Anna Kendrick (“Camp,” “Up in the Air”) plays Norman’s teenage sister in “ParaNorman.” She ends up going along with him on a wild zombie-hunting adventure. At Comic-Con, she talked about making the film, and when asked about her favorite prop, she pulled out her cell phone to show us a picture of it. Norman’s friend Neil is mourning the loss of his dog, and in his locker there is a memorial note with a paw print. It says, “Bub is great, understands me, barks at bullies.” She says it still makes her tear up to look at it.
She visited the set after the movie was completed and was amazed by “All the details you don’t really see in the movie,” how meticulous and careful every part of every scene was designed to be. She loved playing the exasperated teenager. “I can tap into my inner obnoxious person and it is so fun to play somebody so annoying and do that voice. I liked all the vocalization and exasperated sighs.” Like Kodi, she enjoyed the chance to be very exaggeratedly physical in the voice recording sessions without worrying about how she looked. “It was really freeing to not be worried about how idiotic you look.” She and Casey Affleck were together on what was the first voice acting experience for both of them. She appreciated the chance to learn with him, “and by the end of the day we were in a competition to see who could make a greater fool of themselves.” But she joked that working with Kodi “made me feel worse about being Courtney” because it was harder to be mean to him.
No matter how carefully you plan and how diligently you read books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, pregnancy is guaranteed to be different from whatever you think it is going to be. I wish I could say the same for this movie.
These all-star ensemble cast mash-ups are beginning to feel as thin as the old television show, “Love American Style.” It doesn’t help that there isn’t one pregnancy cliche that is overlooked, no matter how many dozens of movies, sit-coms, and cute greeting cards it has already been done and re-done and re-re-done in before.
There is a celebrity fitness coach and reality dance competition show contestant (Cameron Diaz) who becomes unexpectedly pregnant just a few months into a romance with her dance partner (“Glee’s” Matthew Morrison). There is a loving but financially strapped couple hoping to qualify for an Ethiopian adoption (Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro). The husband is nervous about being a father so after his wife offers him a very special sex act to motivate him he starts to spend Saturdays with “the Dudes,” a bunch of stroller-pushing, Snugli-wearing, diaper-bag toting dads whose idea of supporting each other is a Fight Club-style commitment to this decade’s most vapid catchphrase: “no judging.”
Elizabeth Banks plays a woman with ideas about pregnancy so idealized that she has a store devoted to breast-feeding (“The Breast Choice”) and has even written a children’s book about it that is creepier than the infamous Time Magazine cover. She and her dentist husband (Ben Falcone, “Bridesmaids'” Air Marshall Jon) have been trying to get pregnant for years. He is also about to become a big brother. His father is a loudmouth NASCAR champ (Dennis Quaid) married to a decades-younger bride (bright spot Brooklyn Decker) who is pregnant with twins. And there is a pair of rival food truck chefs (Anna Kendrick of “Up in the Air” and Chase Crawford of “Gossip Girl”), whose impulsive encounter apparently did not permit consideration of the importance of birth control.
The movie reads like an extended Caroline Hax “Tell Me About It” column of petty complaints so stunningly self-involved, irresponsible, and selfish that what the movie needs most is a representative of Child Protective Services to take all the babies to better homes. This is one long, loud slog through morning sickness (barfing on live television!), twins, an iPhone app that maps fertility cycles, stretch marks, debates over circumcision, baby names, and combatting the feeling that everyone is doing it better. Serious problems like pregnancy loss and financial concerns are handled as though there is a laugh track and trivial issues like a baby shower are handled as though they actually matter. The big moment comes when Banks’ character confesses to a bunch of future mothers that — insight alert! — “making a human being is really hard.” In yet another tiresome cliche, the clip of her “honest” meltdown goes viral. And then we get to see everyone in labor, making “Exorcist” faces (except for the trophy wife, who sails through labor as she has through the entire pregnancy). “But I typed out my birth plan!” one of them whines cluelessly when it turns out that delivery is not going as she wanted it to. It is another measure of the movie’s disregard of its audience that we go back to the Dudes so they can reverse everything they said the first time. It is not that they have learned anything. The movie is just lazy enough to hope some warm “parenting is wonderful” comments will erase the synthetic waste of celluloid (pixels?) that has gone before. No such luck.
Parents should know that this movie has comic and serious references to reproductive issues including infertility and pregnancy loss and some strong language
Family discussion: Which of these couples will make the best parents? How do you know? Ask your family for some of their pregnancy-related stories.
If you like this, try: “He’s Just Not That Into You” and “Knocked Up”
Rated R for language throughout, sexual content and some drug use
Profanity:
Constant very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking, drug use
Violence/ Scariness:
Character has cancer and the movie deals frankly with the diagnosis and treatment
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
September 30, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:
B004QL7KKC
When Seth Rogen’s friend Will Reiser got a rare form of cancer at age 24, they bolstered their courage by imagining a movie that would be true to their experience. The movies they knew about people with cancer had characters who were (1) older, (2) transformed into saintliness and transcendence and reconciliation, and (3) by the end of the movie — dead. Reiser barely knew how to live as an independent adult. While his contemporaries were worried about dating and figuring out their careers, he was forced to deal with dire, literally life and death decisions.
Resier recovered and wrote this screenplay and Rogen co-produced and played the character based on himself. The result is a movie that captures the surreal nature of being seriously ill, the way you feel as though you appear to be on this planet but in reality you are living somewhere else, Planet Cancer, and the “normal” life around you is at the same time disconcerting and reassuring. But this is also a movie filled with hope, and humor, and inspiration. No one is transformed into saintliness or transcendence but there are lessons learned, losses borne, and hurdles overcome.
The superb Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a 27-year-old who works for NPR. We first see him on an early morning run, stopping at a red light even though there are no cars around for miles. This is a guy who follows the rules. And then what he thinks is a backache turns out to be a rare form of cancer, a tumor on his spine, which his doctor describes as “quite fascinating.” He is still in the early stages of a relationship with Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), an artist. “I have a drawer? We’re getting so domestic.”
Rachael means well and even likes the idea of herself as a loyal girlfriend, but she also feels trapped by Adam’s illness. Adam’s mother (Anjelica Houston) wants to help, but that threatens Adam’s still-fragile sense of independence. Adam meets with a young grief counselor (Anna Kendrick as Katherine) who is just as new to counseling as he is to grieving.
Kyle (Rogen) is immature and squeamish, but it turns out that he is braver than he or Adam knew. What he lacks in judgment and tact he makes up for in heart and candor. When he hears that Adam’s odds are 50/50, he looks on the bright side with a metaphor drawn from his own priorities: “If you were a casino game, you’d have the best odds!” And then there’s priority number one — Kyle assures Adam that cancer is a real chick magnet.
I don’t know whether that which does not defeat you makes you stronger. But that which does not defeat you does show you how strong you are, and how strong your relationships are, too. Reiser’s insightful script and Gordon-Levitt’s sensitive performance make this one of the year’s most satisfying films.
To the list of the biggest lies of all time (“The check is in the mail,” “I’ll still respect you in the morning,” etc.) this must now be added: “All the answers are in your packet.”
No, they aren’t. Many answers are in the packet you get handed after someone tells you that your position at work no longer exists, but they do not tell you anything about the questions you care about most: Will I get another job? How will I pay my bills? Did anything I did here mean anything at all?
Most people in that position will not be asking questions about the person who is handing them the packet, but “Up in the Air,” based on the novel by Walter Kirn, he is our hero. Close enough, anyway, as he is played by George Clooney, whose sleek movie star glow and perfect tailoring give his character a surface perfection that contrasts with his struggle to hold onto his freedom and make sure nothing holds onto him. For him, being a professional brought in by corporate management to fire people in massive layoffs is the perfect job, each relationship with an almost-immediate ending.
Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who is most at home away from where he lives. Even the most generic of hotel rooms has more personality than his apartment, too personality-less even to be considered spare. The 290 days he spent on the road last year were the ones where he felt most connected, most authentic, most at home. In his apartment, he feels rootless. What he loves about travel is the thousands of micro-encounters, all encapsulated into tiny predictable pieces. His affinity points at hotels and airlines gets him an extra “Nice to see you again, Mr. Bingham!” with a smile as fake as Bingham’s assurances that the answers are in the packet. But it is the very fake-ness of it that makes Bingham feel at home because he understands it and it understands no more about him than he wants it to.
At one point in the movie, his sister, who is about to be married, sends him a cardboard cut-out photograph of herself with her prospective husband so that Bingham can take pictures of it in different locations for a scrapbook they are creating instead of the honeymoon trip they can’t afford. Reitman creates a nice, understated contrast between the artificiality of the “travels” by the cardboard duo and Bingham and his fellow road warriors.
Bingham is not the first person and certainly not the first movie character to think that he can get through life with maximum efficiency, with as little weighing him down or holding him back as possible. He has systems for maximizing momentum and minimizing inertia from a small group of impeccable and virtually identical suits to the formula for getting the most out of frequent flier miles. When he finally meets a woman (Vera Farmiga) who speaks his language — their flirty banter about who has more prestige points and which hotels have the best amenities is more delicious than a warm chocolate chip cookie at your check-in — part of what makes it fascinating is that neither Bingham nor the audience can tell at first whether this is just one more frictionless encounter or a connection that will make him re-think his attachment to being unattached. Farmiga matches two-time Sexiest Man Alive Clooney’s rhythms perfectly, and watching these two glossy creatures circle and parry is one of the great cinematic pleasures of the year.
In one respect, Bingham harks back to the iconic American cowboy, alone in the wilderness. In another he is the essence of 2009, in the one sector of the American economy that is benefiting from the catastrophic avalanche of failure that will forever identify the end of this milleneum’s first decade. Co-screenwriter/director Jason Reitman (“Thank You for Smoking,” “Juno”) shrewdly puts Bingham in the middle between his tantalizingly silky no-strings counterpart and a spooky, Scrooge-like vision of another aspect of himself. A young, ambitious newcomer (a superb Anna Kendrick) to his office has an idea about how to save money by being even more ruthlessly efficient. Why do all that flying when you can fire people by video chat?
Reitman continues to populate his films with characters we want to know better and actors who make even small parts into gems of poignancy and meaning. Melanie Lynskey, Danny McBride, Jason Bateman, and J.K. Simmons are irresistible, but there is also a mosaic of reactions from the newly terminated that is even more unsettling when you find out that these are real-life survivors of lay-offs, recruited by Reitman for what they thought was a documentary about the impact of the economic crisis. And be sure to stay through the credits for another telling real-life moment.
“Up in the Air” is very much of its time but it is also one of the best films of the year for its sympathetic and layered understanding of the issues that affect us in good and bad economic times and its recognition that it is here, in these stories, where the questions left unanswered in the packet are explored.
Anna Kendrick (“Camp,” “Up in the Air”) plays Norman’s teenage sister in “ParaNorman.” She ends up going along with him on a wild zombie-hunting adventure. At Comic-Con, she talked about making the film, and when asked about her favorite prop, she pulled out her cell phone to show us a picture of it. Norman’s friend Neil is mourning the loss of his dog, and in his locker there is a memorial note with a paw print. It says, “Bub is great, understands me, barks at bullies.” She says it still makes her tear up to look at it.
, pregnancy is guaranteed to be different from whatever you think it is going to be. I wish I could say the same for this movie.