Prom

Posted on April 28, 2011 at 6:31 pm

Less engrossing than a Clearasil commercial and more synthetic than a Rebecca Black video, “Prom” is Disney’s attempt to launch a new generation of tween idols with a wholesome confection about a high school dance. But the buoyant energy of “High School Musical”-style song and dance numbers is sorely missed and some sweet moments are not enough to make up for a thin storyline featuring too many inexperienced young performers. Anyone over the age of 12 will want to sit out this dance.

It begins three weeks before prom in a suburban high school. The girls are excited about being asked. The boys are terrified about asking them. Apparently, even the ask itself is now a montage-worthy event, with high expectations for drama and creativity from the guys. One romantic invitation features candles in the shed filled with party decorations, igniting a fire that destroys all of the “Starry Night” decorations.This is devastating for Nova (Aimee Teegarden), class president and all-around achiever who is determined that the prom will be “a perfect moment.” Jesse (Thomas McDonell), the school rebel (he has long hair, a motorcycle, and a bad attitude), points out that at the very worst, “the boys and girls of the school have been robbed of the opportunity to stand around and drink punch. Lower the flags to half mast.” The principal orders him to work with Nova to make new decorations, and inevitably, a less combustible set of sparks will fly.

The prom creates stress and drama for other seniors as well. Two popular couples struggle with complications that go beyond the selection of limo and cummerbund. The top candidates for prom queen and king are Jordan (Kylie Bunbury) and her boyfriend Tyler (DeVaughn Nixon), the lacrosse team captain and a playah off the field as well. Mei (Yin Chang) does not know how to tell her devoted boyfriend since middle school that she wants to go to Parsons in New York to study design instead of to the University of Michigan with him. The prom also gives shy, gawky Lloyd (Nicolas Braun) his last chance to ask a girl – any girl — out, with encouragement from his stepsister, Tess (a warm and engaging Raini Rodriguez). And a pretty sophomore (Danielle Campbell) must choose between her awkward, music-mad lab partner and a smoother guy who may not be trustworthy. And they squeeze in two characters from a Disney television series as underclassmen for cross-promotion and the already-announced sequel.

But never fear! The over-packed plot still leaves time for the inevitable trying-on-dresses montage, a parent who has to learn to trust his daughter’s judgment, and a last-minute arrival of a back-lit dream date.

Parents will be relieved that everything stays reassuringly PG. A character who would be a stoner in a PG-13 high school movie merely chomps on the candies that give him his nickname and talks about the girl he is bringing to the prom in a manner that sounds vaguely, well, vague. And parents will appreciate the portrayal of supportive friends and moms and some nice lessons about self-respect, loyalty, and moving beyond shallow fantasies of “the perfect moment.” But with a dozen main characters it feels more like a series of Disney Channel sketches than stories. Its effort to underplay the fantasy of the “perfect moment” prom is lost in its own focus on one magical evening. A complaint from one girl about being required to read Ethan Frome is the only suggestion in the film that school is for any purpose other than college applications and finding prom dates. Like a discount prom corsage, it looks pretty and wilts fast.

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Dumbstruck

Posted on April 21, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for brief suggestive humor
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	References to substance abuse

Once a year, there is a gathering in Kentucky for people who “talk to themselves and play with dolls for a living” — ventriloquists. “Dumbstruck” is a documentary from Lindsay and Mark Goffman that follows five of them for the year between two of these Vent Haven ConVENTions in what turned out to be the biggest year in history for the tiny little community. One of its members unexpectedly hit the biggest of the big time when Terry Fator went from performing at county fairs to a $100 million headliner contract in Las Vegas after he won “America’s Got Talent.”

For an enduringly popular style of performance, there’s a lot of hating on ventriloquists. Many people think of them as corny or annoying, just above mimes or strange, like the murderous ventriloquist characters played by Anthony Hopkins in “Magic” or Michael Redgrave in “Dead of Night.” When Fator walked on stage for the first time in “America’s Got Talent,” judge David Hasselhoff said, “Oh, no, a ventriloquist.”

But it is impossible not to fall in love with the characters in this film — the human ones, anyway — because it is more than an act from someone who might have just as easily chosen juggling. It is clear that these people become ventriloquists because they have things to say that they just do not feel comfortable saying any other way. I used to think that the reason ventriloquists argued with their characters was to enhance the audience’s perception that the puppet was a real character. But this movie makes it clear that the relationship — and that is truly the word that applies — between the person and the puppet is far deeper and more complex and intriguing, and the passion it requires is profoundly moving. All of us adopt personas for different situations; they just make it more explicit. The art is less about whether the lips move or the voice sounds different than it is about the ability to take a portion of what is inside them and create a complete character from it. After all, the most successful American ventriloquist of the 20th century, Edgar Bergen, performed on the radio.

This film has a former beauty queen, Kim Yeager, whose mother wistfully dreams that her daughter will give up ventriloquism and live a normal life. But Yeager is wholeheartedly committed, performing more than 400 shows in a year, many of them safety demonstrations for schoolchildren. In one of the movie’s most intriguing scenes, she gets some advice from a consultant on her act and ends up completely re-thinking her main character. Then there’s Dan Horn, who was at what used to be considered the height of success for a ventriloquist. He spends most of his time on the lucrative cruise ship bookings. But the long separations are very hard on him and his family. We learn about Wilma Swartz from her nephew, who tells us that the rest of the family has abandoned her but that he is loyal to her because of her kindness to him when he had no one else. She is 6 feet 5 inches tall and one of her puppets is a life-size ostrich. And when she needs help, she finds that the ventriloquist community stands by her. Dylan Burdette is a white middle-schooler from rural Kentucky whose mystified parents are trying to understand why he wants to be a ventriloquist and why he insists on a dummy who is a black “pimp.” And there is Terry Fator, who as this movie was being filmed, became a superstar. He returns to Vent Haven as a homecoming hero, and the Goffmans show great sensitivity and understanding in portraying the mingled emotions of his fellow puppeteers as they share his triumph and wish some of it would rub off on them.

The Goffmans have a lot of affection for their characters, and by the end of the film, you will, too.

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Gulliver’s Travels

Posted on April 19, 2011 at 8:00 am

A cringe-inducing catastrophe with all of the appeal of fingernails on blackboard, this movie’s first early warning sign should have been the omission of Jonathan Swift from the opening credits.

I thought at first it was an arrogant oversight. Now I think it is more likely his ghost showed up and threatened to haunt the film-makers and their descendants forever if they did not remove any mention of his name. Swift is the man who wrote the book, with satire so biting and fantasy so thrilling that it has endured for almost 300 years. It will survive this, too, but just barely.

The story has been updated so that Gulliver, like every other aspect of the story, is downgraded (and degraded). In Swift’s book, he is a surgeon. Here, played by a doughy and lusterless Jack Black, he is a guy who works in a newspaper mailroom, too insecure to try to get a promotion or ask out the beautiful editor he adores (Amanda Peet, who does her best to pretend she is in a better movie).

In order to impress her, Gulliver plagiarizes some travel pieces. She gives him an assignment to investigate the Bermuda triangle. I know this is a fantasy, but since when can newspapers afford a mail room staff and what appears to be a bountiful budget for investigative travel pieces?

Gulliver gets trapped in a vortex that lands him in a kingdom called Lilliput, populated by people who are just six inches tall. As in the book, at first he is captured, tied down while he is asleep on the beach. He stands up, ripping the ropes open. But there was noting in the book about his pants falling down, and then having him fall backwards with a poor Lilliputian apparently smothered by his, uh, tush separation.

And then it really gets disgusting. Gulliver has to rescue the king from a fire and, finding no water within reach, pees on everything to douse the flames . As dispiriting as that is, it is not as bad as the flaccid torpor of the script, which shows utter contempt for its audience in every line. Every reference, joke, and plot development is tired and predictable. Gulliver collects — guess! Yep, “Star Wars” action figures. At work, he slacks off by — guess! Playing “Guitar Hero.” When he persuades the Lilliputians that he is known as President Awesome back home where he comes from, we see posters all over the city with Gulliver appearing as the hero of every movie or play from “West Side Story” to “Wicked.” Those are hardly recognizable, much less knee-slapping references for anyone under 40.

Even worse, Gulliver is a thoroughly unpleasant character. He reflexively lies to everyone. He is selfish, incurious, and thoughtless. There is a dull storyline about a Lilliputian commoner named Horatio (a sweet Jason Segal) who dares to love the princess (a regal Emily Blunt), but it is ineptly handled. When the princess challenges the bad guy (Chris O’Dowd, the movie’s sole highlight) to come up with a reason for loving her, predictably, he can’t. But then, shouldn’t Horatio demonstrate some understanding or appreciation of the princess to show his fitness? The script and director Rob Letterman cannot be bothered to follow through. It just keeps desperately throwing stuff at the audience, finally including a killer robot.

Letterman, who showed he knows better in “Monsters vs. Aliens,” blows all the possibilities of the book’s shrewd (and still very relevant) commentary for silly sight gags like Gulliver’s using the Lilliputians to re-enact video games and DVDs. A “Titanic” joke! Stop!

A lump of coal in the stockings of everyone behind this mess.

The King’s Speech

Posted on April 18, 2011 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	One brief scene with profanity used as a vocal exercise
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	Class difference
Date Released to Theaters:	December 17, 2010

One of the best movies of the year makes a king look like an underdog in the true story of a man who had to literally and metaphorically find his voice, with in a very real sense the fate of the world depending on it.
It wasn’t because she didn’t love him, she explains, when she turned down his proposal of marriage twice. It was because he was a prince, a member of the British royal family, and she did not want to live a public life. And then she remembered that she did love him. And that he had a stammer, so she concluded that would keep him on the sidelines. And then she married him, and they had two children. And then he became king.
The Duke of York (Colin Firth), known as Bertie to his family, was an almost-ideal second son in the royal family. He served honorably in the military and took his public duties seriously. He had no interest his brother David’s position as the heir to the throne. But then three things happened. First, radio was invented, and all of a sudden a dignified wave was not enough. For the first time, all of Great Britain (encompassing, at that time, one quarter of the developed world) could hear the voice of their leaders. Second, Hitler’s aggression was making war inevitable.
And third, Bertie’s brother David, by then King Edward VIII, would shatter precedent and become the first ruler in British history to resign, in royal terms, to abdicate, so that he would be free to marry an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson. Just at the moment when the British people most needed to hear their king, they had a king who could not TIFF-Kings-Speech-colin_firth_helena_bonham_carter_kings_speech4.jpg speak.
The best doctors had been consulted, and Bertie had been subjected to treatment that literally went back to Demosthenes. And then the Duchess brought him to Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian actor who had worked with the shell-shocked veterans of WWI. As an actor, he knew breathing techniques and other exercises to help make the spoken word smooth and compelling. And his work with the veterans showed him that the relationship between the therapist and the stutterer — and sometimes the opportunity to talk about the stutterer’s experiences and fears — could be very important.
And so Bertie has, for the first time ever, conversations with someone outside his family. He desperately wants to maintain his dignity, but he even more desperately wants to be able to play this increasingly more crucial role.
The movie may be sepia tones and British accents but it is not at all stuffy thanks to Firth, Rush and Helena Bonham Carter as his wife. Firth shows us Bertie’s struggles to locate his voice and define his role. In one scene, when he tells his little girls (including the current Queen Elizabeth) a bedtime story, it is almost unbearably touching because it means so much to him and the story is so self-deprecatory and loving. People who have trouble speaking spend a lot of time listening and observing. Bertie watches his father and brother with deference, a need for approval, and also a thoughtful evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses as though he is measuring them as a way of creating himself.
The heart of the film is Bertie’s meetings with Lionel, and they are a marvel. Screenwriter David Seidler, himself a one-time stutterer whose uncle was treated by Lionel, worked on the screenplay for decades (the Queen Mother asked that it not be produced until after her death), and it is a masterwork that merits all that went into it. At age 72, Seidler knows what it is to find one’s voice.

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Rio

Posted on April 14, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild peril
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	April 15, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	August 1, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004HO6I4M

A South American setting and striking animation lend freshness to “Rio’s” otherwise much-traveled storyline about a pampered pet who has to learn to survive in the wild. We’ve seen this tale many times — “Madagascar,” “Bolt,” “The Wild,” “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,”and more. But this version is buoyed by local color — literally, with a vibrantly sun-drenched palette, along with a sensationally festive Carnival parade, and a slinky samba-liscious soundtrack overseen by Rio’s most enduringly popular musical export, Sergio Mendes.

Blu (voice of “The Social Network’s” Jesse Eisenberg) is a rare blue macaw who was captured by animal smugglers in Brazil as a tiny chick. His crate falls out of a truck in snowy Minnesota (identified onscreen simply as “Not Rio”) and is rescued by a little girl named Linda. He grows up blissfully domesticated and never bothers to learn to fly. Everything he wants is within reach. He brings Linda her glasses when she wakes up and she makes sure he has just the right number of marshmallows in his hot chocolate. As he explains, he is not a pet; he is a companion. And Linda says he is her best friend.

They are visited by an ornithologist named Tulio (voice of Rodrigo Santoro), who tells Linda (voice of Leslie Mann) there is just one last surviving female blue macaw (voice of Anne Hathaway as Jewel). Unless they mate, it will be the end of their species. Linda reluctantly agrees to take Blu to Brazil. But smugglers show up again to steal Blu and Jewel. Blu has to learn some survival skills and make some new friends to find his way back to Linda.

Blue Sky is the studio that produced the “Ice Age” series and it is obvious that they are glad to be done with the endless blues and grays of the ice, snow, and rock settings. Brazilian-born director Carlos Saldanha (director of “Ice Age” and co-director of the underrated “Robots”) takes evident pride and delight in bringing his home town to the screen, taking full advantage of 3D CGI so that we can swoop around the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue atop the Corcovado Mountain and hang-glide over miles of beaches. He has fun with Brazilian culture, too. When Carnival revelers cross in front of their car, Linda asks Tulio if a woman in a gold-spangled costume is a performer. “No,” he replies, “she’s my dentist.” As the woman in the spangles happily runs off to the celebration, she reminds Tulio to floss. And Blu provides a critique of samba music that will sound familiar to its fans.

Eisenberg’s tremulous voice is just right for Blu, giving him a neurotic, urban, understated wit. “You know how people say ‘it’s a jungle out there?'” he complains to Jewel when they find themselves in the middle of a rainforest. “Not a good thing.” He gets strong support from Tracy Morgan as a bulldog, George Lopez as a toucan, and Will.i.Am and Jamie Foxx as friendly birds. The story may not be new, but in fairness it is a theme that is very appealing to children, whose entire lives are about finding themselves outside their safe, domestic environment and trying to navigate the wild and sometimes scary unpredictability of real life.

The star of the show in every respect is a cockatoo named Nigel (voice of Jermaine Clement of HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords”), one of the most masterfully animated characters in movie history. Blue Sky Studios created a remarkable bird villain named Vlad three years ago in “Horton Hears a Who.” It was a daunting mechanical challenge to animate the infinite complexities of dozens of wing joints and thousands of feathers but Vlad was on screen only briefly. Here the Blue Sky animators take what they learned from Vlad much further. Nigel is a key figure with an even more complicated structure, at once menacing and shambling, who sings, dances, menaces, and fights, all in character. The algorithms necessary for what can only be called Nigel’s performance could probably have programmed a moon shot, and yet he seems completely natural and fluidly expressive. Clement’s voice work is a perfect balance of mean and funny, and Nigel’s musical tribute to his own villainy is pure pleasure.

Saldanha is at his best when there are dozens of characters on screen. Whether they are dancing or fighting, they are colorful, joyous, and meticulously choreographed. A battle between the birds and the monkeys is exciting and funny and the opening dance number is a kaleidoscopic treat. The climax, in the middle of a Carnival parade with massive floats and crowds of thousands is brilliantly imagined. Blu spends most of the movie trying to get off the ground, but with Nigel and these big, showy scenes, Saldanha makes the movie soar.

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