I Can Do Bad All By Myself

Posted on January 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Tyler Perry’s movies are review-proof. Not just because he does not let critics see them before they are released, knowing that his audience won’t care about reviews, but because they do not lend themselves to the usual kind of analysis. They are not the usual kind of movie. They don’t fit into any category except their own: Tyler Perry movie. And as his wildly enthusiastic and utterly devoted fans know, that means a walloping portion of high drama and low comedy, with suffering women who are afraid to trust and very hunky men who are good with their hands, endlessly patient and thoughtful and — in both senses of the word — faithful.

Taraji P. Henson plays April, who lives in a decaying house she inherited from her father, and shuts the door on rooms that are about to collapse rather than trying to repair them. She supplements what she earns by singing at a tiny club with support from her married boyfriend (Brian White). Madea (Perry) catches April’s 16-year-old niece and two younger nephews trying to rob her house. She feeds them, scolds them, and delivers them to April, who has no interest in taking care of anyone, even herself. They are the children of April’s sister, who died of a drug overdose, and they have been cared for by April’s mother, who has disappeared. April is a bit slow on the uptake about what could have happened to her mother, which gives the story a few days for everyone to get acquainted, including a recent immigrant named Sandino (Adam Rodriguez) who is conveniently enough a handyman installed in the house by the kindly preacher around the corner (real-life pastor and gospel great Marvin Winans).

April’s one friend is Tanya (Mary J. Blige) and there is a woman from the church named Wilma who knows April’s mother (Gladys Knight). This gives the film an opportunity for some raise-the roof singing and praise, including the title number. Pastor Winans lends his voice to a heartfelt “Just Don’t Wanna Know/Over it Now,” and we believe that April, hearing it through her window, is genuinely moved by its powerful message. The songs and Henson’s sensitive portrayal of the woman who has neglected herself and her home keep us involved.

Some audiences object to Perry’s portrayal of the popular character Madea, calling her an exaggerated caricature or an embarrassing stereotype. But Perry knows that she provides some counterpoint to the melodrama, in this case including drug abuse, adultery, child molestation, and disability. I am far more troubled by the stereotypes in films like “Friday After Next,” “The Cookout,” and “Next Day Air” than in Perry’s films, which always include an assortment of thoughtful and responsible characters. A little comic relief with Madea’s jumbled-up Bible stories keeps things from getting overheated and reminds us that life — and families — are always a jumble of good, bad, wicked, kind, and silly.

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Youth in Revolt

Posted on January 7, 2010 at 9:28 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content, language and drug use
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, and drug use by teens and adults, people given drugs unknowingly
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, car crashes and explosions
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, some anti-Christian humor
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2010

Those who want to see the Michael Cera they know and love and those who want to see him do something else can both find what they are looking for in “Youth in Revolt,” based on the popular epistolary novels by C.D. Payne. Cera plays Nick Twisp, the typical adolescent hero — his parents are insensitive mess-ups with love lives that embarrass Nick and make him even more acutely aware of how alone he is and how unlikely it seems that he will ever find a girlfriend.
And at first this is the typical Michael Cera role — a sensitive teenager who is not sure of himself but whose hesitant delivery produces makes the surprisingly barbed coherence of his comments particularly winning. But then, when Nick meets Sheeni (appealing newcomer Portia Doubleday) and realizes that faint heart never won fair lady and nice guys finish last, etc. etc., he realizes he needs to up his game. And so, like the Dark Knight, Dr. Jekyll, and The Nutty Professor, he takes on another persona, one that manifests his darker impulses. Nick becomes Francois Dillinger, named for the fantasy Frenchman Sheeni says she hopes to marry and, well, you know. Francois has a mustache, he smokes, and he wears slim, European white pants. He gets Nick into a lot of trouble, but he coolly keeps pushing him forward. The two Michael Ceras interact like “The Parent Trap” on crack.

The exceptionally strong supporting cast includes the Mary Kay Place and M. Emmett Walsh as Sheeni’s very strict Christian parents and Fred Willard as a soft-hearted liberal neighbor. Jean Smart plays Nick’s perpetually-unlucky-in-love mother (her suitors are Zach Galifianakis and Ray Liotta) and Steve Buscemi is his BMW-loving father. The episodic nature of the story seems to drift toward an end that seems hasty and contrived. But Director Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck and Buck”) maintains a darkly comic tone, twisted but buoyant, that will feel authentic to anyone who has survived — or hopes to survive — adolescence.

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Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Posted on January 5, 2010 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for brief mild language
Profanity:	Brief schoolyard language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, no one hurt
Diversity Issues:	Issue of pressure on women to be cute and perky instead of strong and smart
Date Released to Theaters:	September 18, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	January 5, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002WJI2QQ

When things go very, very wrong in this movie, as they so often do, we get to see a series of television news broadcasts from around the world showing the destruction of various iconic monuments, as we so often do. And then something different happens. One of the newscasters points out that this particular un-natural disaster seems inexplicably and improbably primarily directed at national landmarks. So this is a movie with a sense of humor about itself and its audience.

As long as you don’t expect it to have much to do with the story or illustrations in the classic book by Judi and Ron Barrett, you can settle in for an entertaining and, yes, delicious family film. In the book, instead of rain and snow, food falls from the sky in the town of Chew and Swallow. In this movie, we get to see how that came to be.

It begins, as so many stories for children begin, with a kid who feels like an outsider. Flint Lockwood (as an adult the voice of Bill Hader of “Saturday Night Live”) is a curious kid who likes to invent things but does not always think things through. His spray-on shoes are so indescructable they never come off. His gadget to allow Steve the Monkey to speak works perfectly well; it’s just that Steve doesn’t say much worth hearing. His mom believes in him, but after she dies he just has his dad, all eyebrows and mustache (and voice of James Caan) thinks he should just give it up and come to work with him in his sardine shop.

Sardines are the sole product of Flint’s town, called Swallow Falls. But then, disaster happens. Everyone figures out that sardines are yucky. And so the town falls on hard times. Can one of Flint’s inventions save the day?

Well, not really. An invention to turn water into food goes awry when it is shot into the air and the next thing the town knows, what once was rain, snow, fog, and hail is now pancakes, sushi, BLTs, and jellybeans. The mayor (voice of B-movie star Bruce Campbell) sees this as a chance to revitalize the town’s economy through tourism. And as a chance to eat a lot of food and get very fat. The former mascot of the town’s previous sardine industry, the now-grown “Baby” Brent (voice of SNL’s Andy Samberg) sees this as a threat to his popularity. And a junior employee at the Weather Channel who wants to be a newscaster (Anna Feris as Sam Sparks) thinks she has to hide her brains and curiosity to get people to like her and sees this as her chance to show what she can do.

That is a lot to sort out, not to mention a fabulous mansion made of Jell-O and some action sequences involving space travel and a peanut allergy. But it is all handled well without getting frantic or losing its sense of fun. This is a fresh and clever film, with both wit and heart, a family delight, more fun than a hailstorm of jellybeans followed by pizza flurries.

Jennifer’s Body

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 6:00 pm

“Jennifer’s Body” is not scary enough for horror and not knowing enough for commentary on horror.

“Hell is a teenage girl,” says Needy (Amanda Seyfried of “Mama Mia” and “Big Love”). And she should know. She is a teenage girl. And her Best Friend Forever Jennifer (made-for-Maxim hottie Megan Fox of the “Transformers” films) is both, quite literally. She may wear a BFF charm in recognition of friendship going back to the sandbox days, but she is more of a frenemy, one of those people who are in our life and have great powers of influence even though we are not sure why and we don’t like them very much. Jennifer tells the appropriately-nicknamed Needy (for Anita) to break a date with her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) and accompany Jennifer to the town’s only club/bar so they can watch an up-and-coming group called “Low Shoulder.” Needy says yes to Jennifer, no to Chip, and they are on their way.

Some nasty things happen, and Jennifer turns into a demon who preys on the bodies of helpless and terrified victims. (They have to be helpless and terrified; she’s something of a picky eater in that respect.) Needy is the only one who sees her for what she is, and as the remains begin to pile up and funerals clog everyone’s schedules, Needy has to figure out what to do. And it wouldn’t be a horror movie if it didn’t get personal.

When Diablo Cody (“Juno” and many opinionated but very cool and clever essays in Entertainment Weekly) takes on the horror genre, it is fair to expect some snappy honest-to-blog patter and if not obvious po-mo air quotes at least something a little meta. But it does not work as straight-on horror or as what has now become an established and rich little sub-genre of the snarky, self-aware horror film that delivers on two levels, like the “Scream” series, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” or “Shaun of the Dead.”

It actually is not that much of a stretch between “straight” horror and meta-horror. Straight-on horror films deliver thrills with a combination of the predictable (woe to any teenager who has sex and if the camera zooms in close, there’s something terrible just out of frame) and the unpredictable (you know, the part where some one or some thing jumps out and splits some hapless victim down the middle). And they often have a sense of humor about themselves and their conventions, with serial killers Freddy Kruger (of “Nightmare on Elm Street”) and Chuckie (the demon doll) tossing off wisecracks and bad puns as they slaughter.

Cody has a few nice points to make here about the frenemy dynamic of some girl-girl relationships: the drama, the connection, the power plays, and the excitement. “Not high school evil; evil-evil” is an theme worth exploring, but it is hard to improve on “Buffy.” The idea of the indie band’s song “Through the Trees” being used at the candlelight vigils for the dead classmates is well-handled. And there are some cutesy winks at the audience, as when the indie band talks about getting on a movie soundtrack as a path to fame and fortune, as happened to the Moldy Peaches on the soundtrack of “Juno.” Casting everyone’s favorite boy next door Adam Brody as an “agent of Satan with a really awesome haircut” is fun. Director Karyn Kusama and cinematographer M. David Mullen find some striking compositions, though it is unfortunate that a pool scene recalls the much better teen vampire movie “Let the Right One In.” And what is the deal with that 80’s prom dress? Now that’s horror.

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9

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 8:00 am

An award-winning animated student film has been turned into a full-length feature with intricately-designed visuals but a story-line that feels stuck together with chewing gum and Scotch tape. Tim Burton protege Shane Acker has proven a better student of the letter of his mentor’s work than the spirit. Burton’s films are macabre, even grotesque. His characters may be haunted (literally or metaphorically), tortured (ditto), or murderous (ditto again), but they are as rich and complex as his strikingly imaginative visuals. Acker permits his images to overwhelm the story and the result is a film that is too dark for children and too thin for anyone else.

9 is a little burlap rag doll (voice of Elijah Wood) come to life who finds eight other doll-creatures who appear to be the only sentient survivors of an apocalypse that has extinguished all living things on earth. They are being stalked by the same murderous machines that wiped out their human creators and the movie’s greatest strength is the design and operation of these contraptions. Indeed, it is impossible not to think that the film is more interested in them than it is in its ostensible heroes.

The story keeps getting in the way of our connecting to the earnest little figures whose quest is murky at first and then undermined by an unsatisfying conclusion. “9” only gets a 6.

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Animation Fantasy Science-Fiction