Kubo and the Two Strings

Posted on August 18, 2016 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic elements, scary images, action and peril
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Monsters, peril, sad offscreen deaths
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 19, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	November 20, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01KMKM4TW

LAIKA Studios’ fourth film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” is a fable of exquisite beauty and meaning, gorgeously produced in the most painstaking of all forms of filmmaking, stop-motion animation. They are the modern-day equivalent of the monks who labored for years on each page of illuminated manuscripts.

Every detail in every frame and every element of the story, set in a magical version of ancient Japan, reflects the simple profundity of the ancient and contemporary Japanese art that inspired it. LAIKA’s last film, “The Boxtrolls,” was set in a cluttered, sooty, steampunkish imaginary Victorian London, and the studio’s motto was “no square corners, no straight lines.” This time it went in the opposite direction, with the muted palette and spare, carefully balanced settings of Japanese woodblock prints and the sharp lines and perfect corners of origami.

One of the hardest elements to get right in stop-motion is water, because it is impossible to control it frame to frame. In “Boxtrolls,” the studio’s greatest technical triumph was an elaborate set-up for a brief scene in which a character touched standing water and created some ripples. LAIKA loves to challenge itself, and so this film starts with a storm at sea. A woman we will learn is Kubo’s mother is desperately trying to stay upright on a tiny boat. We know she is escaping someone or something, but we are not sure yet what or who it is. And we do not learn until she is washed up on the shore, exhausted and hurt, that she is not alone. In her backpack, there is a baby. It is Kubo.

Like Harry Potter, Kubo had a father who died trying to protect him from a danger so great that Kubo bears a wound. One of his eyes is gone. Kubo’s mother survived, but she used all of her magic to save him and now she is frail, forgetful, and inconsolable.

When we next see them, he is about 11, and has been caring for her all his life. Each day, he makes her food and feeds her. And then he walks from their home in a cave on top of a cliff into the nearest town, where he tells stories in the market. He has the power to bring origami characters to life to act out thrilling tales of the great samurai warrior Hanzo. The townspeople love his stories, which always end with a cliffhanger, and they toss him coins.

The community has an annual Obon festival, where they light lanterns and remember the dead. Kubo wants to go, so he violates his mother’s rule about never being out after dark. And the danger she protected him from years ago comes after him in the form of his mother’s two spooky sisters, both voiced by Rooney Mara and both wearing implacable-expression white masks and terrifying swoopy capes made of black feathers.

Kubo’s mother has just enough magic left to save him one more time. And then she is gone, and Kubo finds himself on a journey, accompanied by the live version of the small monkey charm he always carried in his pocket. He and Monkey (Charlize Theron) set off to find the three pieces of Hanzo’s armor that he will need to fight the sisters and their father, who wants Kubo’s other eye. Along the way they meet a samurai who has been cursed and turned into a giant beetle (Matthew McConaughey). And they meet and fight three different monsters, a giant skeleton, an underwater garden of eyes, and an enormous, floating, reticulated moon serpent, each giving Kubo a chance to discover his courage and power.

This is a gorgeous, epic adventure with grandeur, scope, and spectacular settings, every bit of it wonderfully imaginative. It reflects LAIKA’s own adventurous spirit in taking on narrative and technical challenges as daunting as that faced by any hero. Who else would try to create a stop-motion battle under water? Or take on, in a family movie, a quest that encompasses themes of family, story, courage, loss, destiny, and meaning? LAIKA understands that the most enduring fairy tales are not afraid to deal with darkness because that is the only way to understand its true message, here delivered in a breathtaking conclusion, of tenderness and forgiveness.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy-style peril and violence with monsters and magic, and sad deaths of parents.

Family discussion: Why did Kubo answer his grandfather’s questions the way he did? Why didn’t Monkey tell Kubo where she came from? Why did the two strings make a difference?

If you like this, try: “Coraline,” “Paranorman,” and “The Boxtrolls”

Don’t Think Twice

Posted on August 4, 2016 at 5:53 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and drug use
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad offscreen death
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	August 5, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	December 5, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01IV40HUY

Life is pretty much improv, after all. We are constantly challenged to respond to what we cannot predict. But we do not have the two foundational rules that make performance improvisation so compelling. First is “yes, and.” Whatever anyone on stage says or does, everyone else has to build on it. If someone says, “Wow, it’s cold in here,” no one is allowed to say, “What do you mean? We’re outside and it’s warm.” You have to say something that takes what the first person said to the next level, maybe “Yes, who turned the air conditioning down to 60?” Or even, “Well, there’s really no practical way to heat an igloo.” It is the high-wire without a net act of improv group’s lightning quick, sharply observed, and deftly funny scenes that audiences enjoy.

The other fundamental rule is what improvers say to each other before they go on stage: “I’ve got your back.” Improv is about the group, not the individuals. “Don’t Think Twice” is the story of an improv group called The Commune, suggestive of its familial, interdependent, collegial quality. They are something like a family, if a dysfunctional one. While they have very different backgrounds and goals, the way they come together on stage is, at least for now, enough to make them feel they have a home together.

The closest thing they have to a leader is Miles (writer/director Mike Birbiglia of “Sleepwalk With Me”), who is a little older and taught many of them. He is still teaching improv classes and often has brief affairs with the young women who are his students. Samantha (Gillian Jacobs) and Jack (Keegan-Michael Key) are a couple. Allison (Kate Micucci) is a quiet woman who is working on a graphic novel. Jill (“Inside Amy Schumer” writer Tami Sagher) lives with her parents and is the only one who does not have money problems. And Bill (Chris Gethard) is making ends meet by handing out hummus and chips in the grocery store. “Your 20’s are all about hope. And then your 30’s are all about realizing how dumb it was to hope,” one character says.

The group is presented with some bad news and some good news, two crises that expose the fragility of their connection. They are about to lose their performing space, and there are no alternatives they can afford. And Jack and Samantha achieve the most coveted of opportunities, the chance to audition for a television program that is the equivalent of “Saturday Night Live,” a sketch comedy show that is a major cultural institution. Both put enormous pressure on the group, and the sense of desperation, jealousy, and competition shatters their pretense of unity and endless support for one another. At the same time, Bill’s father becomes critically ill, which gives them a way to continue to connect.

Birbiglia’s “Sleepwalk with Me” showed great promise. The transfer from stand-up to screen was awkward, but the atmosphere and the specifics of life on the road as a comedian were exceptionally well handled and he is on screen, as on stage, an engaging character. Here he once again takes us unto a very specific world that we can all relate to, especially when it comes to the way the characters use humor to reach a place of honesty. Birbiglia takes a risk here, making Miles less likeable, but it works as he very effectively creates real and vivid characters who have to figure out who they are when they are offstage. While the first film gave us one perspective, this one expands with a clear-eyed but generous take on each of them. So, the individual stories work and they provide balance and counterpoint. Even family members have to grow up, accept responsibility, and decide when to change course.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, sexual references and an explicit situation, rude humor, sad death of a parent, drinking and drugs.

Family discussion: Why is it important to say “yes, and?” Is it sometimes hard for you to be happy when your friends succeed?

If you like this, try: “Sleepwalk With Me” and Mike Birbiglia’s short film on YouTube, “Fresh Air 2: 2 Fresh 2 Furious”

Ghostbusters

Posted on July 14, 2016 at 5:20 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended fantasy/paranormal violence with some disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	July 15, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	October 10, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01I2FFGW6

I’m willing to believe them. I mean, sure, the original is a classic, mostly thanks to Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, and a new approach to action/paranormal comedy. But the reboot has the Mount Rushmore of movie comedy with SNL writer/cast members Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Kristen Wiig, plus America’s sweetheart Melissa McCarthy. That’s some serious comedy power there, and some serious dimples, too. It pays tribute to the original, opening with the Ray Parker, Jr. song and featuring cameos from original cast members Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson, Potts, and Weaver, and a couple of the original ghosts, too.

But it is very much its own take on the story, with a fresh script from director Paul Feig and Katie Dippold (“Parks and Recreation,” “The Heat”). There are tweaks on the original’s headquarters and car. And it has updated references — you know that if a New Yorker saw a ghost today, she’d whip out a selfie stick and Instagram it, and they pause for a burn on Reddit haters).

Like the original, it begins with scientists losing their jobs in academia because of their insistence on exploring the paranormal. Wiig plays Erin, a physicist who misses her chance at tenure when it is revealed that she once co-authored a book called Ghosts from Our Past — Both Literally and Figuratively. It was out of print, but the other author, her estranged friend Abby (McCarthy), has made it available on Amazon. Erin visits Abby’s lab and meets Jillian Holtzmann (McKinnon), a mad scientist type who literally plays with fire. When they are all fired, they start a company to investigate the paranormal and are soon joined by Patty (Jones), a subway worker who does not know much about science but has an extensive knowledge of New York city history. And they hire a receptionist named Kevin (“Thor’s” Chris Hemsworth) and get to work trying to capture a ghost so they can prove they are right.

Meanwhile, a nerdy guy is building a machine to unleash and intensify all of the spirits in the city, and so the women go from studying the ghosts to, yes, busting them, with a major confrontation in the midst of a metal concert with a group called “The Slimers” onstage and Ozzy Osbourne watching in the wings. The mayor (Andy Garcia) and his aide (Cecily Strong) thank the team privately but denounce them as frauds publicly to keep the city from panicking.

The final confrontation goes on a bit too long, which is probably why there is an obvious cut of what would have been a dance number (glimpsed in the credits and I hope added in full to the DVD extras). But the action scenes are strong and the comedy is first-rate, at its best achieving a deliriously loopy silliness that is refreshing in an era where gross-out, oh-no-they-didn’t jokes are considered wit.

Each of the four main characters is clearly having a blast showing what she does best, creating distinctive characters with very different styles but always working the chemistry between them with dialog that often feels improvised by actors trying to make each other laugh. It is refreshing to see a movie with four female leads who are professional, super-smart, and totally badass, kicking the butts of all the ghosts and demons and the Bechdel test as well. Their happily ever after is saving Manhattan not getting some guy to put a ring on it.

Newcomer-to the big screen McKinnon tears it up as a Doc Brown type with a wicked smile, a steampunk vibe, and a Faraday cage, swinging into a Glinda the Good Witch song and handing out weapons from a motion-activated proton glove to a Swiss army knife. “She’s doing a marvelous impression of a deflating balloon,” she says as one of her colleagues is being shot through the air. Jones, also in her first feature film lead role, is outstanding as Patty, who knows who she is and what she wants. McCarthy is adorable as always and has a lot of fun with a particular demon. And Hemsworth is flat-out hilarious as the incompetent Kevin. It’s funny, smart, and sweet and in every way as good or better than the original. Fanboys, have at it.

NOTE: Stay through the credits for glimpses of the excised dance scene and some other treats, and following the credits, a brief extra scene with some important information.

Parents should know that this film includes extended fantasy/horror peril and violence. Characters are killed (one off-screen, one suicide by electrocution), and there are some gruesome images and mild crude humor.

Family discussion: What’s your favorite ghost story? Which was the scariest ghost in the movie?

If you like this, try: the original “Ghostbusters,” “Monster House,” and “ParaNorman”

The BFG

Posted on June 30, 2016 at 5:50 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for action/peril, some scary moments and brief rude humor
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Brief scene with drunken characters
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended fantasy-style violence, reference to off-screen violence, including death of children, but no characters injured
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	July 1, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	November 28, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01G4N5Q0A

Steven Spielberg. the director who, with his partners, named their movie studio Dreamworks, understands that movies are like a guided dream. Roald Dahl’s story is about a Big Friendly Giant who collects, selects, edits, and delivers dreams to make people happy and conveys messages that are beyond the capacity of verbal human interaction. Clearly, this story connects with Spielberg profoundly, and it shows.

At 3 am one night in 1983, a girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is the only one awake in the horrible London orphanage where she lives. We can see right away that she is brave and smart, even fierce, as she threatens to call the cops on some drunken revelers making noise in the street. But then she witnesses a disturbance of another kind. Someone very, very large, as tall as her building, is walking quietly — no, stealthily — through the streets.

And then an enormous hand reaches silently and carefully into the window of the room filled with sleeping girls and the very awake Sophie, and grabs her, quilt and all. It is a giant.

He knows how to stay hidden. We see him employ some clever camouflage that keeps the Londoners from seeing him, and then takes off for Giant country, far, far away, but a matter of moments if you’ve got giant legs to leap with. Sophie is terrified. She is sure that the giant wants to eat her. But he does not eat children, he tells her, in his funny, corkscrew, word-twisting language. He has only taken her because she saw him, and he cannot risk her telling anyone about him. He has taken her to keep her from giving away his secret, which means she will have to stay with him forever.

Sophie is determined to run away. But that night, in the crow’s nest of a ship that is one of the many curios crowding his home, she dreams that she escapes, only to be captured and eaten by some even bigger giants. Through this dream, she begins to understand what her giant, soon to be known as the BFG, can’t explain any other way. She cannot be safe if she leaves his house. The other giants, who are as big to him as he is to Sophie, are uncivilized brutes and bullies. They eat “human beans,” including children (a bit less grisly than in the book, but still creepy).

The BFG, whose huge ears listen to everything, even the quietest whisperings of the heart, collects dreams. Sophie goes with him to the place where dreams grow, and she helps him deliver the happiest possible dreams to a young boy and his family. The lonely little girl and the lonely giant get to know one another, and become friends. But the other giants can smell her, and they won’t leave the BFG and Sophie alone. They have to come up with a plan to get rid of the child-eating giants forever. It will involve dreams. And corgis.

This is a slighter story than Dahl’s richly imagined Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach, with much of its humor coming from the BFG’s mangled words and his affection for his favorite beverage, Frobscottle, a fizzy green drink with bubbles that float down, rather than up. The noisy and powerfully butt-lifting physical consequence of this downward gas is what the BFG calls a whizpopple. And there is also an extended scene with the BFG trying to fit into the “bean”-sized world, sitting on a bench on top of a piano and using a rake as a fork.

That almost doesn’t matter, given Spielberg’s gorgeously imagined world and the performances of Mark Rylance as the BFG and Barnhill as Sophie. Rylance, whose last collaboration with Spielberg won him an Oscar for “Bridge of Spies,” is transformed via motion capture into the BFG, and does not lose an atom of his ability to express the BFG’s melancholy, isolation, gentleness, and integrity.

Spielberg has always been superb in casting, especially with children. Barnhill’s performance would be remarkable if she were interacting in a built, rather than virtual world. Given that in much of the movie she was probably looking at a tennis ball hanging in front of a green screen, it is truly astonishing. She so clearly believes in what we see around her and to her character’s friendship with the BFG that we believe in it, too. Next-level special effects help, too, with utterly seamless interaction between the digital and practical effects and gorgeous, wonderfully intricate production design that makes the BFG’s home both cozy and strange. The setting for retrieving the dreams is enchanting, though the visualization of the dreams themselves is not up to the level of the rest of the design. But the friendship between the BFG and Sophie is real magic.

Parents should know that this film includes extended fantasy peril and some violence (no characters hurt), references to children being eaten by giants, and some potty humor.

Family discussion: What dream would you most like to have? Why wasn’t the BFG like the other giants?

If you like this, try: Roald Dahl books and movies including “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Matilda,” and “James and the Giant Peach”

Finding Dory

Posted on June 16, 2016 at 5:42 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for mild thematic elements
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril, separation from parents
Diversity Issues:	Sensitive treatment of disabilites
Date Released to Theaters:	June 24, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	November 14, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01FJ4UGF0

Pixar’s first feature film was “Toy Story” because their then-groundbreaking computer animation technology could only create characters who were stiff and smooth. Plastic toys were ideal characters. Each film since has shown exponential technological progress — the furry creatures of “Monsters Inc,” the balloons in “Up,” Merida’s curly red hair in “Brave.” With “Finding Dory,” Pixar has created its most ambitious character yet, a seven-appendaged, camouflaging octopus named Hank, voiced by Ed O’Neill. Hank moves like jello in water in a plastic bag, each appendage separate, and his skin and shape adapt to take on whatever colors and textures are in the background. Hank is an astonishing marvel of a character, always surprising, completely believable, wonderfully expressive, and endlessly fascinating.

Hank is one of the characters encountered by Dory, the short-term memory-impaired, whale-language-speaking blue tang who helped Marlin (Albert Brooks) find his lost son in “Finding Nemo.” At the end of that film, she tells Marlin that “I look at you, and I… and I’m home.”

Following a flashback to Dory’s early years with her devoted and understanding parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), we see that she is living with Marlin and Nemo when she has a flicker of recollection. Her parents are in California, the other side of the ocean. She knows she needs help to get there. Marlin, still fearful about anything he cannot control, does not want her to go and he really does not want to go with her. But having almost lost his own son he knows how much Dory needs to be with her family, and he knows he could never have found Nemo without her help. And so they hitch a ride across the ocean with Crush the sea turtle (director Andrew Stanton), but then they get separated at a marine life sanctuary, which is where Dory meets Hank.

Dory has been tagged for transport to an aquarium in Cleveland. Hank wants that tag; he does not want to be returned to the ocean. He wants to be safe and he wants to be left alone. He agrees to help Dory find her parents if she will give him the tag. Meanwhile, Marlin and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) try to catch up with Dory, with some help from a pair of alpha exemplars of the territorial imperative, British-accented sea lions (Dominic West and Idris Elba) and a scrawny, wild-eyed loon named Becky. Meanwhile, Dory runs into an old friend, a visually-impaired whale shark named Destiny (Kaitlin Olson). And there’s another sort of friend, played in an adorable cameo by Sigourney Weaver as sort of herself.

With most of the action in the marine sanctuary, this film misses the grandeur and beauty of “Nemo’s” underwater setting, spending much of its time on a series of expertly executed action sequences with comic moments and delightful characters. Once again, the film centers on the essential joy/anxiety conundrum of being a parent or a child. Dory’s parents are endlessly patient and encouraging, though she hears them privately worrying about how they can teach her to stay safe and be independent despite her cognitive impairment. Destiny and her neighbor, a Beluga whale named Bailey (O’Neill’s fellow “Modern Family” star Ty Burrell), both have to overcome their disabilities as well. Bailey has a sort of PTSD following an injury and has to learn to use his echolocation to “see” what is happening to Dory. The treatment of disabilities is exceptionally nuanced and tender-hearted, not the usual pity or saintlike treatment. Everyone has strengths as well as weaknesses. When Marlin realizes that instead of over-analyzing everything he has to learn to think more like Dory, he, Nemo, Dory herself, and those of us who are leaning just a little closer toward the screen, learn to trust her heart and ours as well.

The DVD/Blu-Ray release has a fabulous assortment of extras, including interviews with resident of the real Marine Life, the adorable “Piper” animated short film, “Animation & Acting.” a look at the art of creating a deep and profound connection between an audience and a fish, and my favorite, “The Octopus That Nearly Broke Pixar,” the story of Hank, the challenges and rewards of bringing to life Pixar’s crankiest, most technically challenging character ever. The cast talks about their favorite underwater creatures and there is some background on the story development. There’s even an all-emoji version of the story!

NOTE: Be sure to get to the movie in time to see the utterly winning short film, “Piper,” and be sure to stay all the way through the credits for some extra scenes, including the appearance of some favorite characters from the first film.

Parents should know that this movie has extended peril and some violence, some mild language and brief potty humor. Even more than the first film, it is a frank but sympathetic portrayal of characters with disabilities.

Family discussion: What is a good way to help someone who has memory impairment? Why did Hank change his mind? What is the difference between the way Dory and Marlin think about how to solve problems, and should you be able to do both?

If you like this, try: “Finding Nemo” and your local aquarium or marine life sanctuary and learn more about the sea creatures in the film.