Alice in Wonderland

Posted on June 1, 2010 at 8:00 am

Almost 150 years ago Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson published his wildly imaginative story about Alice’s adventures down a rabbit hole. And now the wildly imaginative director Tim Burton has brought Wonderland to the 3D movie screen. It is less faithful to the original story than many of the previous dozen or so movie versions, but I think Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, would approve of Burton’s bringing his own take to the classic characters.

He brings his own story as well. Carroll’s Alice is a little girl bored by her sister’s dull book, and her journey is episodic and filled with wordplay and references to Victorian society that fill the annotated edition of the book with witty footnotes.

To make the story more cinematic, Burton tells us that all of that has already happened in what young Alice thought was a dream. This is her return visit. Alice is 18 years old and has just been proposed to by a dull but wealthy lord with no chin and bad digestion. As she meets up with the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter, she is not the only one who is confused. Characters seem puzzled and unsure about whether she is the real Alice. The Mad Hatter peers at her perplexedly. She may be Alice, and yet not quite completely the Alice they are looking for. “You were once muchier,” he tells her. “You’ve lost your muchiness.” In Burton’s version, Alice’s adventures are about her finding her “muchiness.” Her visit to Wonderland is a chance for her to understand what she is capable of and how much she will lose if she makes her decisions based on what people expect from her. As in the Carroll story, she is constantly changing size, and Burton shows us that she is really finding her place. She believes she is once again in a dream but increasingly learns that it is one she can control. By the time she faces the Jabberwock, she knows that she is in control — and that her courage and determination can create the opportunity she needs to follow her heart.

Johnny Depp brings a depth, even a poignance to the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter is utterly delicious as the peppery red queen, hilariously furious over her stolen tarts. There’s a thrilling battle, the visuals are dazzling, with references to classic book illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, and the 3D effects will have you feeling as though you are falling down the rabbit hole yourself. The frame story bookending the Wonderland/Underland adventure is tedious and, oddly, less believable than the disappearing cat and frog footmen. But Burton’s re-interpretation of the classic story is filled with muchiness and the result is pretty darn frabjuous.

Dear John

Posted on May 25, 2010 at 8:00 am

Nicholas Sparks writes the equivalent of comfort food, high-carb, low-nutrition, but sometimes it hits the spot. His stories usually feature relationships that are not just true and deep and loving but healing. And then, like ripping off a band-aid, he tears it asunder, but in a manner that demonstrates just how true and deep and loving and healing the relationship was but how ennobling as well. And there is usually some object of deep metaphoric and sentimental value.

Ladies, prepare your hankies.

This time, the author of “The Notebook,” “Message in a Bottle,” “Nights in Rodanthe,” “A Walk to Remember” and this spring’s “The Last Song” (starring Miley Cyrus) gives us John (Channing Tatum) and Savannah (Amanda Seyfried of “Mamma Mia!” and “Big Love”). She is a kind-hearted girl and he is a special forces soldier with some anger issues. They have some soft-focus moments on the beach in Charleston while he is on leave and she is on spring vacation. She is considerate to his socially impaired father (Richard Jenkins) and he is understanding with her autistic neighbor. Two weeks later, they are very much in love, and agree to write as he completes his last year of service, as they look forward to being together as soon as it is over. But 9/11 changes everything. As Richard Lovelace wrote almost 400 years ago, “I could not love thee, dear, so much/Loved I not honor more.” As wrenching as it is for both of them, they know his place is with his team, defending freedom.

But then, she writes a “Dear John” letter telling him that she is engaged. He is wounded, recovers, and returns to battle. When he finally sees her again, he learns that her choice was not what he thought.

Director Lasse HallstrÃ¶m (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “The Cider House Rules,” “My Life as a Dog”) keeps things from getting too syrupy and Tatum and Seyfried have a sweet, easy connection. Henry Thomas (the kid from “E.T”) has warmth and humor as the single father of the autistic boy. Richard Jenkins does what he can in the underwritten role of John’s father, whose reserve and awkwardness may be attributable to an autism spectrum disorder. We’re on the side of these undeniably decent and very pretty people. But there is nothing they can do to make the last third of the film feel emotionally or narratively believable. If at the end of the movie, you ask whether there was any other reason for a character not to provide more information much earlier and the only answer is that they had to find a way to fill the last 40 minutes of screen time, that is not going to work. And the sweetness of the original connection is dissolved in what feels like a trick.

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Based on a book Date movie Romance

The Road

Posted on May 25, 2010 at 8:00 am

The most terrifying moment we ever experience is the realization that we are responsible for the life of the perfect being who has turned us from people into parents. We want more than anything to keep them safe and teach them everything they need to survive, even though we know how impossible it is to do both at once. “The Road,” based on the acclaimed novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) takes that conflict to the extreme with an archetypal father and son (just known as “Man” and “Boy”) and on a post-apocalyptic journey.

We do not know what the cataclysmic event was. We do not know if it was a natural disaster or the result of some kind of attack. But the world as we know it has ended. Sometimes the Man (Viggo Mortensen) goes back to the before in his dreams, of the night before his son was born, the last night when life still held possibilities. Since that day, everything is wiped out, including plants and animals. It is always cold. There is nothing to eat. Almost everyone has died or committed suicide. Those that are left are either predators or prey.

Stripped down to essentials, the Man has just one occupation — protecting the Boy, physically and psychically. As all parents must, he tries to help his son make sense of the world around him, teaching him enough about treachery and danger to be safe but teaching him enough about hope and honor to be “the good guys.” The Man tells his son that he must always carry the fire and by that he means both the literal fire that keeps them alive in the eternal winter and the spirit of optimism and humanity that is as important to the fate of the world as their ability to find something to eat.

As they go toward the coast, for no other reason than that it might be better than where they are and because it gives them a goal, they have encounters that are sad, strange, and scary. They find a somehow-overlooked relic of the past, a can of Coke, as exotic and inexplicable for the Boy as a shard of Sumerian pottery might be to us. When they find the house the Man grew up in, the markings his parents made to measure his growth are still there, a symbol of stability and care. When he tells the Boy that this is the fireplace mantel where they used to hang their stockings, he realizes that memory has any no connection to the Boy’s entire lifetime of scrounging, moving, and staying away from desperate packs of people who might as well be zombies for all of the humanity they have retained.

Wrenching, elegiac, but ultimately inspiring, this is a film that knows how to hold onto its own fire. By stripping away everything but the essentials, it makes us ask ourselves about the compromises we make, the consequences of our choices, and the value of the things that we so often think are worth striving for.

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Based on a book Drama

Valentine’s Day

Posted on May 18, 2010 at 8:00 am

Ladies and gentlemen, let the record show that the Twitter movie has arrived.

“Valentine’s Day” consists of a bunch of incidents and concepts and indications that in our omni-media world are taken for stories, though all of them would fit within Twitter’s 140-character limit. And it would take less time to list the people who are not in this movie than the people who are. The opening credits, with one name at a time, threaten to continue for the first hour of the movie. I’ll save time with this summary: just about anyone in Hollywood who has ever been described as cute or adorable is in the cast, with a full complement of Jennifers plus a Jessica, a Julia, a couple of Taylors, four Oscar winners, and a Queen.

Love, Actually-style — or, actually, Love American Style-style, this is a bouquet of skits that are variations on the themes of love — old, new, familiar, surprising, poignant, frustrating, and joyous. I do not use the terms “deep” or “unpredictable” or “witty.” Like a dime store box of valentine chocolates, it is not fancy, and some of the ingredients may not be ideal, but they are still tasty.

At the heart of the story is Ashton Kutcher as Reed, an idealistic and kind-hearted florist who starts off Valentine’s Day by proposing to his career-focused girlfriend (Jessica Alba) and is overjoyed when she agrees. As he goes on through his busiest day of the year, taking orders and making deliveries, he encounters many of the other characters observing the holiday in their own ways. A young boy needs flowers for the most beautiful girl in school. A doctor needs flowers for both his wife and his girlfriend.

Also — a teacher (Jennifer Garner) decides to surprise her boyfriend by flying out to see him. A young man newly in love and an older man married for decades must cope with disappointing revelations. A football player (Eric Dane) and a sportscaster (Jamie Foxx) think about what they are missing by being alone as a publicist (Jessica Biel) wonders if anyone is coming to her annual “I Hate Valentine’s Day” party with its ceremonial bashing of a heart-shaped pinata. A young couple finds that no matter how carefully they have planned their first sexual encounter, they cannot anticipate every problem. And a US Army captain (Julie Roberts) and a businessman (Bradley Cooper) seated next to each other on a 14-hour flight, talk about life and love and how precious the time we spend with those we love can be.

Some of the segments work better than others and a few sour moments intrude when the movie wants us as well as its characters to shrug off certain choices that to my mind are unsettling. The revenge of a woman who was cheated on is more creepy than vindicating. And I thought I made this clear, people: NO MORE RACING THROUGH AIRPORT SCENES IN ROMANTIC COMEDIES.

Director Garry Marshall keeps things moving so that by the time you realize one story is not working very well we are on to the next. He tosses in many bits of pop songs throughout just to make sure we don’t miss anything (the first-time couple drives off to “Feels Like the First Time,” get it?). There are too many participants for the performances to be anything but competent, though it gets some energy from sheer star power, especially from Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, and Marshall perennial good luck charm Hector Elizondo. Taylor Swift clearly has some fun as half of a high school couple believably described as “full of promise, full of hope, ignorant of reality.” Distracting winks at the audience (Taylor Lautner’s character says he is uncomfortable taking his shirt off in public, we see a poster for Love, Actually, and in the closing credit sequence Roberts reprises some dialogue from the movie she made with Marshall, “Pretty Woman”), however, are just about always an acknowledgment that the movie needs some artificial stimulants to keep the audience feeling entertained. But watching pretty people fall in and out of love is not a bad way to spend a winter evening and there is so much going on that at least one relationship will touch just about anyone.

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Date movie Romance

The Spy Next Door

Posted on May 12, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Jackie Chan, the most graceful and acrobatic of men when it comes to action scenes, is also one of the most clumsy when it comes to dialogue. So it is clever to cast him as a man who is awkward and unsure of himself in any situation that doesn’t involve his unique combination of tumbling, gymnastics, martial arts, and defying gravity.

In “The Spy Next Door,” he plays Bob Ho, a Chinese agent on loan to the CIA, investigating a Russian bad guy named Poldark (Icelandic star MagnÃºs Scheving). With Poldark captured, Bob has another target in mind, his beautiful next-door neighbor Gillian (Amber Valletta). They have been dating for three months, and he would like to marry her. But there are three problems — her children. Oh, and he has not told Gillian what he does for a living. She thinks he has a nice boring job selling pens.

Gillian has to go away to care for her father just as Poldark escapes. And Bob has to take care of the kids and stop the bad guy. At any given moment, it is hard to say which is the more challenging, or more dangerous. As someone says in the movie, “Spying is easy; parenting is hard.”

Yes, it’s silly, but it is the kind of entertaining silliness that is aimed squarely at eight-year-olds who are old enough to enjoy the action and young enough to think an adult saying “poop” is funny. Chan is a long way from his best years as an action star, briefly glimpsed in the opening credits to depict his character’s career as a spy. But he can still dazzle with stunts that are part ballet, part juggling, and part magic. It is fun to see him flip a folding chair with his foot, making perfection look easy, but it is just as much fun to see him in the traditional closing credit-sequence outtakes, showing us that it is even harder than we guessed. Kids, don’t try this at home.

The film does a good job of keeping things light on the good guys vs. bad guys part of the story, with bad guy Poldark repeatedly confounded by being forced to wear clothes that do not meet his standards of elegance and fashion. He and his partner are more silly than scary, clearly inspired by Boris and Natasha with their thick Cold War accents, wacky schemes, and pratfalls. As Bob has to find a way to win the hearts of each of the kids the movie finds some unexpected sweetness and even a quiet moment or two amid the mayhem. The very appealing Madeline Carroll (“Swing Vote”) plays Gillian’s step-daughter who is still hoping that her father will come back. She does a particularly nice job as the sulky teenager who does not want to admit even to herself how much she depends on Gillian. She is such a natural that she even makes Chan seem to relax when the two of them sit companionably on the roof together.

Kids will relate to the parallels between espionage and parenting, especially when Bob has to find a four-year-old in a princess costume in a mall filled with girls in shiny pink dresses and when he uses his spy gear to spot contraband like snacks being taken upstairs. And the movie wisely shows Bob refusing to use his skills to take on the bullies who are preying on Gillian’s son, encouraging him to deal with them himself. It may not be especially fresh — there is a lot of the “Mr. Nanny” and “The Pacifier” in the concept. And I did not care for the inappropriate “pick-up” line Gillian’s son (Will Shadley) tries out on a middle school girl (at least he learns quickly that it was a mistake). But Chan in action is still magic. Valletta brings warmth and good humor to the role of the mother who has to be something of a super-spy to stay on top of three children. Carroll continues to show promise as an actress and has a very natural screen presence. And the movie has some nicely reassuring thoughts about blended families. The intended audience will enjoy the action and humor and families might even find something in it to discuss on the way home.

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Action/Adventure Comedy