CODA

CODA

Posted on August 12, 2021 at 5:38 pm

B +
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for drug use, strong sexual content, and language
Profanity: Strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking and marijuana
Violence/ Scariness: Bar fight, tense confrontations
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: August 13, 2021

Copyright 2021 AppleTV+
One of the smartest choices a filmmaker can make is to take a challenging universal human experience and heighten with with specific details and characters we care about. That is the case with “CODA,” the first film ever to win both the Audience Award and the Grand Prize at Sundance. It got the Directing Award as well. The challenging universal human experience at its center is leaving home, and all of the terror and identity-searching and family conflict it entails.

The heightening details are in the film’s title. CODA stands for (hearing) Children of Deaf Parents. If Deaf parents have a hearing child, there are immediate difficulties. First is making sure the child is around enough spoken language to learn to communicate in the hearing world. Second, as we see throughout this movie, is that in many ways even young children of Deaf parents have to act in an adult, even a parental role as they interpret for them. In an early amusing scene, Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) has to communicate the symptoms and treatment of her father’s jock itch in a doctor visit. The doctor tells her to explain to her parents that they cannot have sex for two weeks and she cannot resist telling them instead that they can never have sex again — before confessing that it’s just two weeks, which her father insists is impossible.

Ruby is a senior in high school and she also works in the family business, catching fish starting at 3:00 am. By the time she gets to school, she is exhausted.

Ruby wants to sing. She shyly signs up for the school chorus, but runs out when it is her turn to sing “Happy Birthday” so the teacher, Bernardo Villalobos (a terrific Eugenio Derbez) can hear her range. Later, she tries again and he can see she is untrained but gifted. He assigns her a duet (with the boy she likes, “Sing Street’s” Ferdia Walsh-Peelo as Miles). And he offers to help prepare her for an audition to see if she can get into the Berklee College of Music. This comes just as the pressure on Ruby increases because her father is told he cannot take his boat out without a hearing person on board for safety reasons.

Writer/director Sian Heder (“Orange is the New Black”) has created a universal story in a very specific world with endearing characters and a vivid, lived-in world. Hearing people usually assume that the world of the Deaf is quiet, but it is the opposite; because they cannot hear, they do not try to muffle or avoid loud noises. This leads to more than one scene of complications, from frustrating to funny to both. The world of the fishing community also adds a lot of depth and color. Deaf actors Troy Kotsur as Ruby’s father, Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin as her mother, and Daniel Durant as her brother Leo are all excellent, with the one-on-one scenes with Ruby and her parents two of the film’s highlights. Jones is marvelous in a star-making role, lighting up the screen, making her ASL an integral part of her performance, and with a voice we know Berklee would be lucky to have on campus. The conclusion may not come as a surprise (especially as it is featured in the trailer for some unimaginable reason), but by that point we are rooting for newcomers Heder and Jones as much as we are for the endearing character they created.

Parents should know that this movie has strong and crude language, explicit and crude references to sex and body parts and explicit sexual situations, a bar fight, alcohol with scenes in a bar, and marijuana. There are tense family confrontations.

Family discussion: Did Ruby make the right decision? Why did her parents change their minds?

If you like this, try: “Children of a Lesser God” with Matlin’s Oscar-winning performance and “The Sound of Metal,” about a musician who loses his hearing, as well as “Blinded by the Light,” about a young would-be writer who loves Bruce Springsteen

Related Tags:

 

movie review Movies -- format Movies -- Reviews Stories about Teens
How to Be a Latin Lover

How to Be a Latin Lover

Posted on April 27, 2017 at 10:40 pm

Copyright 2017 Sony

I like everyone connected with this movie so much that I am especially sorry to give it a bad review. Mexican star Eugenio Derbez is a wonderfully engaging performer with enormous warmth and charm, as we saw in “Miracles From Heaven,” where he played the doctor. The supporting cast includes Salma Hayek, Kristen Bell, Rob Riggle, Raquel Welch, Michael Cera, Michaela Watkins, Rob Lowe, and even Weird Al Yankovic. The director is the very funny Ken Marino (“Burning Love”). And it introduces a terrific young actor, Raphael Alejandro, who is the highlight of every scene he is in. But all of that talent cannot overcome a painfully unfunny script by Chris Spain and Jon Zack.

In the opening scene, a young brother and sister see their father drive into their house, creating an explosion that kills him and destroys their home. There’s a way to start a comedy!

This is an important lesson in the uncertainty of life, which the boy interprets as: Find a wealthy lover and be pampered for as long as you live.

As a healthy and handsome young man (played by Derbez’s very attractive young son), Maximo woos a wealthy, middle-aged lady (Renee Taylor). Twenty-five years later, Maximo (now played by Derbez) is living a blissful Richie Rich life, except that he has to sleep with a very old lady. A battalion of servants attends to his every wish, even turning his poolside lounger to follow the sun or turning the pages of his e-reader. He never even has to take a step: he glides through the mansion on a hoverboard. The most exercise he gets every day is reaching over to his wife every morning so he can put a mirror under her nose to see if she is still breathing. And maybe pointing to the new sportscar he says he is buying for her but is really buying for himself.

Unfortunately, the car salesman sells himself along with the car, and Maximo is out on the street with nothing but a faint memory of an ironclad pre-nup. He needs a new old lady to marry, and until then he needs a place to stay. Which is how he ends up knocking on the door of his sister Sara (Hayek), a widow with a young son, Hugo (Alejandro). Many slapstick encounters ensue, including a guy in a wheelchair getting hit by a car three different times, a tenderhearted girl getting shredded by her cats, but mostly about Maximo helping Hugo talk to Arden, the girl he has a crush on (Mckenna Grace of “Gifted”) so he can make a move on Arden’s rich grandma, played by Raquel Welch. Yes, let that sink in for a moment: Raquel Welch. Also, some guys want to beat him up but I don’t need to say why because you can assume that pretty much everyone is on their side by this point. I’m guessing you will be, too, when I explain that in addition to the wheelchair “joke,” it is also supposed to be humorous that Maximo removes a disabled character’s prostheses and that when he tries to dye his hair with shoe polish and dives into the pool, everyone things, well, you know what’s hard to tell from Shinola. I’d say the same for this screenplay.

Parents should know that this movie has material that pushes the limits of PG-13 with a lot of crude humor and comic peril and violence. There is very strong language, some to a child, alcohol, sexual references and situations, and “humor” about disabilities.

Family discussion: Was any of Maximo’s advice to Hugo worth following? Why did Maximo choose that career?

If you like this, try: “Stuck on You” and “Shallow Hal”

Related Tags:

 

Comedy
THE MOVIE MOM® is a registered trademark of Nell Minow. Use of the mark without express consent from Nell Minow constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition in violation of federal and state laws. All material © Nell Minow 1995-2024, all rights reserved, and no use or republication is permitted without explicit permission. This site hosts Nell Minow’s Movie Mom® archive, with material that originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies, Beliefnet, and other sources. Much of her new material can be found at Rogerebert.com, Huffington Post, and WheretoWatch. Her books include The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies and 101 Must-See Movie Moments, and she can be heard each week on radio stations across the country.

Website Designed by Max LaZebnik