Remember Me

Posted on June 23, 2010 at 10:31 pm

Robert Pattinson has gone from brooding, adoring Bella, saving Bella, and trying not to kill anyone in the Twilight movies to “Remember Me,” a J.D. Salinger-esque tale that has him brooding, adoring Ally (played by the vampire-esquely named Emilie de Ravin), saving various people, and trying not to kill anyone.

He plays Tyler, the son of a Wall Street tycoon (Pierce Brosnan) and big brother to the precocious Caroline (played by “Nurse Jackie’s” Ruby Jerins, and by far the film’s best and most interesting character). He is 21 and not quite in school, auditing courses. He meets Ally, but he does not tell her that the meeting was orchestrated by his roommate Aiden (Tate Ellington) as a part of an a vague and not very focused revenge plot. Her father, an angry cop (Chris Cooper) beat Tyler up and arrested them both when they got into a fight trying to defend some passers-by against some thugs.

Tyler and Ally begin to get acquainted and it turns out they have something in common. Ten years earlier, in 1991, she was with her mother in a subway station when she was murdered by two guys stealing her purse. And a few years earlier, on his 22nd birthday, Tyler’s older brother committed suicide. Tyler was the one who found him. Loss is isolating. It destroys our trust in the essential rightness of things. Tyler and Ally begin to find a way to feel connection, and hope.

Tyler is furious at his father for neglecting Caroline. Ally is furious at hers for striking her. This, too, connects them. And then, Ally finds out what led Tyler to approach her and feels betrayed. And then, some really bad stuff happens that will, depending on your age and inclination, will either seem deep and meaningful and transcendent or will seem manipulative and cheesy. I’m in that latter category.

There’s a lot to like in this film. The scenes with Tyler and Ally are touching and the Tyler’s relationship with Caroline feels warm and genuine. The first-filmed script by Will Fetters shows promise. Its rookie flaws are forgivable and its strengths show great promise.

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Drama Romance

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Posted on June 22, 2010 at 8:45 am

A teenager feels like he doesn’t fit in anywhere. It all comes together when he finds out that he has inherited some special powers from the father he last saw when he was seven months old. And he soon finds himself in a special school with other kids like him, where they can learn to make the most of their powers.Sound familiar? It does have something in common with Harry Potter, including a successful series of books now made into a movie. They even share a director; Chris Columbus did the first two Harry Potter films, and so he is an old hand at translating a beloved series of novels about kids with special powers on screen. Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) loves his mom (Catherine Keener) but his step-father is obnoxious and abusive. He has a loyal friend named Grover, but he is dyslexic and has ADHD so school is difficult. He is most happy and comfortable in the pool. On a field trip, the gray-haired substitute teacher turns out to be a fury. As in a shrieking flying monster. And the teacher in the wheelchair (Pierce Brosnan)? He turns out to be a centaur, half man, half horse. Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who walks with crutches, is a satyr (goat-legs) assigned to protect him. And Percy is the son of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. He is to water like Popeye is to spinach, and then some. Water gives him strength and healing powers and he can also control it. Someone has stolen the lightning bolt from Zeus (Sean Bean). And he suspects his two brothers, the gods of the sea and the underworld. He thinks Percy is hiding the bolt — and so do a number of other creatures. Percy has to find the bolt and return it to Zeus before the summer solstice. He gets a bit of training at demigod boot camp and is soon off on his quest with a shield from the son of Hermes, and a pen from the centaur, accompanied by Grover and Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), the swashbuckling daughter of Athena. Writer Rick Riordan is not in J.K. Rowling’s league when it comes to inventiveness, intricacy, imagination, or heart. But he has a good sense of the way a young teenager sees the world. I like the way that the things that bother Percy most in his old life turn out to be strengths in his new life. He is dyslexic with English because his brain is hard-wired to read classic Greek. He is ADHD because he has the reflexes of a warrior. And his mother stuck with the odious step-father because, well, I’ll just say because it was the best way to keep Percy hidden. I like the overlay of Greek mythology. But the attempts to bring a modern sensibility to the adventures sometimes feel forced and awkward. Lerman is a bit bland, leaving Grover to capture much of our attention and interest.But the main thing this movie seems to be missing is classically trained British actors. Brosnan is nicely majestic in a brief role and Steve Coogan brightens things up considerably as Hades. But we realize how much the Harry Potter movies benefited from top performers like Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon. Uma Thurman re-creates her all-time weakest performance by making Medusa into a snake-headed version of Poison Ivy and the usually-terrific Rosario Dawson seems lost as Persephone. We need a bit more “Clash of the Titans” and a bit less of “Circus of the Stars.” (more…)

She’s Out of My League

Posted on June 22, 2010 at 8:35 am

“She’s Out of My League” recognizes that raunchiness is easy, but sweetness is the challenge. Making both parts of the equation work is something of a struggle but this movie comes closer than many.
The title says it all, and the mismatch of tone parallels the mismatch in the story. It’s a gender-reversed Cinderella story about a shlub who loves a goddess. And he has no idea what to do when it appears that she might just like him back. He cannot believe that he deserves her, and so of course he then does everything he can think of to prove he’s right by making the near-fatal mistake of taking the advice of his friends. The definitive response to this, of course, is still the scene in “Say Anything,” the quintessential she’s out of my league movie, where John Cusack responds to his friends’ awful advice: “If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women anywhere?” Apparently, Kirk (Jay Baruchel of “Tropic Thunder” and “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”) never saw that movie because when one of his friends tells him that the way to a woman’s heart is to engage in an extreme makeover of a personal area, he goes for it all the way in an extended scene that somehow — see above — manages to become kind of sweet.

A lot of the credit goes to Baruchel, in his first romantic lead, as Kirk, the TSA security guy who works at the airport so he can dream of becoming a pilot, and Alice Eve as Molly, the impossibly beautiful dream girl who also happens to be smart, successful, kind-hearted, and able to somehow see more in Kirk than anyone else ever has. They never lose sight of the fact that this has to work as a romance as well as an over-the-top outrageous comedy, and that helps carry the audience through the slow patches. Unfortunately, it doesn’t to much to get us through the excruciating patches in which Kirk is subjected to a series of humiliating events, many featuring his embarrassingly obnoxious family and ex-girlfriend as well as various drawn-out mess-ups and recoveries and confrontations, ending, finally, in the inevitable race through the airport for a movie that never makes it off the ground.

(more…)

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Comedy Romance

Fantasia

Posted on June 21, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	All Ages
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol at festival, god of wine
Violence/ Scariness:	Characters in peril, scary monster, dinosaurs die out
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	1940
Date Released to DVD:	2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0040QTNSK

Disney’s glorious “Fantasia” and its sequel, “Fantasia 2000” are out for a limited time in a spectacular 4-DVD blu-ray package.

Considered a failure on its original release, “Fantasia’s” eight-part combination of images and music is now indisputably a classic. Musicologist Deems Taylor explains that there are three kinds of music: music that paints a picture, music that tells a story, and “absolute music,” or music for music’s sake, and then shows us all three. Highlights include Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, whose plan to save himself from a little work by enchanting a broom to carry the buckets of water gets out of control, the Nutcracker Suite’s forest moving from fall into winter (with the adorable mushroom doing the Chinese Dance), Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with characters from Greek mythology celebrating at a festival and seeking shelter from a storm, and the Dance of the Hours, with ostrich and hippo ballerinas dancing with gallant (if overburdened) crocodiles.

It concludes with the scary Night on Bald Mountain followed by the dawn’s Ave Maria. The movie is perfect for blu-ray — it’s as though we can finally see the colors the way the artists could only dream of. The flying Pegasus family soars through the sky, the thistles kick like Cossacks to the Russian dance, the dinosaurs lumber to the Rite of Spring. This is one of the greatest movies in cinematic history, groundbreaking and timeless.

And there’s more. Disney planned another musical segment designed by famous surrealist artist Salvador Dali, who came out to the Disney studio for eight months to work on it. But it was canceled due to financial setbacks at the company at the time, and Disney always regretted that it was not completed. It has become a legend, much speculated about and sought after. This splendid set includes Destino, with Roy Disney at long last completing Dali’s original vision, 58 years after he began it.

Roy Disney also supervised “Fantasia 2000,” the sequel, which includes a charming Al Hirschfeld-inspired Manhattan saga set to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and a wildly funny flamingo/yo-yo mix-up (more like a pile-up) to the music of Saint-Seans.

Fantasia/Fantasia 2000 is a genuine family treasure, guaranteed to inspire and entertain all ages. Grab it while you can.

Great Movie Dads for Father’s Day

Posted on June 19, 2010 at 3:44 pm

Happy Father’s Day!

1. Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) in “To Kill a Mockingbird” The last line of the movie says it all: “He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

2. Jason “Furious” Styles (Laurence Fishburne) in “Boyz N the Hood” This well-named father is a fierce defender of his son, protecting him but also teaching him to believe in himself.

3. Marlin (Albert Brooks) in “Finding Nemo” A loving if over-protective little clownfish must search the entire ocean to find his lost son in this beloved Pixar classic.

4. Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) in “Father of the Bride” Watch Tracy’s face when his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) explains why she has (thankfully temporarily) called off her engagement in this story of a loving father who gets caught up in pre-Bridezilla wedding drama (and trauma). See also the remake with Steve Martin.

5. Gil Buckman (Steve Martin) in “Parenthood” No film better shows the challenges, terrors, wrenching choices, and satisfactions of fatherhood than this extended family story inspired by the lives of the three men who made it and the 14 children in their lives.

6. Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) in “Kramer vs. Kramer” A father who is not even sure what class his child is in discovers what it means to be a father after his wife leaves them. And then he discovers how much it matters to him when she returns and he has to fight for custody.

7. Tom Winters (Cary Grant) in “Houseboat” In one of his few roles as a father, Grant plays a man who only discovers how much he needs his children after the death of their mother — and Sophia Loren arrives as their new nanny.

8. Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) in “Sleepless in Seattle” — Though devastated by the loss of his wife, Sam is committed to being a positive and caring father.

9. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) in “The Pursuit of Happyness” — Smith and his real-life son shine in this story about a devoted single father who went from homelessness to a career as a stock-broker.

10. Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura) in “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” — A Japanese father shows his love for his estranged son by completing the son’s final project, a filmed version of a Chinese opera, even though he knows nothing about filming, China, or opera.