Deadpool

Posted on February 8, 2016 at 3:58 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong violence and language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity
Profanity:	Constant very strong and crude language and sexual references
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, scenes in bar, medical torture
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense comic book action violence with many characters injured and killed, some disturbing and graphic images
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 12, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	May 9, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01BLS9E2Y

Frankly, exuberantly nasty — in the nicest possible way, Deadpool is not your father’s superhero. That is, unless your father is more like “Who’s your daddy?” all snarky wisecracks, 90’s pop culture references, and joyous mayhem.

Deadpool is the po-mo superhero, so self-aware he knows he’s in a comic book, or now, a movie. A riotously funny opening shot takes us in exquisite slow-motion through an in medias res freeze frame that teases and reveals where we are — not just geographically and narratively but the world we are in. Suspended in air are elements of violence and chaos and also a copy of the Sexiest Man Alive People Magazine with Deadpool portrayer Ryan Reynolds on the cover. Oh, and the song on the soundtrack is not the kind superhero fanfare we might expect. It’s the syrupy “Angel in the Morning.”

And then we see the opening credits. Instead of the actual names of the people on and off screen we get their descriptions, telling us that the filmmakers will both meet and subvert our expectations for a comic book movie. We will see: God’s fool, a moody teen, a wisecracking sidekick, a British villain, a CGI character, and a gratuitous cameo. And the movie is produced by “asshats,” directed by “a stupid tool,” and written by — the real heroes of the film (there are some benefits to having final say on the script).

A big, crazy battle on a bridge is underway but Deadpool pauses to tell us his story, starting with a very crude reference to another comic book hero to explain how he got his own movie, and then taking us back to his pre-superhero days, when he was just Wade after his days in Special Forces, when he was an Equalizer-style hired gun with a very bad attitude.

A bunch of bad attitude types congregate at a bar run by Weasel (T.J. Miller), the closest thing to a friend Wade has, which doesn’t keep him from betting on Wade in the “dead pool,” a running tally of odds on which of the colorful, trigger-happy local denizens will die first. Wade meets Vanessa (Morena Baccarin of “Gotham”), who speaks his language — tough, twisted, and funny. Their one-upsmanship on who had the worst childhood is topped by a hilarious montage of holiday and season-related sexual situations. As Wade tells Vanessa, they are two jigsaw puzzle pieces who don’t fit in anywhere else but fit together just right.

But then Wade gets Stage 4 cancer. It seems hopeless until a man approaches him with the possibility of a cure that will make him better than before. Ajax (Ed Skrein) has a mad-scientist lab/hospital that tortures people until they either die or mutate into superheroes. Wade comes out of the process invulnerable, strong, covered with burn-like scars, and very, very angry.

First time director Tim Miller has a background in animation and special effects, and it pays off in his handling of the action sequences, which would be enough to sustain a lesser comic-book film on their own. But what he really captures here is the charm of the anti-hero who spouts off a kaleidoscope of 90’s pop culture references fit for a crit lit symposium panel as he skewers the bad guys (often literally), mashes on his elderly blind roommate (Leslie Uggams! Thank you!), and is genuinely sweet with Vanessa. This is a great fit for Ryan Reynolds, who, People Magazine notwithstanding, is best when he is not trying to be conventionally heroic (no more mention of Green Lantern, please, ever, and the same goes for romantic comedies like “Just Friends”). He is better when he’s bitter. And certainly much more fun for us.

Parents should know that this movie has extensive comic-book style violence, including torture, with graphic and disturbing images. Characters use very strong and crude language and there are vulgar sexual references and explicit situations, along with references to drug use.

Family discussion: What makes Deadpool an anti-hero? When is he willing to accept help from others?

If you like this, try: the X-Men and Avengers movies and “Guardians of the Galaxy”

The Choice

Posted on February 4, 2016 at 5:55 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some thematic issues
Profanity:	Some mild language, someone gives the finger
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Serious car accident, character critically injured
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 5, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	May 2, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01D1JDCB0

Nicholas Sparks is one of the rare authors who has become a brand of his own, bigger than any of his movies. One reason is their predicability; fans know what to expect and they won’t be disappointed. The other reason is his genuine gift for creating characters audiences immediately like and want the best for.

In “The Choice,” with a script by “Demolition” screenwriter Bryan Sipe, we meet easy-going Travis (Benjamin Walker, last seen as the bad captain in “The Heart of the Sea”) as he meets his new neighbor, a peppery med student named Gabby (Teresa Palmer). In the midst of studying, already furious because of his loud music, she discovers that her dog is pregnant and she goes next door to let him know how angry she is. He is captivated by her because she is different from the other girls he has known, who came to him with little effort and left with little fuss. “You bother me,” he tells her, intrigued and a little surprised.

They both discover that their initial conclusions about one another may have been wrong, but the chemistry between them is increasing in intensity, even though Gabby has a serious boyfriend, a handsome doctor (Tom Welling). Gabby likes challenging Travis and he likes having to work to get her affection.

Their side-by-side homes both look out onto the water of North Carolina’s Inner Banks, and the images of sky, water, and coast are exquisite, somewhere between travel brochure and screen saver. Sparks has to be the MVP for the North Carolina tourism bureau. All of his stories are set in this spectacularly beautiful (if plagued by storms) region. And it is certainly easy to believe that the glow from this enchantingly glorious setting makes this a sublime place to fall in love. Director of Photography Alar Kivilo and the setting itself are as important to the film as the storyline, and more important than the dialogue. Some lines are arch or cheesy: “Look who’s sassypants!” “You’re a dork!” “There you go again, bothering me.” We never find Travis or Gabby as appealing as we are asked to believe they find each other.

Sparks seems to have taken in some complaints about the formulaic nature of his stories, or maybe he just wanted to try something different (but thankfully not as different as the awful “twist” in Safe Haven). We still have a body of water, a letter, and someone who has to be taken down a peg or two. The surprises are not as surprising to us as they are to the characters. But there is something gentle about the story that is undeniably captivating.

Parents should know that this film includes a serious auto accident and questions of when someone should be taken off life support, along with some strong language, mild crude references, social drinking.

Family discussion: What small choices in your life have made the biggest difference? Why does Travis like to be bothered?

If you like this, try: other Nicholas Sparks films like “Nights in Rodanthe” and “The Lucky One”

The Finest Hours

Posted on January 28, 2016 at 5:53 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of peril
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense scenes of peril, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 29, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	May 23, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B019PQ0NZG

“In the Coast Guard they say you gotta go out. They don’t say you gotta come back in.” It was a big nor’easter storm off the coast of Massachusetts. It was February 1952, so communications technology was limited. And not one but two tankers split in half. The most experienced Coast Guard crew went off to rescue the first one. When word came in that a second one was sinking, four young men, all under 25 and two who had never been on a rescue operation, took a small boat out into the storm.

That second ship was the Pendleton. Knowing that they had no more than two to three hours before their half of the tanker would sink into the icy storm-tossed waves, they had to decide who would be in charge. “No officers, no rules, every man for himself,” a crew member says. But they realize they must choose between the man who wanted to take the lifeboats or the engineer they did not know as well who said he had a plan (Casey Affleck, understated and compelling). “They may not like you, but they know to listen to you,” one member of the crew admits.

Based on the true story as told in the book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman, screenwriters Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson efficiently introduce us to the characters and the challenges they are facing. Chris Pine plays Bernie Webber, a departure from his usual cocky, confident roles. Bernie is a little shy, but very sincere, and he believes in the rules, not in a rigid way but in a careful way. When we first see him, he is about to see the girl he has been talking to on the phone for the first time and he does not want to get out of the car because he is afraid she will not like him.

And of course she does like him. Her name is Miriam (British actress Holliday Grainger, last seen as an evil stepsister in “Cinderella”). Director Craig Gillespie (of the wonderful “Lars and the Real Girl”) gives them just enough time to get invested in their relationship — and to get us invested in it — before the storm comes in.

Gillespie really gets going when the storm does, though, and those scenes are powerful and exciting. We are in the small boat with Webber as the window shatters and the compass is wiped out. The boat is tossed around like a cork, at one point completely on its side, with monster waves crashing down. And we are in the Pendleton’s engine room as seams burst and beams come down. And then we are back on land, as Miriam tries to find out what is going on, tries to get the commanding officer to bring the rescue team back, and then learns what it is to love a man who risks his life as a part of his job.

In a film like this, the most important job of the director is to make sure we understand how daunting, even impossible, the task is, and then to make sure we get to see what goes into surmounting the obstacles. Some of that is missing here, as when we are told that there are too many men on the Pendleton for the small boat to carry, and then somehow it carries them. The compass is out, there’s no communication, and yet somehow Webber’s crew finds the Pendleton. It may be that no one knows how it worked, but it undercuts the drama to skip over some of those details.

The quiet heroism of these characters is movingly portrayed, and these days, when heroes are hard to come by, this is a touching story of selflessness, courage, and dedication, and exactly the kind of story that Disney tells best.

Parents should know that this story concerns a real-life catastrophic storm with many lives lost. There are scenes of very intense peril, some mild language, and social drinking.

Family discussion: How did the men on the tanker decide who should be in charge? How did Bernie decide when to follow the rules and when not to? What did Miriam learn from her visit to the widow’s house?

If you like this, try: “The Perfect Storm” and “The Hunt for Red October”

Son of Saul

Posted on January 14, 2016 at 5:56 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent content, and some graphic nudity
Profanity:	Racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and deeply disturbing Holocaust atrocities including shooting, gas chambers, graphic images
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 15, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	April 25, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01BZBOA30

son of saul — Copyright 2015 Sony Pictures Classics

As we move past the time when there are living witnesses to the Holocaust who can tell us their stories, we need more than ever voices like first-time writer/director László Nemes to tell the stories. I know there are those who will shrug sheepishly and say that they just can’t handle another one. But each story is about a singular individual who had a singular experience. And this Oscar-winning drama is distinctively different in subject matter and in the form of storytelling. It deserves careful attention.

The Nazis took more than lives in the concentration camps. They took identities and they took souls. Saul (Géza Röhrig), the title character, is a Hungarian Jew in an unnamed extermination camp near the end of the war. Because Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy cooperated with the Nazis but did not allow them to take the 800,000 Hungarian Jews until he could no longer prevent it in 1944 (see Walking with the Enemy), Saul has only been there a short time. Throughout the movie, the camera is close to his face or at his shoulder as he numbly tries to hold on to his life and to some sense of himself amidst the horrific slaughter and nightmarish chaos all around him. We get only glimpses.

In the very first moments, we see him standing silently as a reassuring German voice tells the new arrivals that there will be jobs and food for them, as soon as they clean off in a shower. They leave everything they brought with them, clothes, jewels, money, photos, in the outer room and then, naked, walk into the gas chamber, where they are killed.

What happens to Saul is worse than death. He is a Sonder-kommando, a prisoner forced to assist in this process, from making the new arrivals feel a little less hopeless to ransacking their belongings and removing the remains, which the Nazis will not dignify with the term “bodies.” They are called “pieces.” And he is forced to be a part of it.

Somehow, a boy, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, survives the gas chamber. He is still breathing. So he is sent to the doctor (another prisoner) to be killed and autopsied, to help make the killing process more efficient.

And that is Saul’s breaking point. He becomes convinced that the boy is his son, though it appears likely he never had a child. This may be manifestation of trauma-induced delusion, or it may be an adaptive mechanism to restore his shattered sense of the world. He knows he cannot save this both in life. But perhaps in death he can do one kindness and provide the boy with a religious burial, away from the discarded “pieces.” Increasingly desperate, contrary to his previous flat affect, Saul seeks a rabbi who can say the mourner’s prayer over the boy. Throughout the film, we see quick glimpses of the ways other prisoners hold on to some tiny element of control. For some, it may be keeping a record. For Saul, who seems to see very little of what is going on around him, it is giving a boy a better death.

This insistence on a sacred burial at any cost is a direct link to Sophocles’ 442 BC play Antigone, the final chapter in the Oedipus trilogy. Three thousand years of human history later, and someone is still finding meaning by refusing to make one final compromise.

Parents should know that this is a Holocaust movie with scenes of Nazi brutality and disturbing themes and images including gas chambers, shooting, suffocation, and dead bodies, some nude.

Family discussion: How does the style of this film help to convey the experience of the concentration camp? Why was this boy so important to Saul? What were the special issues faced by the Sonder-kommandos and the doctor?

If you like this, try: “Conspiracy,” “Schindler’s List,” and “Labyrinth of Lies”

The Revenant

Posted on January 7, 2016 at 5:35 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity
Profanity:	Some strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense, graphic, and disturbing violence including arrows, knives, guns, sexual assault and prolonged animal attack
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	April 18, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01AB0DX2K

In the 1820’s, ladies of fashion liked fur trim. And, true then as now, men like money. So frontiersmen went on trapping expeditions into the wilderness of the young country of the United States of America (played here by British Columbia and Alberta, Canada). The rewards for bringing back fur pelts are significant. The risks, including attack by the Arikara Indians, are dire.

A frontiersman named Hugh Glass was the guide for one of these expeditions. According to lore, he was savagely attacked by a bear and left to die by his companions, but survived and made it back over 250 miles to the nearest fort, intent on revenge. The story has been told — and embroidered and adapted — over the years, reflecting each era’s perspective and concerns. This version is based on the novel by US Trade Michael Punke (who, as Deputy US Trade representative and Ambassador to the World Trade Organization is restricted from promoting the film). As co-written and directed by “Birdman’s” Alejandro González Iñárritu it is a story of resolve. As often with Westerns, it is a way to explore the fundamental contradictions of the American spirit: determination, vision, courage, but sometimes without any regard for the damage they can cause.

Both Iñárritu and his Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki won Oscars for this film. They filmed only in available light, meaning they had to limit themselves to just moments of filming each day. As the director told Deadline, they created “little-by-little jewel moments; that’s the way I designed the production…But those locations are so gorgeous and so powerful, they look like they have never been touched by a human being, and that’s what I needed.” They filmed under conditions so arduous that Will Poulter, who plays real-life frontiersman/trapper Jim Bridger, told me that no acting was necessary to show that they were freezing and exhausted. The bear is CGI (and the bear attack is truly horrifying), but almost everything else was really there and really happening, including diCaprio’s hacking coughs (he had the flu).

The cinematography is the most stunning I have ever seen, perfectly focussed throughout the depth of field, even across endless vistas. Second only to the visuals is the movie’s real theme, not revenge or even will, but law.

When there is no structure, no church, no police, courts, or jail, no lawmakers, no appeals, how do you decide who is in charge and what to do? The film’s most fascinating moments are the ones where we see characters across the continuum on those questions, with one in particular who is still deciding where he fits in, decide what they should do, what they must do. In an early scene, the Indians attack and the frontiersmen’s response is: pelts payload first, and every man for himself second. Wounded men are left behind without a second’s hesitation.

But when Glass (Oscar-winner Leonardo DiCaprio) is critically wounded in the middle of nowhere, Captain Henry, the leader of the expedition (Domhnall Gleeson) is certain what he is owed. Because he has been an essential and honorable part of their expedition (and, unstated but evident, because no one is shooting arrows at them at the moment), he decides two men will be left behind to care for him until he dies and then give him some semblance of a Christian burial. They are John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Bridger (17 years old at the time). Glass has a teenage son (Forrest Goodluck), from his marriage to a Native American woman who was killed, and he stays with his father as well.

But Fitzgerald becomes impatient and commits a terrible act of cruelty while Bridger is away from the campsite, then lies to him about what happened. Glass is left for dead. As Glass, Fitzgerald, Henry, and Bridger deal with the consequences of these actions, we see the beginnings of a society and culture. Some day, the pristine landscapes explored by Glass and Bridger would be covered with roads and cities and we will try to re-create them by filming in other countries to show us what we were. But the story of the struggle for justice, always the great work of this country, is a story we will keep telling forever.

Parents should know that this film includes extremely graphic and disturbing human and animal violence with many explicit and disturbing images of dead bodies and wounds, murder of family members, sexual assault, brief nudity, some strong language, and racism.

Family discussion: How many different views about law and morality do you see among the characters? What should the group have done with a severely injured member?

If you like this, try: “Touching the Void,” a documentary about an extraordinary story of survival in the wilderness