Johnny Belinda

Posted on January 4, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Celebrate the birthday of Jane Wyman with her Oscar-winning performance in the classic Johnny Belinda.

Belinda (Jane Wyman) lives with her father and aunt on a farm on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Her father, Black McDonald, is hard and angry. He resents Belinda because her mother died when she was born, and he treats her like an animal because she is deaf and mute. People in the town refer to her as “the dummy.” Dr. Robert Richardson (Lew Ayres) teaches Belinda to communicate through sign language, and for the first time, her sweet and loving personality emerges. She is raped by Locky McCormick, a drunken brute, and becomes pregnant. The baby is named Johnny Belinda.
Everyone assumes that Robert is the father, and he must leave the comÂ¬munity. Belinda’s father finds out Locky was responsible and confronts him. Locky kills Black, making it look like an accident. When Locky’s wife cannot have children, he wants Belinda’s baby, knowing it is the only child he will ever have. The people in the town believe that Belinda cannot take care of the baby and decide to take it away from her.

Locky goes to Belinda’s house and tries to take the baby, but she thinks he means to harm him. Trying to protect herself and the baby, she kills Locky. She is charged with murder. It looks as though she will be convicted, until Locky’s widow comes forward and tells the truth. The community understands that even though Belinda cannot speak, she is loving, devoted, brave, and intelligent. Robert returns to be with Belinda and her child.

Jane Wyman spoke of trying to achieve an “anticipation light” when she was preparing for this role, the look of interest and attention she saw in deaf people who were trying to understand what hearing people were trying to communicate.

This movie does a good job of showing that learning a little bit can make a person hungry to learn more, and that having even one person believe in someone can make that person feel capable of achieving anything. The key themes of this movie, recognizing the humanity in those who are different and the impact that having that humanity recognized has on people and everyone around them, are well worth discussing.

Some kids may want to know more about rape as well, and this provides an opportunity to discuss it as a crime of power and aggression rather than of sex. Young girls often misunderstand and worry about somehow sending a signal that invites rape. It is important to make sure they understand , as shown in this movie, rapists are not accepting an invitation and , on the contrary, it is the idea of overpowering someone who does not want to consent to sex that is exciting to them.

Parents should know that this movie includes a rape scene that is not explicit, but still disturbing, as well as a violent confrontation that proves fatal.

Family discussion: Why is Belinda’s father so hard on her? How much do you think Belinda understands before she learns sign language? How can you tell? What makes her decide to be more aware of her appearance? Why does Aggie change in the way she treats Belinda? What does she mean when she says their family may fight with each other, but they support each other when any one of them needs it? How is this movie similar to The Miracle Worker? How is it different? See if the kids can recognize this “anticipation light” look and even try to create it themselves. They also may want to wear earplugs, as Wyman did, to help adjust her reactions to those of someone who does not respond to auditory cues and signals.

Dinner for Schmucks

Posted on January 4, 2011 at 8:00 am

The truest comedy is the laugh of recognition and enlightenment. You won’t find much of that in this crass and crude remake of the French film, “The Dinner Game.” What you will find instead is that easier and far less satisfying category of humor — the smug laughter at someone’s expense. The problem is that this movie’s entire premise is that making fun of people who have dorky personalities is, as expressed twice by characters we are supposed to identify with, “messed up.” Therefore, it is especially icky that it tries to have it both ways, asking us to laugh at the bozos and then asking us to feel superior to the movie characters who are doing the exactly same thing.

In the French film, the main character is a wealthy man who has a competition with his friends to see who can bring the biggest loser to dinner. And so of course he has to learn some lessons about who the loser really is. But this is America, and our good guy can’t really be a big old meanie, even at the beginning of the film. So, we begin by casting Mr. Nice Guy, Paul Rudd as Tim, an analyst for a private equity firm desperate to get a promotion. His good-guy reluctance takes most of the emotional and narrative energy out of the story. When the big boss (Bruce Greenwood) gives him a chance to move up and he finds out it involves participating in the dinner-with-a-dork competition, he instantly and correctly identifies this as messed up, but then, when he literally bumps into a perfect specimen, he decides it must be fate, and invites him to the dinner.

The dork (I refuse to call him a shmuck, which is a Yiddish term that literally means a part of the male anatomy and metaphorically means a bad — as in untrustworthy — guy, not a foolish or nerdy one) is Barry, played by Steve Carell, having way too much fun with his fake teeth. Barry’s hobby is stuffing dead mice (yes, he is an amateur taxidermist, just like Norman Bates) and creating dioramas for them based on classic works of art and historical events. But once again, the movie can’t make its mind up whose side it is on, and the idea may be appalling but the renditions are actually quite lovely. (In the French film, the guy makes replicas of famous buildings from matchsticks.)

Despite Carell’s best efforts, Barry is not a character. He is just an engine for creating humiliating experiences for Tim. The essential inconsistency of his behavior and capacity obstructs any comedic pleasure in predicting what is going to happen. It’s as though we have to be continually re-introduced to him. On the other hand, one-note supporting characters like Tim’s stalker would-be girlfriend (wasting the talents of the delectable Lucy Punch), Barry’s colleague (Zach Galifianakis), and an oleaginous artist (Jermaine Clement) quickly become tiresome.

Here’s an idea for a movie — how about the story of a talented French writer/director who meets with Hollywood executives who want to re-make his excellent comedies like “The Toy,” “The Dinner Game,” “The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe,” and many more, into over-budgeted and under-funny comedies by clumsy Americans. Now, that is a dinner for schmucks.

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Comedy Remake

The Rest of the ‘Catfish’ Review (Spoiler Alert!)

Posted on January 3, 2011 at 3:56 pm

If you have seen “Catfish” and are ready for the rest of my review, here it is:
In the early days of the World Wide Web, a widely-circulated New Yorker cartoon showed a dog sitting up before a computer, paws on the keyboard. The caption read, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” We all know too well the stories about people who pretend to be something or someone they are not online. Nev knows that the beautiful young woman whose picture he hopefully Photoshops with his own may not be exactly what she says. He jokes that it could be a guy. But he gets caught up despite himself. When he and the film-makers go to Michigan, they are open to adventure. They know that Megan may not be what they expect. But what they find is something they could never have imagined.
Nev believes he is in touch with an entire community of people. It turns out he is in touch with one person, Angela. She is in reality the mother of Abby, the little girl, and Megan, the 19-year-old, and all of the people Nev has “friended” are real people. But they are not on Facebook. Angela has created all of the Facebook pages and personas — and kept two cell phones, one to answer as herself, one to answer as Megan. All of them have names and other identifying characteristics of the real people and places and events in Angela’s life, but in a much more fundamental way, all of them are aspects of Angela herself. The movie’s most powerful moments are when we realize that Angela was not trying to deceive Nev as much as she was trying to present a self that felt more authentic to her than the life she was actually leading. She is like both Cyrano de Bergerac and the handsome-but-blank soldier whose love letters he penned.
At first, Angela tries to keep the fantasy alive. But with surprising gentleness, Nev encourages her to confess. She had once dreamed of being an artist but she was living in a remote part of Michigan, caring for two profoundly disabled teenage step-sons. Like many of us, Angela looked around at her life, very far from what she had hoped for and felt that it wasn’t who she really was. And so, like a novelist or screenwriter, she imagined another world. For a little while, it felt more real to her and to Nev than what they were living. She longed for Nev’s life in the midst of the cultural opportunities of New York. He longed for the bucolic pleasures of the country. They both longed for someone to love and be loved by. And for a moment, they found it, or what felt like it anyway.
Angela often ends her sentences with a “so…..,” not ready to finish the thought, not willing to see where it leads, but not able to end where it is. It is telling that her paintings, which mean so much to her, are based on photographs. Just as she amplifies and embroiders and expands on the images of what really exists in her artwork, she took the details of her life and made them prettier. But as Nev cannot find it in his heart to be angry or feel badly deceived, we, too, respond to her need to spend a few hours a day as the person she felt she was meant to be. It is moving to see his spirit expand to recognize that it was not Angela’s lies he was drawn to, but her truth. And at the end, when for the first time we understand the meaning of the film’s title, and then we see where Nev’s relationship with Angela is today, we can feel our own spirits expanding, and rising, to greater understanding and forgiveness.

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Spoiler Alert

Catfish

Posted on January 3, 2011 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some sexual references
Profanity:	Some sexual references and mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense scenes, reference to sad death
Diversity Issues:	Disabled characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 17, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	January 3, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B003Q6D1YW

Let’s say you’re a guy. And the girl you really like has finally agreed to go out with you. You’re at the restaurant ordering pizza. And she says her favorite pizza is Hawaiian, with pineapple. The idea makes you feel a little queasy; normally you order pepperoni. What do you say? On a first date, isn’t it likely to be, “Sounds great!” And you hope someday you’ll be telling your grandchildren the funny story of your first date with Grammy, and how you either discovered that you loved pineapple on your pizza or that three months later, when you were finally comfortable enough with the girl to tell her how you really felt, she laughed and confessed that she wasn’t really interested in college basketball as she had pretended to be on that same first date. So you may not have pineapple pizza and the NCAA in common, but you have something even more important — you both cared enough about making the relationship work to create some superficial commonality while the more important connection was building.

Now let’s say you’re online. There are two reasons online attachments get intensely personal so quickly. The first is the capacity of the internet to connect you to the one other person in the world who cares as passionately as you do about not just pineapple pizza but pineapple pizza with pesto-encrusted pineapple slices and fontina cheese. That connection is so immediately validating that you can’t help feeling that whatever else you have in common is enormously significant and whatever you don’t doesn’t matter. The second reason is that online communication is like a Rorschach test; we project onto all the empty spaces all the things we subconsciously want to see there, unable to realize how much of what we see comes from our own minds. Which brings me to a third reason — they work because we want them to. They are the perfect fantasy relationship, creating the illusion of intimacy without the risk because we have control over what we send back. Until we don’t, when it stops working and fantasy relationships lead to real-life heartbreak.

And yes, there is a movie review here, not just a meditation on the pleasures and perils of online relationships. But it is hard to talk about the movie directly without giving too much away. So, I’m going to tell you as much as I think is fair and then, after you’ve seen it, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com and if you’d like to see the rest of my review, I’ll send it to you.

Nev (pronounced Neev) is a young, New York-based photographer whose brother, Rel, is a film-maker. Rel and his partner Henry Joost, started filming Nev as he opened a package from someone who had seen one of his photos. The gift, a painting from a little girl inspired by the photograph, led to connections online via Facebook — the little girl’s mother Angela and sister Megan and their relatives and friends, all in Michigan. Nev began talking to them on the phone and texting them, getting caught up in the daily details of their lives, and growing increasingly attached to Megan. And then, when he began to have some doubts, Nev went to Michigan to see them, bringing Rel, Joost, and the camera along.

What happens then is a haunting exploration of identity, intimacy, desire, and the temptations of online relationships. Whatever you expect, the movie will surprise you. And if you want the rest of my review, send me an email.

Movies to Ring in the New Year

Posted on December 30, 2010 at 8:00 am

Rotten Tomatoes has a list of New Year’s Movies. Here is my list, which I first posted in 2007:
When Harry Met Sally… is a sweet, funny love story starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal as two people who took a very long time to realize they were meant for each other. A series of New Year’s Eves punctuate their developing relationship.
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn star in Holiday, about an idealistic young man whose engagement to a wealthy girl is supposed to be announced at a New Year’s Eve party. Hepburn plays the girl’s sister, whose support for the engagement gets complicated when she begins to fall for him herself.
The Apartment, the bittersweet comedy about an ambitious man who lets the executives at his company use his apartment for their assignations won the Oscar for Best Picture. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine star in this Billy Wilder classic.
The pilot episode of Futurama takes place on New Year’s Eve in the year 3000, and yes, Dick Clark (well, his head) makes a cameo appearance.