Exodus: Gods and Kings

Posted on December 11, 2014 at 9:51 pm

The story of Exodus is central to three of the world’s most significant religions and one of the Bible’s most cinematic stories, with a flawed but charismatic hero and a stirring story of slaves seeking freedom. It has already been filmed at least eight times, from Veggie Tales’ Moe & The Big Exit to Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s animated The Prince of Egypt. Now Ridley Scott, who showed his mastery of sword and sandal epics with Gladiator has taken on the story with an all-star (but mostly non Middle-Eastern) cast and the latest 3D technology to really deliver on the special effects. Not so much on the theology part, though, or even the morality or meaning of it. Scott is clearly more interested in chases and battles and plagues, and so busy with it that he leaves out some of the story’s most important incidents. For example, instead of having to leave the palace because he killed an Egyptian who was beating a slave, Scott gives us a soapy story about Ramses’ jealousy. And we know Ramses is decadent because every time we see him, he’s eating.

The action and special effects work well, though. This is a two and a half hour movie that starts in the middle of the story and Scott keeps it moving. We first see Moses (Christian Bale) and Ramses (Joel Edgerton) as Seti (John Turturro), the Pharaoh, is giving them each a sword. At first, Ramses, Seti’s son, thinks he has been given the wrong one. But Seti has given them each other’s swords on purpose, to remind them that they must care for each other as they are about to go into battle. A seer has a prophesy: “In the battle, a leader will be saved and his savior will someday lead.” This inflames Ramses’ insecurity, especially when it comes true.

After Seti’s death, Ramses puts Moses in prison and tries to have him killed. Moses finds a home with a small community of shepherds and falls in love with Zipporah (María Valverde). Their life there is very sweet for nine years until he sees a burning bush and receives a message from God. Scott makes an imaginative choice here about portraying the Deity that I won’t give away, but I am still trying to decide how I feel about it. God tells him what he already knew in his heart. The Hebrews are his people and he cannot run away from his responsibility to help them find freedom. So he goes back to Memphis.

Bale holds the screen well as Moses, but Turturro, Kingsley, and Sigourney Weaver as Ramses’ mother do not have enough to do to. But there is a lot of time devoted to spectacle. Well past the two-hour mark, there are still 40 years of wandering in the desert and the Ten Commandments (twice) to get through, and they are sped through very quickly. The striking of the rock to get water, manna, the golden calf, and Moses not being permitted to enter the promised land are all skipped over. Two significant ideas that are included are Moses’ disagreements with God (and God’s approval of it) and the journey from the first scene, where Ramses believes in omens and faith and Moses believes in reason, to the end of the film, where they switch places.

Moses tells Ramses he must free the slaves and Ramses says the same thing that people have said throughout history when there is no possible moral justification for their position. He says that it is not economically feasible and will take a long time. Moses, trained as a general, gets the Hebrews to attack the Egyptians’ supply chain, but God gets impatient and steps in with the plagues, which are very vivid and rather disturbing. After the death of the Egyptian first-born children, including his own son, Ramses tells the Hebrews to go. But then he and his army ride after them, until the miracle at the Red Sea, very impressively staged. But, again, the focus is shifted from the story of the Exodus to much less interesting battle between two cousins raised as brothers.

The visual scope here is impressive. There just isn’t much soul.

Parents should know that this movie includes Biblical themes including slavery, plagues and other kinds of peril and abuse, extensive peril and violence, battles, many characters injured and killed including children, and disturbing scenes with dismemberment and dead bodies.

Family discussion: How did being raised as a prince affect the way Moses saw himself and his role? How was he affected by learning the story of his birth? Why does he object to the plagues?

If you like this, try: “The Ten Commandments” with Charlton Heston

Top Five

Posted on December 11, 2014 at 5:59 pm

MPAA Rating:

Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, crude humor, language throughout and some drug use

Why is it that we love to talk about our top five? Is it because it gives us a sense of order in the midst of chaos? Is it because we feel that if we can somehow distill the whole world into a definitive top five (with a possible but un-canonical sixth position just to make it interesting), that will reveal something essential about the person doing the ranking?

Writer/director/star Chris Rock plays Andre, a stand-up comic turned wildly successful movie star, with a series of dumb comedy blockbuster hits where he plays Hammy the Bear, an ursine cop with a gun as quick as his wisecracks and catch phrases. Like the director in “Sullivan’s Travels” and the stand-up comic turned actor and filmmaker in “Stardust Memories,” Andre wants to do something serious and meaningful. He has made a new film called “Uprize,” a drama based on the real-life slave rebellion in late 18th century Haiti, and he is on a publicity tour to promote it. He is also about to get married to a reality star (Gabrielle Union as the exquisitely airbrushed and relentlessly determined Erica), who has made every element of the wedding and their lives together a branding opportunity. And he has agreed to spend the day with Chelsea, a New York Times reporter (Rosario Dawson) who begins by asking him why he isn’t funny anymore and wants him to describe what it felt like to hit bottom before he became sober.

Andre and Chelsea travel all over the New York, visiting the inner city neighborhood where his friends and family jockey between pride and resentment. The girlfriend who was there at the beginning is sorry she quit before he hit it big. The old friends tease him about how he was never the funniest one in the group and remind him to keep it real. Andre also has a talk with some older men on the street. One calls him “Hollywood” — but asks for money. We learn his relationship to Andre. It is understated, but significant.

No one is buying tickets to “Uprize.” And “everyone in the barbershop wants to see in the bear costume” for Hammy 4.

Rock has often seemed awkward or uncomfortable on screen, even in “Head of State,” which he directed, especially in scenes with women. But here he shows a welcome naturalness and confidence. We got a glimpse of those qualities in his best previous performance, “2 Days in New York,” which has a similar intimate, improvisational vibe. This time, playing a central character who shares some of his experiences — and some of his friends, with Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, Jerry Seinfeld making cameos — Rock’s performance is nuanced, thoughtful, very, very funny, and touching as well. It is the funniest movie of the year, in part because it is so sharply observed. Andre may think the best way to deliver a message is with a serious drama, but Chris Rock knows better.

Parents should know that this film has extremely strong, explicit, and crude language including the n-word, extremely explicit sexual references and situations, and very crude humor, substance abuse including drugs, and mild comic peril.

Family discussion: What will Andre do next? Would you go to see his movie about the slave rebellion? What is “rigorous honesty?” Who’s in your top five and why is it fun to try to rank your favorites?

If you like this, try: “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Stardust Memories” and Chris Rock’s stand-up performance films and television series

Related Tags:

Comedy Movies -- format

Wild

Posted on December 4, 2014 at 5:58 pm

“If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve—”

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) adds the name of the author, Emily Dickinson, to the quote she has inscribed in a journal for hikers kept at her entry point on the Pacific Coast Trail. And then she adds her own name as well. It is her own name in a very real sense as she was not born with it and it was not her husband’s name. It was a name she chose from a dictionary at the end of her marriage as the name she wanted to go on with, a name for going above her nerve.

Strayed was lost. Her mother Bobbi (a glowing Laura Dern), the “great love of (her) life,” died of cancer. Her husband Paul (“Newsroom’s” Thomas Sadoski) was loving and supportive but Strayed fell into a self-destructive death spiral, obliterating herself through “detached” sex with strangers and substance abuse that ultimately included shooting heroin. She and Paul recognized their divorce with matching tattoos to keep some part of the idea of permanence connecting them. And then, with nowhere else to go, she decided to take a walk, more than a thousand miles. It was a chance to reconnect with something she knew she loved to do and to get away from the bad choices she was making. The Chinese proverb says that the longest journey begins with a single step. Strayed wanted to take those steps between her old life and whatever was ahead, to begin to feel an un-obliterated life.

Her 60 pounds of equipment filled a backpack called The Monster. She did not practice putting up her tent or using her stove before she left. She was scared, and soon she was also hungry. She had brought the wrong fuel for her stove. A burly farmer driving a tractor gruffly agreed to give her a ride to some food, and then told her he was bringing her back to his house. She looked at him, trying to figure out if he was planning to attack her, hoping he was not. He was not. The farmer and his wife were kind and generous with her. She got the right fuel, and, a few stops later got some advice about getting rid of some of her load, down to burning each night the book pages she had finished reading. Plus, she didn’t really need all those condoms, did she?

Strayed’s book became an international-bestseller, so poetic and inspirational Oprah rebooted her Book Club to endorse it. Like other memoirs combining real and spiritual/emotional journeys, what makes it work is the narrator’s voice. This is as much an internal story as an external one. Screenwriter Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”) and director Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyer’s Club”) understand that this is not a travelogue, though there is some stunning scenery. It is about Strayed thinking back through her chaotic, messy life through the experience of putting one foot in front of the other on her way to a place called The Bridge of the Gods. As she thinks back on her life, we begin to understand the context for this trek at the same time that she does. As we expect from Hornby, there are some great song choices, too.

Strayed’s adventures and encounters along the way resonate with her memories. The farmer is not the only potential danger. The film understatedly but clearly shows how any woman in any sort of wild has to constantly calculate the threat level of the men she encounters. And, in a scene where Strayed comes across another hiker taking a bath in a lake, we get something we rarely see in films, a woman appraising, or maybe just appreciating, a male body. This is a character moment for Strayed, who as we see, has been too impulsive in sexual encounters. But here, she stands back and just savors the moment on its own, owning it without having to do anything about it. “I’m lonelier in my real life than I am out here,” she says.

Feeling your feelings can be painful. Strayed loses toenails and, at one point, her shoes. There are angry, raw patches of skin where The Monster digs into her. She thinks through painful memories of her mother’s illness, her father’s abuse. She remembers being inconsiderate of her mother, a woman who was thrilled to get a chance to go back to school, to think and question and learn. And for the first time, she begins to understand what her mother said about putting yourself in the line of beauty. Just because some things are terrible doesn’t mean everything is. “This has the power to fill you up again if you let it,” someone tells her.

Witherspoon gives a performance of quiet vulnerability and courage. In some ways, as producer as well as star, this was as daunting an undertaking for her as the hike was for Strayed. There was a real risk of making it a glamorized, soapy star vehicle. But as producer and actor, she gives this story the film it deserves.

Parents should know that this film includes explicit sexual references and situations and nudity, substance abuse, references to domestic abuse, and very strong language.

Family discussion: What do you think the quote means and why did Strayed use it to begin her hike? What does it mean to say that wounds come from the same source as power?

If you like this try: Strayed’s books, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, and another 2014 film about a real-life woman on a long, long walk, Tracks.

The Imitation Game

Posted on December 4, 2014 at 5:03 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Wartime violence
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie, homophobia, suicide
Date Released to Theaters:	November 21, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	March 30, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00RY85CQI

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician with an enormous intellect, an almost equally enormous ego, and an almost equally enormous secret. He was one of the founding thinkers behind modern computing and it is his name that we use for the test that determines whether a computer has achieved true artificial intelligence status. The Turing test standard is human conversation. If a human cannot tell whether he or she is communicating with a person or a computer, than the program has passed the Turing test and is true artificial intelligence.

I’m not sure that Alan Turing could have passed the Turing test. Cumberbatch, who also plays a super-smart, arrogant, and obnoxious guy in “Sherlock,” creates a very different character here. Turing himself is an Enigma. In the opening scene, a sort of job interview nightmare in which Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) is trying to interview Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) for a spot on the team working at the famous Bletchley Park estate to break the code the Germans were using to send orders to their troops. If passing as human means meeting even the most minimal standards of civility and responsiveness, Turing failed that interview. He seemed to think that it was he who was interviewing Denniston to determine whether the task was of sufficient interest and import to merit his attention.

Denniston begins to dismiss him. But when Denniston says that everyone thinks the code, known as Enigma, is unbreakable, Turing says briskly, “Let me try, and then we’ll know for sure.” Denniston does not have a better idea or a better option.

The German code is unbreakable because it is constantly changing, so by the time any one message has been decrypted, whatever was learned could not be applied to whatever comes next. The Allies are perpetually behind. [The process, complicated as it is, has been simplified for the purposes of the movie, glossing over the important work done by Polish mathematicians, the contributions of the French, and the challenges faced as the Germans continued to make the Enigma more complicated and impenetrable as the war continued.) While a bunch of brilliant mathematicians, scientists, and puzzle-solvers (including Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightley) worked away, Turning realized not only that what made the code unbreakable was the inability of any then-existing computational mechanism to perform enough calculations fast enough to decrypt the messages before the code was reconfigured the next morning, but that he could create a machine to do it.

We know how it turned out. But director Morten Tyldum keeps the story gripping on several levels. First, there is the conflict between Turing and just about everyone, and the pressure for immediate results as he is spending a lot of time (years) and money on something no one has ever seen before. Second, there are the interpersonal struggles, and Turning’s internal difficulties. He did want intimacy, and we see in his memories of his first love, a boy at his school. He likes Joan, and is briefly engaged to her. But he was gay at a time when being gay was punishable by prison. Then there are other kinds of secrets. One of the people working on breaking the code may be a spy. And once the code is broken, the Allies have the wrenchingly painful decision about what to do with the information. It’s not just a puzzle. It is statecraft, and terrible compromises and terrible losses are part of the job.

The film adds some unnecessary drama and oversimplifies parts of the story. But it is a powerful, complex drama and a long-overdue tribute to a true hero and visionary.

Parents should know that this film includes wartime themes and images, some disturbing, wrenching moral choices, betrayal, the pressures of being a closeted homosexual when it was a crime, drinking, smoking, and some sexual references.

Family discussion: Do you agree with the decision to withhold the news that the code had been broken? To allow the mole to keep spying?

If you like this, try: Read up on the history of the codebreakers at Bletchley (The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-boat Codes, 1939-1943) as well as those in Poland and the spies who helped them get the information they needed and try some online version of the Turing Test.

Horrible Bosses 2

Posted on November 25, 2014 at 5:58 pm

Maybe it’s just the proximity to the horrible “Dumb and Dumber To,” but the cheerily offensive “Horrible Bosses 2” made me laugh. Full warning — it begins with an elaborate sight gag as our hapless heroes demonstrate their new product on a relentlessly cheery morning show. When the product, a “Shower Buddy” that combines the soap and shampoo with the shower head, demonstrated by Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) does not work at first, Dale (Charlie Day) kneels down behind it to make some quick repairs. His back-and-forth motions in the vicinity of Kurt’s lower torso make it appear to be a sexual act. This is followed by an expression of interest in the Shower Buddy by the TV host (the wonderful Keegan Michael Key), until he hears the name of the company. The trio has combined their three names: Nick, Kurt, and Dale, to sound like a racist epithet. If you’re still with me, then this is your movie.

Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt, and Dale are very happy to be free of their horrible bosses and running their own company, especially when a wealthy entrepreneur named Bert Hanson (Christoph Waltz) places a large order. The guys rent a manufacturing facility, hire staff (mostly girls Kurt wants to have sex with, plus a black felon they are scared of and a Latina woman they can’t understand), and go into production. They are proud to report to Hanson ahead of schedule. But it turns out that Hanson planned from the beginning to bankrupt them and take over their company. They are back in the world of horrible bosses again.

They get some advice from one of their old horrible bosses, Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), now serving his jail term, and from M****F**** Jones (Jamie Foxx), the criminal they sought guidance from in the last movie, not realizing that his crime was only pirating “Snow Falling On Cedars.” They decide the best option is to kidnap Hanson’s spoiled, arrogant son (Chris Pine) and hold him for ransom. Their plot requires some laughing gas as a sedative, so they visit the dental office of Dale’s former horrible boss, the sexually predatory Julia (Jennifer Aniston), not knowing her sex addiction support group is going to be meeting there.

The kidnapping plot does not go well. They are not even sure how to spell kidnapping when they write it with permanent marker on their dry-erase board. But there’s a surprising twist that gives the story a second wind. Waltz and Pine, not known for comedy, are both excellent, especially Pine, clearly enjoying himself enormously. A lot of the humor is sheer outrageousness, much of it racist or sexist or both, but some of it is pleasantly loopy, like a doorbell that plays Badfinger. The three guys have great chemistry. And nobody is better at playing a horrible boss than Spacey. But the highlight of the film is the outtakes over the end credits, showing us that this movie was more fun to make than to watch.

Parents should know that this movie includes extremely crude, offensive, and graphic sexual references and situations, nudity, constant very strong language, and violence including murder.

Family discussion: Who was the worst boss you ever had? Who was the best?

If you like this, try: The first “Horrible Bosses” movie and “Ruthless People”

Related Tags:

Comedy Series/Sequel