenditures — much of it undisclosed — makes this film even more timely and even more terrifying. Jack Abramoff will get out of prison at the end of this year and come back to a world filled with new opportunities.

Related Tags:

Documentary Movies -- format