12 Strong

Posted on January 18, 2018 at 11:22 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for war violence and language throughout
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Portrayal of misogynistic regime
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended wartime violence, characters injured and killed, some disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 19, 2018
Date Released to DVD:	April 30, 2018

If it was fiction, you’d dismiss 12 Strong as too far-fetched. But this recently declassified military mission following 9/11, with a tiny Special Forces group, just twelve men, led by an officer who had never been in combat, were sent to Afghanistan to take out a Taliban outpost. They were vastly overmatched in terms of men and weapons. And, most improbable of all, they had to travel by horseback. Men trained to use the very latest of technology were riding the mode transportation used by knights and cowboys. These guys are the best of the best, nothing but courage, patriotism, skill, and determination all the way through. Think of them as The Clean or rather Sandy Dozen.

This film begins with a brief reminder of the terrorist attacks leading up to the airplanes that flew into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. And then, as in all films of men about to go into danger, we see happy families, just enough to make sure we care about these loving husbands and fathers. We know that Captain Nelson (Chris Hemsworth, back to being mortal after “Thor: Ragnarok” but no less heroic) is not going to be able to keep his promise to pick that adorable ladybug-drawing daughter after school, and pretty soon he knows it, too.

There are wives who bravely say that this is what they signed up for. One says, “Some wives cry; I clean,” as she scrubs her oven. Another looks at her husband grimly, insisting he give their son the bad news himself. Nelson has to undo his plans for a desk job to go back to his team. He also has to prove himself to his commanding officer, who selects him over five other teams because he seems to have the best understanding of the challenges, especially the weather that will make their mission impossible if they don’t complete it before winter makes the route impassable.

And then the twelve are on their way with just the briefest and sketchiest debrief from a CIA officer. There are three warlords in the area who all oppose the Taliban but otherwise are in mortal combat with each other. One of the challenges for the American team will be to keep that fragile alliance in place as they need the support of all of them to reach the outpost, liberating several locations along the way.

It is hard to follow at times. There are so many “the whole world depends on this next impossible thing” moments, so much bro talk, so much tech talk, so many reminders of how many days “in country,” so many similar-looking explosions and shoot-outs. But Hemsworth, Shannon, and Pena create real, relatable and yet heroic characters, and seeing them ride into battle on horseback against daunting odds is genuinely moving and inspiring. The most intriguing part is the developing relationship between Nelson and his local counterpart, General Dostum (Navid Negahban). The outcome revealed before the credits is appropriately both reassuring and disturbing.

Parents should know that this film includes extensive wartime peril and violence including guns and explosions with many characters injured and killed, some grisly and disturbing images, references to child abuse, strong language, and some sexual references.

Family discussion: What is the difference between a soldier, a warrior, and a warlord? How did Nelson and Dostum learn to trust one another? What can we tell about the man by the way they said goodbye to their families?

If you like this, try: the book by Doug Stanton and the movies “Act of Valor,” “Lone Survivor” and “Charlie Wilson’s War”

The Clapper

Posted on January 18, 2018 at 4:06 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some sexual references
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Mild
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations, reference to sad death
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 26, 2018

“The Clapper” is an unpretentious little indie from writer/director Dito Montiel, adapting his own novel. It has actors who are familiar from studio movies and television playing quirky characters with a bit of social satire some family dysfunction, and a love story. The screenplay is uneven, but the exceptionally strong cast makes it watchable.

Ed Helms is a gifted actor/comedian who can play something other than a repressed, depressed but very nice guy (see, for example, “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” and “We’re the Millers”), but that seems to be where he is most comfortable. Like the neglected gem “Cedar Rapids,” which he produced, as he did here, Helms plays a man who has shut down many of his emotions following a loss. He has what might be termed a micro-job. He and his best friend, Chris (Tracy Morgan) are “clappers.” They sit in the audience in infomercials and appear to be amazed and wildly enthusiastic about whatever is being pitched. Occasionally, they will get a line like, “There’s more?” for a couple of extra bucks. He has a hat and a fake moustache to try to look different for each show.

But a late-night host (Russell Peters) figures out that it is the same guy in all of the ads, and turns it into a bit, crowdsourcing a “Where’s the clapper?” search for the elusive audience member. It goes viral. In the world of this film, there is something existentially compelling about the sad sack who has nothing better to do than pretend to be in ecstasy over a bunch of cheesy junk and get rich quick schemes.

You might think that with a main character named Eddie Krumble, the movie is going to be harsher and more sharply satiric than it is. But there is a sweetness to it that is undeniably captivating. The talk show host and his producers (Adam Levine and the very funny P.J. Byrne) are out for ratings and not especially sensitive, but they are also not cartoonish villains, and they are not without heart. Eddie is horrified at the attention and knows it means he will lose his job, but he agrees to go on the show so he can find Judy (Amanda Seyfried), the shy, animal-loving gas station attendant he loves from afar. He does not think through the consequences of his appeal, because of course he turns on her the same kind of misery he has been subjected to as a result of the spotlight.

The script is uneven, with some awkward shifts in tone, as when Eddie’s mother appears as a caricature out of step with the rest of the film. But the movie’s biggest failure is in the character of Judy. Seyfried gives one of her best performances, but cannot save the character from the lack of agency or even personality that is the fault of the script. She is pretty much just there to for Eddie to respond to.

NOTE: I have a connection to this film. My daughter, Rachel Apatoff, was the assistant costume designer. So I make no pretense of objectivity in stating that the costumes were all superb and one of the highlights of the movie.

Hostiles

Posted on January 18, 2018 at 2:41 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong violence, and language
Profanity:	Some very strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive and very graphic violence, many characters injured and killed, rapes
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 19, 2018

“Hostiles” is more in conversation with movies about the settlement of the West than it is about or in conversation with the brutal history of the West itself. For decades there were simple stories of brave cowboys and soldiers fighting racist caricatures of Native Americans. White men were heroes and Indians were savages.

Then there were some stories with a little more nuance and some better intentions but pretty much on the side of “civilization” and the more nuanced Native American characters were usually played by actors who were not Native Americans. Westerns went out of vogue in part because of the growing recognition that the stories were too complicated and painful for the “good guys vs. bad guys” cliches of the past. “Hostiles” is a sincere effort from writer/director Scott Cooper at a Western that frankly grapples with the challenge of building a society on the unthinkable carnage and injustice of the past. But there is more formula than drama, with each character specifically designed to represent a place on the spectrum of culpability. With dialogue like “I don’t know what we are going to do with these wretched savages” and “There ain’t enough punishment for his kind” and soldiers with too-symmetrical responses to their own culpability, and unceasing brutality to drive the points home, even the fine acting cannot bring it to life.

Christian Bale plays Captain Joseph Blocker, a man who has witnessed and inflicted horrible brutality in the fight with Indians. When he is ordered to escort an Indian leader and his family to their home, he refuses, until his superior officer threatens to court-martial him and withhold his pension. Blocker despises Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), who has been in prison for years and is dying of cancer. But the President has ordered that he be allowed to return home to die, and he will need an escort to protect him and his family.

Blocker assembles a group of soldiers and they begin the journey. They come across Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose husband and children have just been killed by Indians, who stole their horses and burned down her home. She is severely traumatized, but Blocker’s respectful treatment helps her begin to accept what has happened, and when Yellow Hawk’s daughter offers her some clothes, she changes out of her blood-stained dress.

Each encounter along the way, most horrifically brutal, is designed to add some variation on the theme, and all boil down to: both white settlers and Native Americans committed atrocities and both have to find some way to reconcile with the past. The film begins with a quote from DH Lawrence: ““The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Perhaps more apt is a quote attributed to Golda Meir, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Parents should know that this film has extended peril, violence, and rape, with many characters injured and killed, including children and a baby, and many grisly and disturbing images, suicide, racist epithets and comments, and some strong language.

Family discussion: What helped Mrs. Quaid begin to accept her loss? How were Blocker and Wills different? Why did Blocker get on the train?

If you like this, try: “Unforgiven” and “The Searchers”

Forever My Girl

Posted on January 18, 2018 at 12:39 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic elements including drinking, and for language
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and alcohol abuse, reference to drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad death, scene in hospital, child in peril
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 19, 2018

Well, there is a brief song by Travis Tritt. And actor Alex Roe is personable and engaging even in the preposterously imagined role of Liam Page, a country singer whose every moment is obsessed over by zillions of fans and all of the magazines sold at grocery store checkout counters. But that can’t make up for the syrupy Nicholas Sparks wannabe storyline, clunky dialogue (we are told three times in the first seven minutes that hometown boy Liam is on the brink of stardom) and the excruciatingly chirpy child at its heart.

Liam Page runs out on his wedding, leaving Josie (Jessica Rothe) in their Louisiana hometown and going off to pursue a career in music. Eight years later, he is is a country superstar, performing in arenas and chased by fans as though he is a Beatle. A would-be groupie accidentally breaks his vintage cell phone, and he runs to the store barefoot offering $10,000 to get it repaired. Under the duct tape and the bent antenna there is a voicemail he just cannot lose (or, apparently, download to another phone). This is, of course, documented by fans on their (up to date) cell phones and a major news story.

Liam is a mess, drinking too much, behind on the songs he owes his record label. When he finds out that his hometown best friend has been killed in an accident, he returns, to stand outside the church during the funeral, unable to bring himself to go inside. He gets a grim greeting from the preacher, who is his father, and a punch in the stomach from Josie. But it turns out that Josie has a seven year old daughter, and it does not take a math whiz to figure out that Billy (Abby Ryder Fortson) unfortunately conceived as 90 percent precocious sass with gratingly quippy commentary about the “stats on surviving an accident in a convertible — they are low, staggeringly low.” “What happened to Mom’s rose garden?” Liam asks his father in case we are missing the metaphor. Don’t worry, no one possibly could.

The town (Georgia playing the part of Louisiana) is like the setting for a Hallmark channel Christmas movie starring Hannah Montana, with twinkly lights and bustling businesses on Main Street, and just filled with good neighbors who are endlessly supportive and kind and unanimous in their rejection of the hometown boy who jilted Josie. We know where this is all going, but it is still jarring when Josie goes from a Taylor Swiftian “we are never ever getting back together” to “I want to go on a magical superstar date!”

Listen, Nicholas Sparks is already Nicholas Sparks lite. You can’t really take it any further or, I should say, make it more shallow than that. Pretty people with pretty problems will always be playing on a screen somewhere, but this one is better suited for watching while folding laundry.

Parents should know that this film includes drinking and alcohol abuse, reference to drug use, sad parental death, offscreen fatal accident, mild references to groupies and pregancy, and some language.

Family discussion: Why did Liam leave Josie? Should she forgive him? Why?

If you like this, try: “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone,” “The Lucky One” and “Dear John”

Phantom Thread

Posted on January 11, 2018 at 5:49 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol, cigarettes
Violence/ Scariness:	Poison
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	December 22, 2017
Date Released to DVD:	April 10, 2018

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” is the story of a selfish, headstrong haute couture designer who likes to leave small, secret, embroidered messages concealed within the lining of his meticulously constructed gowns. If Anderson has left a message within the lining of this meticulously constructed, exquisitely performed, but ultimately self-indulgent and morally vacant film, it is better kept secret.

There is so much potential here. The relationship between the designer and the women who make, model, and wear the gowns brims with intriguing concepts about who is in service to whom. Clothing is art, commerce, and self-expression and it is also practical. It has to fit when one stands, sits, and walks, to protect us from the elements while it defines us and tells the world who we are and at the same time who the designer is as well. Not much of that is explored here, any more than the philosophy side of the charismatic leader played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Anderson’s “The Master” was. Like that film, this is about the drive of the central character more than the motives or ideas. And so, in a story about a man driven by the impulse to create, it is curiously empty about what it is to have or to struggle with a creative vision. We see more of the designer’s inner life in his jealous reaction to a customer who is buying dresses elsewhere and his irritated reaction to toast being buttered too loudly.

The designer is Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in what he says is his final role, and reportedly inspired by the European designers of the 1950’s, before designer ready-to-wear began to take over the market. The opening scenes, as a fleet of impeccably smocked seamstresses arrive in the elegant London townhouse that serves as his home, studio, and showroom, is breathtakingly staged and kaleidoscopically entrancing.

We see that Woodcock tires easily of his live-in lady friends, and that it is his omni-capable sister Cyril (a gorgeous performance by the always-brilliant Lesley Manville) who not unkindly informs this latest in what appears to be an endless line rotating in and out that her services are no longer required. Woodcock visits the country where a waitress named Alma (Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps) catches his attention. Soon he is literally taking her measure, fitting a gown to her, and she becomes the next lady to rotate in. She has no intention of rotating out.

Like Elizabeth Taylor with Mercedes McCambridge in “Giant” and Joan Fontaine with Judith Anderson in “Rebecca,” Krieps plays a young, innocent woman who comes into a grand house with a mysterious, imperious, magnetic, and wealthy man only to find that there is already in the house a woman in charge. The dynamic between them would have made a better movie. Instead, we are alerted in a foreshadowing scene as it begins that this is about the relationship between Alma and Woodcock. She says to someone we cannot yet identify, “Reynolds has made my dreams come true. And I have given him what he desires most in return, every piece of me.”

It’s a more literate, better acted, more tastefully presented version of “Fifty Shades of Gray,” all lush settings and “the sub is truly the dom” dynamics. Without some understanding or or even some representation of Woodcock’s aesthetic vision or what creating means to him, he is just a narcissistic diva who adores being adored. The nutso ending really sends it over the cliff.

Day-Lewis is extraordinary, of course. No one commits more fully to a character. It is mesmerizing to see the way he brushes his hair and pulls up his socks, the mercurial shifts from being overwhelmed by having other people near him to a visceral need for attention. Manville’s Cyril is shrewd but not unsympathetic to the people she has to finesse. And Krieps is fine as Alma, who wants to please Woodcock but despite the “every piece of me” line, she wants it the way she wants, not necessarily the way he wants. Like “mother!” though, this is a movie by a self-conscious auteur about how the tortured existence necessary for creation depends on the willingness of devoted, uncomplicated, lissome females that cannot even make a case for the value of the art. If there is a hidden message in the lining, it is just: “Me.”

Parents should know that this film includes some very strong language, sexual references, and very risky behavior with some harm.

Family discussion: Why did Reynolds approve of what Alma was doing? What did Cyril and Alma think about each other? What did Alma mean about “giving him all of myself?”

If you like this, try; “Magnolia” and “There Will Be Blood”

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