Blended

Posted on May 22, 2014 at 6:00 pm

Oh, if perennial Razzie-winner Adam Sandler must keep making movies, I suppose they are less terrible when he includes his sweetest co-star, Drew Barrymore. She always brings out the best in him (“The Wedding Singer,” “50 First Dates”). The imperishable sunniness of Drew can somehow persuade us that Sandler is not as unlikeable as he seems. Sandler just might escape the Razzie award for cinematic atrocity this year. That might not be progress, but at least it’s a respite.

Thankfully, Sandler does not do that awful baby-voice or force Rob Schneider into another disgusting cameo in “Blended,” and no one has sex with an old lady. So, as Adam Sandler movies go, this is not as terrible as some of them. Yay! Of course that does not mean that Sandler foregoes his trademarks: a lot of gross-out humor involving bodily parts and functions, adults behaving like children and children precociously preoccupied with sex, and a lazy, almost haphazard approach to the story. Plus: Sandler regulars Kevin Nealon and Alexis Arquette, the genuinely funny Terry Crews and Wendy McLendon-Covey (“Bridesmaids”), a bunch of less funny people in the credits with the last name “Sandler,” a walloping product placement placement from a tourism bureau, this time South Africa, and a gooey, sentimental, retro vibe to remind us that boys are boys and girls are girls and it is great to be part of a family. While there was laughter in the theater, it is telling that following a fire alarm and brief evacuation, about a third of the audience decided not to come back. Consider yourself warned.

Sandler plays Jimmy, manager of a sporting goods store and single father of three girls he calls by boy names, one named for his favorite television network: Espn. He dresses them in khakis and polo shirts. Drew plays Lauren, a single mother of two sons, one who throws tantrums when he strikes out in Little League, one exploding with adolescent hormones.

We meet Jimmy and Lauren on their disastrous blind date, for each of them the first date since before they were married. They are awkward with each other and agonizingly uncomfortable. He brings her to Hooters. She has not one but two spit-takes. He looks at the TV while she’s talking. “There’s a very tight game going on up there.” And he insults her closet organizing business. “Did you start by organizing glove compartments?” They agree on just one thing — they never want to see each other again.

But then they end up on the same trip to Africa. Lauren and Jimmy discover they are on the “blended family-moon,” a special week for second-marriage couples and their children. Their loathing turns to respect and affection as they go on adventures and bond with each other’s children. If you guessed that this bonding would include a makeover for Jimmy’s 15-year-old girl (hair extensions, lipstick, miniskirt) to help her achieve her goal (attention from a boy) and batting practice and boxing lessons for Lauren’s sons, then you are familiar with the “Brady Bunch”/Bazooka Joe level of plot and character development that Sandler inflicts on his fans. The retro humor crosses the line from lazy to skeezy, with locker-room-style gender and sexual orientation jokes that were outdated twenty years ago.

Intended to be a laugh riot: a child repeatedly having his head slammed into walls and doors when his mother tries to carry him, a young teenager who puts his babysitter’s face on a nude fold-out that he keeps under his bed, a “meet cute” involving the two leads’ mutual inability to cope in the drugstore as Jimmy is trying to buy tampons for his daughter and Lauren is trying to buy porn for her son. There is attempted comedy about the appropriate tampon circumference for a 15-year-old and the appropriate masturbation material for a middle schooler.

Closer to the mark: the always-great Terry Crews as a pec-popping tummeler with a traveling group of township jive-singers, ubiquitous white minivans, and a couple of the jokes. A couple as in two.

Most of the jokes are disappointingly lazy, as usual in Sandler films. These are joke-ish, not actual jokes. In one scene, Jimmy’s youngest daughter (a darling Emma Fuhrmann) looks in a mirror and realizes that what she thought was cute kitty cat make-up face paint applied by her father was a mess. She screams that she looks like the “Walking Dead.” This is supposed to be funny because she is surprised that it looks different from what she envisioned and because a little kid knows about “The Walking Dead.”

But it’s a sloppy, easy, cheap joke, and it’s a sloppy, easy, cheap movie. Sandler should keep working with Drew Barrymore, and next time he should also film a script that has had more than one draft.

Parents should know that this movie includes very strong and crude language for a PG-13 and a lot of sexual humor including extended references to teen masturbation and discussion of adultery and divorce and jokes about Kegel exercises, bondage, a 15-year-old’s private parts, cameltoe, animals having sex, and giving someone a rufie. There is comic peril and violence and a sad off-screen death of a parent and a joke about developmental disabilities.

Family discussion: What did Lauren and Jimmy learn from watching each other as parents? Which of the activities in Africa would you like to try?

If you like this, try: “The Wedding Singer”

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Comedy

Godzilla

Posted on May 15, 2014 at 6:01 pm

All the basic ingredients are there for a slam-bang summer monster movie. We have people in helmets and hazmat suits running to try to get away from something scary. We have a scientist pleading with a military officer to trust him and the guy in camo responding that he can’t take that chance. We have a guy everyone thinks is crazy who turns out to be right. We have mumbo-jumbo about radiation and bio-acoustics. We have a tentacle(?) tease 40 minutes in. We have a corporate/government cover-up. People say things like, “There’s been a breach,” and “I can prove to you and the world that this was not a natural disaster.” Oh, and “I’m going to find the truth and end this, whatever it takes.” And “It’s going to send us back to the stone age.”

Buildings will be destroyed and a bridge will collapse. People will be told to stay home and then traffic will be at a standstill as they all ignore directions. We have a lot of globe-hopping so that international forces can be involved and iconic skylines can be trashed. And, most important, we have a very, very big monster to do the trashing. Enormous ships will be tossed around like a rubber duckie in a bathtub.

What we don’t have is a very good story. And for a movie with a lot of destruction, not enough of a sense of real investment in the outcome. The good news about CGI is that you can make anything happen on screen. The bad thing is that everyone knows you can make anything happen, so at a fundamental level, it does not feel real.

“Godzilla” begins promisingly, with a terrific opening credit sequence over “archival” footage and glimpses of redacted government reports. And ash, lots of ash, detritus from atomic fallout, pretty cool in 3D. Then there’s a little backstory. In 1999 we see the discovery of a skeleton in a Philippine mine. The rib cage is the size of an apartment building. And there’s goop! If there’s one thing we’ve learned from monster movies over years, it has to be DON’T TOUCH THE GOOP.

Meanwhile, still in 1999, we get our introduction to the adorable family — there always has to be an adorable family — living near a nuclear energy plant in Japan who will provide the emotional core of the film. There’s loving American father (Bryan Cranston) Joe Brody, distracted by some inexplicable but rhythmic tremors. There’s loving French wife (Juliette Binoche), who also works at the plant. And there’s a son, cute tyke Ford. “Earthquakes are random, jagged,” Joe explains. What he is hearing is “consistent and increasing.” We know he will have a hard time persuading his bosses, but we know he is right. And soon tragedy strikes and the cooling towers collapse. The entire community is contaminated and shut down.

Fifteen years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of “Kick-Ass”) is coming back from a military deployment where his job is “stopping bombs.” After he has an adorable reunion with his own adorable wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son, he gets a call. Joe has been arrested in Japan, where he is still obsessed with finding the truth about what happened. He has a crazy room with walls covered in clippings connected by string to show the various conspiracies. Ford thinks his dad is nuts. He’s about to find out that he is right.

I don’t want to give away any monster spoilers here, so I’ll just say that there are some surprises for anyone not thoroughly immersed in “Godzilla” lore. I liked seeing the creature pop nuclear warheads into his mouth like Popeye knocks back spinach. And it steps things up nicely when the monster’s power charge shorts out the grids. The special effects are excellent, though only a high-altitude/low opening parachute jump makes full use of the 3D. But the story is weak and the characters are cardboard. The original 1954 “Godzilla” resonated because it personified (monstronified?) our then-new fears about the atomic age. With so many contemporary scares about environmental damage, they should have been able to find something equally potent.

Parents should know that this is a sci-fi movie in the tradition of all monster movies, with extensive mayhem,scary surprises, some disturbing images, and many characters injured and killed. There is some strong language.

Family discussion: What made the scientist and the military come to different conclusions — information or training? What was the significance of the pocket watch?

If you like this, try: the original Japanese “Godzilla” movies

Million Dollar Arm

Posted on May 15, 2014 at 6:00 pm

milliondollararm

The folks behind feel-good, based-on-a-true-sports-Cinderella-story, Disney movies “The Rookie” and “Miracle” are back with another. This time it is the story of a real life Jerry Maguire sports agent named J.B. Bernstein (a terrific Jon Hamm) who has fallen on hard times, despite the optimistic name of his firm: 7 Figures Management. Think of it as Jerry if Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s character quit him, too. He needs some athletes to sell to major league baseball and there isn’t anyone in the world who plays baseball who isn’t already represented. He even has a line almost identical to Jerry’s famous “Help me help you.”

In one of those crazy ideas borne out of complete desperation (plus watching Susan Boyle wow the judges on “Britain’s Got Talent”), Bernstein figures that the only place left to look is India, which must be perfect because (1) no one there plays baseball, so no agents have signed anyone up, and (2) it is the second most populous country in the world, so the odds are that there must be someone there who can throw a fastball. What do they play in India instead of baseball? Among other sports, they play cricket, which J.B. describes, with all the cultural diplomacy we might expect from someone who has some important lessons to learn by the time we finish our popcorn, as looking like “the insane asylum opened up and all the inmates made up a game.”

He decides to go to India to look for what we like to call a long shot. He will stage an “American Idol”-style competition with (per the title) a million dollar prize. He gets the money for this from the wealthy Mr. Chang (Tzi Ma), who is not too worried about whether there really is a major league throwing arm in India because he figures that the competition will stir up interest in baseball for the first time in a brand new country with up to a billion new fans. And that is money in the bank.

So J.B. goes off to India where, predictably, he runs into problems with exotic food and cultural and language barriers. “Indians love honking and bypassing the system,” his affable new aide advises him. Less predictably, he runs into not one but two young men who can throw fastballs hard, Rinku (Suraj Sharma, who had his own “Million Dollar Arm” moment in real life when he was selected from 3000 actors who auditioned to star in “The Life of Pi”) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal of “Slumdog Millionaire”). He finds them with the help of an adorably cranky old scout played by Alan Arkin, as always, the best part of any movie he’s in. Of course he’s the old guy showing everyone how it’s done playing the old guy who shows everyone how it’s done, so he’s got that going. “Don’t wake me up until someone’s throwing a baseball,” he says, explaining he does not have to look at the contestants because he can hear pitching speed. And he can.

Slight problem: they not only have never played baseball before; they have never seen a baseball game and have no idea how to play or what the rules are. And it is difficult for them to learn because (1) their knowledge of English is only slightly better than their completely nonexistent knowledge of baseball, and (2) playing any sport at the professional level is very, very, very, very hard for people who have been working on it for decades and has to be impossible for anyone who has never played before.

But then, if they couldn’t do it, we wouldn’t be here, now, would we?

J.B. brings two young men back home to California. The only thing he has paid attention to is the number on that radar gun that clocks the speed of the throws, which is an impressive number. And maybe the number in his bank account, which is not a good number. He has not noticed that these are very fine young men or that they have never been away from home before. He learns very quickly that he cannot leave them in a hotel.

They move into his bachelor pad, marveling over the room for just one man but confused that they don’t see anywhere to pray. They are befriended by his tenant, a beautiful and kind-hearted doctor (Lake Bell).

JB turns the young men over to college coach Tom House (Bill Paxton), who explains why you can’t turn a non-baseball player into a major league pitcher in a matter of months, in time for the try-out Mr. Chang has put together. “It’s completely different motions, biometrics.” They do not know what a baseball glove is. But J.B. is good at one thing, persuasion. “You certainly don’t need any help with your pitching,” House tells J.B. He agrees to try to teach them that “it is not about throwing hard, but throwing right.” And they study a copy of Baseball for Dummies.

Writer Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “Win Win”) keeps things from getting too twee. The film clearly respects Rinku and Dinesh and their country, though it skirts very close to Magical Negro territory and the fish-out-of-water cultural clashes stay on the surface. The young men are not allowed to be much more than amiable innocents whose job is to give the soulless white guy an important opportunity to reconnect with his humanity (and, as a consequence, with the beautiful doctor as well). This is J.B’s story and Hamm is a pleasure to watch, with full-on, big-time movie star magnetism, and his scenes with the lovely Bell (“In a World”) have a real warmth that makes the happy ending feel earned.

Parents should know that this movie includes some mild language and sexual references. Characters have casual sex (off-screen).

Family discussion: What were the most important things JB learned in India? When he got home?

If you like this, try: “The Rookie” and “Miracle” from the same producers and also “Bend it Like Beckham”

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Based on a true story Sports

Chef

Posted on May 15, 2014 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, including some suggestive references
Profanity:	Very strong and graphic language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	May 16, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	September 29. 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00KQTGWPC

You’re writer/director/actor Jon Favreau. You’ve been making big-budget films, mostly huge blockbuster successes (“Elf,” “Iron Man”), but also a big-budget bust (Cowboys & Aliens, which I liked). This might put you in mind of a simpler, more satisfyingly creative time (Favreau wrote the indie smash “Swingers” and wrote and directed “Made”). And that might inspire a movie like “Chef,” with Favreau as writer. director, and star and a small-scale story with, thanks to his connections, a big-scale cast, about an artist who, like a movie director, creates the kind of art that must be appreciated by others to be satisfying. And director Jon Favreau brings the same loving care to the creations made by his character that the chef does himself. This movie will be on lists of “Great Food Films” forever, along with classics like “Big Night” and “Babette’s Feast.” The food is so lusciously photographed you can almost smell it. And the music perfectly matches the food, sensual and spicy. This is an utterly delectable treat.

No surprise — it is about a guy who has a big-time, high pressure job, loses his mojo, his inspiration and his sense of creativity, and then finds it again in a smaller venue. The job is in the title. Favreau plays Carl, a passionate chef at a high-end restaurant, frustrated because the owner (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to stick to his “greatest hits,” the solid, reliable favorites that Carl now finds boring. “You remember what happened when you put guts on the menu?” When an influential restaurant critic gives him a bad review, Carl quits in a fury. Then, in an even bigger fury, he tweets what he thinks is a private response to the critic (he is not sure of the difference between Twitter and email). It goes viral. (“You’re trending, bro.”) Carl goes into a shame spiral fueled by self-pity and blame, both self and everyone else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP6SE65F-h4

Carl’s passion for his job led to the end of his marriage to Inez (Sofia Vergara). He is a devoted but harried father to Percy (Emjay Anthony), a young social media expert who enjoys the fun activities his dad plans for them when he has time but wishes they could just plain hang out more. Inez, wanting to get Carl out of his funk, invites him to come with her on a business trip to Miami, so he can watch Percy. It will get him away from the Twitterverse gaffe of the day crowd and give him some time with his son. She also has another plan. Her previous ex-husband (a movie-stealing performance by the scene-stealing master thief and “Iron Man” star Robert Downey, Jr.), who gives Carl a food truck. Well, apparently there is a food truck there underneath the layers of grime and fry oil. Joined by a friend (John Leguizamo) and Percy, they drive the truck back home to Los Angeles, stopping along the way to feed the people who have been following Percy’s social media updates.

There are no surprises in the story, and there is not one female character with any reason to exist other than supporting/adoring Carl, but the characters feel genuine and the food is mesmerizingly luscious. Favreau has his mojo back, and I hope he will keep ours going by serving us food truck movies along with his five star restaurants.

Parents should know that this movie includes very strong and crude language and some vulgar references.

Family discussion: What is your favorite meal to cook? Why was it hard for Carl to just hang out with Percy before the food truck?

If you like this, try: “Big Night” and “No Reservations”

Belle

Posted on May 8, 2014 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for thematic elements, some language and brief smoking images
Profanity:	Some brief language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad death of parent (offscreen), tense family confrontations
Diversity Issues:	Race and gender issues the theme of the film
Date Released to Theaters:	May 9, 2014

Writer Misan Sagay, director Amma Asante, and actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw have created a film of exceptional understanding, honoring the life of the real-life woman who inspired the story with intelligence, sensitivity, and insight that illuminate her time and our own. Mbatha-Raw plays the title character, who must navigate her way across lines of gender, class, race, and legitimacy — in its legal and broader senses. Mbatha-Raw (“Larry Crowne”) is mesmerizing, a beautiful, thoughtful performance in a film that has all of the trappings of the best sumptuous costume dramas but has a story with unexpected contemporary meaning.

Dido Elizabeth Belle was the illegitimate daughter of a titled officer in the British navy and a West Indian slave woman. When her mother died, he brought his daughter to live with his uncle, Lord Mansfield, the chief judge of England (Tom Wilkinson), his wife (Emily Watson), and their other niece, Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). The girls are raised like sisters but there are always distinctions. They eat together as a family if they are alone, but if there are guests, Dido is not permitted to eat with them but can join them in the parlor afterward. After her father’s death, Dido is an heiress with a respectable fortune while Elizabeth, a legitimate heiress, is cut off from her inheritance by her father’s second wife. As Dido and Elizabeth are introduced to society (Elizabeth formally, Dido does not “come out”), the eligible young men rate the women as shrewdly as Jane Austen characters. Does an impoverished young man of good breeding in need of money find Dido’s fortune sufficient to overcome her race and unmarried parents? If he does, will Dido have a choice in evaluating his proposal?

Meanwhile, a case is wending its way toward the judge that is of vital interest to Dido. Slaves being transported were jettisoned from a cargo ship. Are they to be seen as property or as people? Dido gets more information about the case from a fiery but poor young law student, risking his opportunity to study with the judge by communicating with her. As she learns more about her mother’s people and understands more about the kinds of restrictions she and Elizabeth face — some alike, some different, she begins to understand that some of those restrictions are freeing as well. If she cannot travel the usual path for young women in her society, she can learn to forge her own.

Parents should know that this movie includes discussions of legitimacy, mixed-race relationships, and slavery. There are references to the slaughter and mistreatment of slaves.

Family discussion: How many different distinctions did the family and the culture make between Elizabeth and Dido? Between the two women and the men around them?

If you like this, read more about the real story in Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice and watch “Amazing Grace” and “Amistad.”