The Peanuts Movie

Posted on November 5, 2015 at 5:26 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Some tense scenes of anxiety, hurt feelings, and shyness, some mild action scenes and peril (Snoopy’s flying ace battles)
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 6, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	February 29, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B018WXLHVM

I admit that I approached this film with some of the same trepidation Charlie Brown approaches the football, knowing Lucy’s history of pulling it out of the way at the last second. I’m a fan of Charles Schultz’s original comic strip and fond of many of the animated specials and features that were careful to preserve the simplicity of his aesthetic. I was concerned that a more fully-animated version (in 3D!) would drown out the gentle storylines. But Schulz’s family has been careful to preserve his legacy. The script is co-written by his son and grandson and is timed to appear on the 65th anniversary of the strip and the 50th anniversary of the classic “Charlie Brown Christmas” special. And Blue Sky (which made the “Ice Age” and “Rio” movies) understands the material and its audiences — the older generations who are attached to the original version and today’s children, who are new to these characters.

The brightly colored, rounded figures were easier to get used to than I feared. The iconic details — Charlie Brown’s yellow shirt with the brown zigzag (it turns out he has a whole closetful) and wisps of hair are familiarly iconic. It’s not a period piece but there is a timeless quality. Phones are corded landlines. We never see a laptop and no one ever checks Google or GPS. Indeed, one of the most important items in the story is a pencil. It has glitter and a feather decorating it, but it also has the teeth marks of its sometimes nervous owner, and that is something you won’t find on a smartphone.

The movie does not commit any serious blunders. There are pleasant moments and welcome echoes of the past, but it does not justify its existence by adding anything of value to the canon already available. The first and best of the television specials, A Charlie Brown Christmas, is less than half an hour long, but it has more wit, charm, poignancy, than this feature film, and it includes one of the most beautiful holiday songs ever written, the piercingly bittersweet Christmastime is Here. In almost two hours, this film has time for just a snippet, to make room for inferior contemporary pop songs. A joke about “merch” seems ill-advised given the strip’s history of selling its characters for everything from insurance to toothbrushes.

The film begins promisingly, with Schroder playing the studio’s theme music on his piano and an immersive soft, gentle snowfall. It’s the most joyous day of the year — a snow day — and we meet the characters as they wake up and choose the winter activities they most enjoy. Charlie Brown decides it is a good time for him to try the kite again, figuring that the “kite-eating tree” will be out of commission in winter. It does not go well. Once school is back in session, a new student arrives, a girl with red hair, and Charlie Brown is smitten — and terrified. How can he impress her?

The Schulzes are true to the spirit of the original. We squirm with Charlie Brown as he agonizes over his insecurity, especially when he is faced with a dilemma at the school talent show and when he is awarded an honor it turns out he did not deserve. The sections with Snoopy’s Red Baron fantasy are of less interest and appeal and the 3D effects and the talents of top-tier musical stars (Trombone Shorty playing the “waa waas” for the adult voices and Kristen Chenoweth as Snoopy’s daring aviatrix love interest) are underused. The best use of this film is as an introduction to the classic television specials — and the original comic strips that inspired them.

Parents should know that this film includes some tense scenes of anxiety, hurt feelings, and shyness, and some mild action scenes and peril (Snoopy’s flying ace battles).

Family discussion: Which character is most like your friends? Which would you most want to be like? Why don’t we hear the grown-up voices?

If you like this, try: The Peanuts comic strip collections and the television specials.

Miss You Already

Posted on November 5, 2015 at 5:22 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug references
Violence/ Scariness:	Serious illness, sad death, some graphic and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 6, 2015

Friendship has the best aspects of romantic love and the best of family love, and the worst of both as well. Your friends as are close to you as anyone in the world, which means you can rely on them and they can rely on you, whether it’s telling you if your butt looks too fat in those jeans or you need someone to come pick you up because a date has gone horribly wrong. And it means that they can hurt you terribly, because they mean so much to you and because you trust them and because they know you so well.

And yet, while there are hundreds of thousands of movies about love and family, there are not very many great movies about friendship. “Miss You Already,” from director Catherine Hardwicke, is a worthy attempt, the story of two women who were friends since childhood, and whose friendship is nearly destroyed by the complications of grown-up life. Though it appears only once in the film, the title refers to a catchphrase the two women use to say goodbye, making fun of themselves for being so deeply in one another’s lives, but really meaning it, too.

Drew Barrymore plays Jess, an American living in England and the more serious and responsible of the pair. Toni Collette is Milly, the wild party girl who improbably is living happily ever after with Kit (Dominic Cooper), the roadie who got her pregnant and then married her, started a successful business, and turned out to be a wonderful husband and father. They have darling children, a beautiful home, and satisfying careers and they are still mad for each other. Jess is happily married to Jago (Paddy Considine), though they do not have any money and are struggling with fertility problems. But they live on an adorable houseboat. It is one of the movie’s wisest choices that the husbands are not complaining (most of the time) or complained about. They are full partners to their wives and full partners in supporting the friendship.

Milly has always lived lightly, skimming along the top of life, still a party girl at heart. She loves her husband, children, and Jess, but she is admittedly superficial and vain. And then she gets a cancer diagnosis. Jess is happy to live up to the assigned tasks of “bringing treats and not being annoying” to help Milly through chemotherapy. And wig shopping (with the wonderful Frances de la Tour). And changing dressings. But she believes that Milly’s illness is so all-consuming that she cannot share what is going on in her life. And then Milly does something that creates the first serious breach in their relationship.

Yes, we’re in “Beaches” territory, so get out your handkerchiefs. Drew and Collette make a touching screen team, and Jacqueline Bisset, almost unrecognizable with platinum blonde hair, is a welcome antidote to over-sentimentality as Milly’s self-absorbed mother, a moderately successful actress. Hardwicke, who began her career as a production designer, has a superb eye and a great gift for using the settings to tell the story. If she cannot avoid the usual touchstones of women’s friendship movies (singing along to a favorite pop song), at least she changes it up a little — REM in a taxi instead of the usual Motown into a hairbrush. “Miss You Already” will make you want to call a friend you miss, and then bring her along to see it again.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, sexual references and situations, serious illness with some graphic images, a very sad death, a childbirth scene, alcohol and drug references.

Family discussion: What makes a great friendship? Ask family members about their most important friendships, how they met and their favorite moments.

If you like this, try: “50/50” and “Beaches”

Burnt

Posted on October 29, 2015 at 5:50 pm

Tormented but brilliant chef Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) invites the sous chef he hopes to persuade to come work for him to lunch. At Burger King. They are both food snobs. She does not want to touch anything in the fast food outlet and is barely willing to sit in the booth. And he, improbably but only slightly more improbable than pretty much everything else in the movie, tries to persuade her that it is part of the rich tradition of “peasant food.” Yes, it is a lesser cut of meat, but that is why it is so imaginatively prepared.

Uh, no. That is not true of Burger King, and it is not true of this film, a lesser cut of meat indeed, and not deserving of the terms “imaginative” or “peasant food.” We don’t believe the praise for fast food from a guy who says anything less than perfect must be thrown away, that a chef must apologize not to the boss or to the customer but to the piece of turbot for inferior preparation. We don’t believe that a man who says he does not want customers to appreciate his food — he wants them to ache with longing — would eat a Whopper.

Most important, we just do not believe Adam, even with Cooper’s piercing blue eyes and movie star magic, is more than a lesser cut of meat himself. Here’s a hint, Hollywood — it is often fatal to a movie to have its characters more in thrall to the lead than the audience is.

We meet Adam as he is completing his self-imposed penance for sins we will spend the rest of the film learning about. The three-year expiation — shucking one million oysters. Does that have anything to do with making amends to those he harmed? No, but it is picturesque and it gives him a chance to tell us that oysters and apples cannot be improved upon, but it is the duty of the chef to try.

It turns out that Adam was once a star of the foodie world, but hubris — and many, many drugs — led to his downfall, taking lots of other people down with him. And so, we see him visit his old friends, enemies, and frenimies, to see if he can put the old band back together to make culinary history and achieve a third Michelin star.

For those who missed the Michelin star lecture in The 100-Foot Journey, we get the “Star Wars” version here. One star from the legendary rater of restaurants is Luke Skywalker. Two stars are “whoever Alec Guinness was” (Obi-Wan Kenobi). And three stars is the Jedi Master: Yoda. (I actually prefer Michelin’s own cost-benefit analysis approach: worth a stop, worth a detour, worth a journey.)

Or, in movie terms, worth a theater ticket, worth a Netflix rental, wait for cable. This falls somewhere between the second and third category. Food and food preparation are presented with loving, luscious care far in excess of the attention to the story or characters, neither especially well seasoned or fresh.

Parents should know that this film has constant very strong language, some sexual references, references to drug abuse, some angry confrontations, and brief violence.

Family discussion: Would you want to eat in Adam’s restaurant? What do you think of his million-oyster penance?

If you like this, try: “Chef” and “Babette’s Feast” and reality shows about Mario Batali and Gordon Ramsey, who worked on this film

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Our Brand is Crisis

Posted on October 29, 2015 at 5:38 pm

As we gear up for one of the most improbable and even outlandish Presidential campaigns in US history, we get a movie based on a real-life Presidential campaign in Bolivia, with imported American political consultants transplanting the media-savvy, scorched-earth, mud-slinging “expertise” that won elections in the US. What could go wrong?

The name of the film is “Our Brand is Crisis,” also the name of the 2006 documentary about what happened when James Carville, an architect of the Clinton campaign, went to Bolivia with his group of consultants and strategists to help elect the Bolivian-born, American-raised Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Actually they went to help re-elect him. He had served as President from 1993-97. He was trying to regain the Presidency, and who better to help than the team who helped the young governor of Arkansas beat a sitting President, George H.W. Bush?

Sandra Bullock, taking a part based on Carville and originally written for George Clooney, plays a consultant known as “Calamity” Jane. She is burned out and living in a remote rural area when she gets a visit from two former colleagues.

Nell (Ann Dowd) and Ben (Anthony Mackie) want her for two reasons. First, she is good at what she does. Second, she is “disposable, expendable, and deniable.” If their candidate (named Castillo in this film and played by Joaquim de Almeida) wins, they get the glory. If he loses, they can blame “Calamity” Jane. Win win, and a good introduction to the small-p politics of the world of strategists and consultants who work on campaigns.

Jane is not interested, even though she needs the money, until she learns that Castillo’s opponent is being advised by her arch rival, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), a man who has been on the other side “three or four times” and beaten her “three or four times.” Much more interested in trouncing anyone Candy is advising than in any of the issues or the quality of the candidates, she agrees to fly to Bolivia, where she spends the first few days breathing oxygen from a tank and throwing up due to the altitude.

Finally she begins to wake up and her fiercely competitive spirit takes over. She brings in a secret weapon, a young woman with crackerjack online research skills known only as LeBlanc (Zoe Kazan), a sort of Lisbeth Salander who looks like a sophomore at Yale. And she starts barking orders, telling her candidate to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves and to turn toward the camera if he feels a tear in his eye. “We are the syringe that injects the people’s voice into your campaign,” she barks. He is so far behind in the polls that he has no alternative.

Jane’s short-term goal: to humanize her candidate, who is seen by the electorate as imperious and out of touch. Her medium term goal: to persuade the electorate that there is a crisis and only his experienced hand can guide them through. Her ultimate goal: complete annihilation of Pat Candy, with a side order of public humiliation.

The political sophistication of the screenplay is below the level of an AP history class, with a lot of scorched earth posturing and the inevitable idealistic youngster to provide contrast to all the superficial cynics. A reference to Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand is there for a gloss of political sophistication, but the aphorisms are tired (“If you fight with monsters for too long, you become a monster”) and the film is almost as cynical as its characters. The reason to see it is Bullock, who gives one of the best performances of the year, as complex, nuanced, savvy, and honest as the film would like to be. She’s got my vote.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, vulgar sexual references, smoking, drinking, and some violence including riots, tear gas, and guns.

Family discussion: Why did Jane take the job? What will she do next?

If you like this, try: the documentary of the same name that inspired this film and “No,” starring Gael Garcia Bernal, based on the 1988 election in Chile

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Based on a true story Drama Politics

Suffragette

Posted on October 29, 2015 at 5:30 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some intense violence, thematic elements, brief strong language and partial nudity
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some intense violence including bombs, police brutality, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 30, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	February 1, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B017Y01GOM

How do you persuade politicians to give you the vote when you do not have the capacity to vote them out if they deny it? That was the problem faced by women in later 19th and early 20th century Great Britain and the US. While Abigail Adams urged her husband to “remember the ladies” in setting up the US government, the Constitution did not give them the right to vote. Nor did the 15th amendment to the Constitution adopted after the Civil War to give the vote to all men, regardless of race. Efforts to give “universal suffrage” in the UK led to reforms over the 19th century, but none of them granted any voting rights to women.

As this film begins, women in the UK had been fighting for the right to vote for 30 years. They concluded that they had exhausted all peaceful means of sending their message and were resorting to what today we might consider terrorism, throwing rocks at store windows and planting bombs in mailboxes. They were careful to destroy property only. No one was hurt through their protests, except for the protesters themselves, who were subjected to extreme brutality from the police, including torturous forced feeding for those who participated in hunger strikes when they were imprisoned.

Those who have studied the history of women’s suffrage may be familiar with the names of the leaders, like Emmeline Pankhurst (played in this film by Meryl Streep). But as so often happens with history, the stories of the everyday women who played a vital role in the movement are not well known, and this film wisely focuses on them. Pankhurst is on screen for less than ten minutes. The movie’s main character is a composite who is representative of the working women who became a part of the cause. Maud (Carey Mulligan) works in a laundry as does her husband (Ben Wishaw) and as did her mother, until she was killed in an industrial accident. She began working there as a child and will work there as long as she can, though she knows that the likelihood of injury or illness caused by the working conditions is very high. That is not the only problem. As her friend’s young daughter comes to work in the laundry, we can see from Maud’s reaction to the sexual assaults by a predatory boss are something she recognizes from her own experience.

Maud is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is assumed to be working with the protesters. Instead of denying it or, when she has the opportunity to help her situation by spying on them and reporting what she learns back to the police, she begins to think for the first time that there could be a chance to create a better life for herself and for the next generation, and she becomes involved, though she risks losing her job, her husband, and her child.

The movie, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, is somber in tone but it is effective at showing the harsh conditions of Maud’s life and the always-watchable Mulligan gives her character a developing ferocity that is more of a surprise to her than it is to us. It also is effective at showing us the class divisions and how women across class lines worked together. But 21st century audiences well-versed in the narratives of later protests like the civil rights, women’s equality, environmental and and anti-war movements may find it difficult to sympathize with the literally incendiary tactics of these women. There are so many characters in a very limited time period with very little progress that its good intentions are not enough to make it a strong narrative.

Text at the end of the film provides sobering statistics about how long it has taken — and is still taking — for women to get the right to vote. Here’s hoping it will not take explosives for these women to have a say in the laws that govern them.

Parents should know that this film features protest violence including destruction of property and explosives by activists and police brutality by law enforcement. Characters are injured and killed and there is domestic violence, sexual abuse, a parent permanently separated from a child, brief strong language, and non-sexual nudity.

Family discussion: If you were advising the activists on behalf of women’s right to vote, what would you suggest? How did later political movements learn from their example?

If you like this, try: the documentaries “One Woman, One Vote” and “Not For Ourselves Alone“