Real Steel

Posted on October 6, 2011 at 6:57 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some violence, intense action, and brief language
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Human and robot violence, character badly beaten
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 7, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	January 24, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004A8ZWW4

The robot has the heart and the human has to learn to feel again in this unabashedly cheesy but irresistible fairy tale about a father, a son, and robots who bash the heck out of each other in a boxing ring.

Charlie (Hugh Jackman) was a boxer until human boxing was abandoned some time in the near future. Now enormous rock ’em sock ’em robots get in a ring and fight to total mechanical destruction. It is like something between trial by combat, a computer game, a cockfight, and a demolition derby. Now Charlie drives around from one skeezy venue to another, promoting whatever bucket of bolts he can get to stand up and throw a punch. When his robot loses a match because Charlie was distracted by a pretty blond, he loses everything. He actually loses more than everything because he bet more than he had.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei5l3r1dV4I

He gets an opportunity to try again when a former girlfriend dies and he is left with their son Max (Dakota Goyo), with whom he has had no relationship. The boy’s wealthy aunt on his mother’s side (Hope Davis) wants to adopt him. Charlie agrees to sign over the boy in exchange for enough money to buy a new robot. It means keeping Max for the summer, so the aunt’s husband can take the child-free vacation trip he has been planning. Charlie planned to dump Max on another old girlfriend, Bailey (Evangeline Lilly of “Lost”), the daughter of the man who trained him as a boxer. But Max insists on going along and when the robot Charlie bought with the money he got is destroyed, Max finds an old sparring robot in the junkyard. He was never intended to be a boxer. He was not designed to throw punches, just to take them. But he has a “shadow” function that enables him to learn moves by imitating a human. And Charlie is the human who knows how to hook, jab, and uppercut.

Two things work surprisingly well in this movie. The first is the robots, magnificently designed and brilliantly executed. Real-life boxing champ Sugar Ray Leonard provided the boxing moves and gave each one of them a distinct style and personality in their approach to fighting. They are outrageously fun to watch. The second is the storyline. Part “The Champ” (made twice, both among the greatest sports weepies of all time) and part (of course) “Rocky,” the script is co-written by Dan Gilroy (the stunning fantasy “The Fall” and the uneven but intriguing and provocative “Freejack”). It may be cheesy but it embraces the cheese with enthusiasm and awareness. Jackman and Goyo bring a lot to their roles as well. We might lose interest in Charlie but Jackman makes us see that he is wounded, not selfish. And Goyo has just the right mix of determination and faith to show us that he has the best of Charlie in him and to show that to Charlie as well.

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Dolphin Tale

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:41 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild thematic elements
Profanity:	Some schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Some alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Injured human and animal characters, offscreen wartime violence, recovering human and animal amputees, discussion of parental loss and abandonment
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 12, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004EPZ01G

It won’t be available for sale until next week but I just can’t wait to feature this terrific film. I have a copy to give away so if you’d like to enter, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Dolphin in the subject line and don’t forget your address! I’ll pick a winner December 16.

Clearwater Florida’s star attraction Winter, the dolphin with the prosthetic tail, plays herself in a heart-warming story that is one of the best family movies of the year.

The human characters are fictional, but Winter really did lose her tail and would not have survived without the development of a mechanical tail to allow her to swim. In this story, a nice connection is made not just between a lonely boy and the affectionate dolphin but between the two species who have to adjust to the loss of limbs and the use of mechanical replacements.

In this version, a boy named Sawyer (Nathan Gamble) has become something of a loner after his father left and his favorite cousin Kyle, a swim champion, joins the military. He is unhappy about being sent to summer school. All he wants to do is tinker with his remote controlled helicopter in his workshop and wait for his cousin to come home.

On the way to school one morning, he sees an injured dolphin on the beach. He gently cuts her free and whistles to her to keep her calm until the Marine rescue team arrives. Later, he sneaks into the aquarium where she is being cared for and meets the marine biologist in charge, Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick, Jr.) and his young daughter, Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff). Winter responds to Sawyer so well that they let him stay and help take care of her.

Hazel and Sawyer spend hours cradling Winter gently until she starts to try to swim. As Winter begins to get better, Sawyer starts to become a part of the community at the aquarium. His mother (Ashley Judd) is at first frustrated and angry that he has been ditching school. But then she realizes that he is learning far more from being with Winter at the aquarium than he could anywhere else. When Kyle comes back injured, both he and Winter will need to find the courage to confront their challenges. A lovably irascible doctor at Kyle’s VA facility (Morgan Freeman) thinks he can adapt the prosthetic technology they use to help the wounded veterans to give Winter a new tail.

And then just as Winter’s survival is on track, the survival of the aquarium and the marine program is at risk.

That’s a lot to handle, but writer/director Charles Martin Smith wisely keeps the focus on Sawyer and Hazel, and it is a treat to see their passion and optimism. Gamble and Zuehlsdorff have a lovely natural chemistry and the grown-ups in the cast provide able support. The story has a fairy tale quality, especially when it comes to saving the aquarium, and then the footage of the real-life disabled kids visiting Winter reminds us that the true story is even more magical.

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Moneyball

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:02 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language (much less than the book)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Chewing tobacco, alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family situations, sad references to injuries and letting players go
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	January 9, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0060ZJ7BC

Brad Pitt is underrated as an actor. But he is the best there is when it comes to calibrating the deployment of his onscreen star power, which he uses as expertly as Meryl Streep does accents. Pitt can dial it down to one when he wants to play character actor and make it work. But here he dials it back up to eleven, giving the role of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane a shot of pure movie magic in this real-life story about the man who turned baseball upside down by using computer formulas to select “undervalued” players.

The Oakland A’s feel like “a farm team for the New York Yankees.” They make players great and then lose them to the teams with budgets more than three times as large. All that money makes the playing field anything but level. “We’re a small market team and you’re a small market GM. I’m asking you to be okay spending the money we have,” the owner tells Beane. “There are rich teams and there are poor teams and then 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us,” is Beane’s frank appraisal.

The A’s cultivate and train players who leave for the teams that can pay the most. A game that is supposed to be about skill and drive seems to be just about money. And then Beane, in the midst of a negotiation with another team that is not going well, notices a nerdy-looking guy in the corner who seems to have some influence. After the meeting, that nerdy guy becomes Beane’s first draft pick.

He is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a shy wonk who comes to work for Beane and together they pursue a different direction. Instead of the century-old system of watching players hit, catch, throw, and run and try to figure out if that means they will be able to perform in the big leagues — a system that failed badly when Beane himself was recruited right out of high school — they will look at computer algorithms about what produces wins. Brand and Beane develop a roster like Warren Buffett puts together a stock portfolio. They look at fundamentals to figure out unrecognized value. Sort of a grown-up Bad News Bears. Or, as Brand puts it, an Island of Misfit Toys.

The script from two of the best screenwriters in history, Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steven Zallain (“Schindler’s List”) is well-structured and filled with smart talk. The scenes of Beane’s own pro career are too long and too distracting. But scenes with Beane visiting his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and her new husband and especially those with Beane and his daughter add warmth and urgency to the story. But it is Pitt who is in every way the heart of the movie, his natural confidence and grace a lovely balance to the formulas with Greek letters and the endless statistics. It is nice to see baseball, that most number-centric game, get upended by numbers. And yet it succeeds because it is that most cherished of traditions, the come-from-behind underdog story.

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The Help

Posted on August 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic material
Profanity:	Some strong language, racist terms of the era
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some graphic scenes of a miscarriage, disturbing material about pre Civil Rights-era racial discrimination, references to murder of Medgar Evers
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	August 10, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 5, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005J6LKVI

The book-club favorite about African-American women working as domestics in the early Civil Rights era South has been lovingly turned into a film that like its source material engages with its sensitive subject matter humbly and sincerely.

Kathryn Stockett grew up in Jackson, Mississippi and was devoted to her family’s “help,” which inspired her first novel, the story of Skeeter, an awkward girl just out of college (Emma Stone) who persuades the women who work as domestics to tell her their stories for a book. This is a minefield of an idea, which may be one reason the book was rejected 60 times. We are rightly sensitive about the presumption of a white woman acting as interpreter or, even worse, as liberator. And Stockett had her African-American characters speaking in dialect. There can be no better proof that we have still not figured out how to handle these issues than this summer’s cover of Vanity Fair with a bikini-clad photo of Stone, describing her on the inside of the magazine as the “star” of “The Help.” She is not the star, just as her character is not the author of the book she produces. She is the ingenue. The stars of the story are the maids played by Viola Davis (Aibileen Clark) and Octavia Spencer (Minny Jackson). Entertainment Weekly did a much better job. All three actresses appear on the cover, with a headline: “How do you turn a beloved, racially charged book into a moving, funny film? Very carefully.”

That is thanks to Stockett’s closest childhood friend, Tate Taylor, who grew up with her in Jackson, who optioned the book before it was published, and who wrote and directed the film, and who insisted it be shot in Mississippi and that it reflect the South he knew.

Skeeter is accepted by the ladies who run things in Jackson, but she does not fit in. She is not married and hopes for something beyond bridge club luncheons and dinner-dances. She applies for a job at the local newspaper and is hired to do the household hints column. Since she knows nothing about cooking, cleaning, or laundry, she asks her friend’s maid, Aibeleen, for help. As they talk, she becomes more aware of the bigotry around her and of her own failure to oppose it. She begins to wonder about the lives of the women who raise the children and feed the families in her community but are not permitted to use the bathrooms that they scrub. A New York publisher (Mary Steenburgen) encourages her to collect their stories for a ground-breaking book. Skeeter asks Aibeleen and Minny to help her, knowing that she may be putting them at risk of losing their jobs, or worse. Privately, Skeeter works on the book. Quietly, and then less quietly, she works to oppose a local initiative to require all homes to build separate “colored” bathrooms.

The woman behind the initiative is Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), ostensibly Skeeter’s best friend and the alpha girl in their community. It is less a matter of prejudice than a struggle for power, but that just makes Skeeter’s refusal to go along more inflammatory. Meanwhile, Hilly has fired Minny, who goes to work for Celia (Jessica Chastain), a pretty blonde from the lower class who does not realize that she is being frozen out by the society ladies of the town. And the more Hilly feels threatened, the more the pushes for her “sanitation” initiative.

Taylor said that Greenwood, Mississippi is closer to what Jackson looked like in the 60’s than Jackson is now and the period detail pulls us into the story. Octavia Spencer, playing a part she helped to inspire, does not let Minny become a caricature and Viola Davis gives another richly layered performance as the quieter Aibeleen. If Howard makes Hilly a little too shrill (and the ending more upbeat than would have been possible in that era) it is understandable given the changing times. No one would believe today that such a short time ago, blatant virulence could be so casual, which is why the conversations this movie will prompt are so important. And Stockett deserves credit for her care in acknowledging moments of generosity and affection on all sides in spite of the restrictions of the era.

This is an involving drama with respect for its characters that has some important points to make about race and gender, about the past that still haunts us, about friendship and passion, and most of all about the transformative power of stories, the ones we tell and the ones we listen to. As Douglas Adams wrote:

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

“The Help” does not pretend to be perfect, but it is an honorable step forward and one of the most heartwarming dramas of the year.

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Midnight in Paris

Posted on May 26, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	May 27, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 20, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005MYEQ4U

Woody Allen’s best film in years is a nostalgic tribute to nostalgia. And this is one you’ll enjoy more by knowing less, so consider this entire review a spoiler alert and stop now if you want to preserve all of its surprises.

It begins with postcard Paris, a series of shots of iconic locations and a rueful jazz score.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a successful Hollywood writer who longs for something richer and more challenging. He has come to Paris with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams, doing her best in a thin role), and her parents, caricature Californians who prefer Napa Valley wine and American movies, even when they are in France. A character calls him Miniver Cheevy because he romanticizes the Paris of the past, when Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote and drank and things seemed — at least in retrospect — simpler and filled with promise. It all seems even more appealing as he struggles to do the writing he says he wants to do and fumes as Inez seems enthralled by Paul, a fatuous know-it-all (Michael Sheen).

Okay, now spoiler alert again — stop reading if you don’t want to know what happens. One night, when Inez has gone dancing with Paul and his girlfriend, Gil goes for a walk. Just as the clock chimes twelve, a car pulls up and he is beckoned inside. At first, he thinks he has happened upon a costume party, but then he realizes that he is not talking to a couple dressed as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill); he is speaking to the legendary writers, and seeing them when they were young and happy and excited by the world around them. He meets his heroes. They accept him as one of them. He begins to live the life he believes he was meant to live — but only at midnight.

And there’s a girl. Marion Cotillard plays a free-spirited but warm-hearted girl who has had relationships with some of the now-legendary names of the era. And Gil is engaged. But she and Gil are drawn to each other and suddenly the only thing he can remember that he has in common with Inez is a fondness for Naan bread.

Allen makes no attempt to re-create the historical Paris of the lost generation. Part of the charm of the story is the way that it is very much Gil’s idealized dream of the era, with all of the now-famous names friendly and obliging. Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) is perfectly happy to read his novel (about a man who owns a nostalgia shop) and give him both encouragement and constructive suggestions. Just from reading what Gil wrote, a famous author (portrayed with great wit and gusto by Corey Stoll) has insights about Inez that Gil could not see. In a Jungian sense, each of the real-life characters is here simply as a manifestation of some aspect of Gil, a way for him to think through things he has been too successful to consider. When the story takes an “Inception”-like inverted twist, Gil begins to understand, like Dorothy Gale of Kansas, that the power is inside him when it is time to go home.

The retro scenes are brimming with charm, an all-star parade of early 20th century luminaries, charmingly written and beautifully portrayed. They may be Gil’s projections, but they are enchanting. The opening postcard shots shimmer into the dream of Paris and we embrace it as happily as Gil does, swept up in the bittersweet nostalgia you can only feel for something you never really experienced. Those midnight excursions for Gil are what movies like this one are for us, an emotional vacation that, if we are lucky, provides respite, clarity, and renewal. Allen continues his exploration of the great capitals of Europe next year with Rome. I’m nostalgic for it already.

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