The Square

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 8:06 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violence and language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive and graphic violence including guns, arson, and car crashes, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	May 7, 2010

When the first 10 minutes of film introduce us to an illicit affair, a kickback scheme, and a hidden bag filled with money, we know we’re in for a twisty thriller, and “The Square” delivers.

Brothers Nash and Joel Edgerton have been compared to the Coens, and “The Square” is in some ways a tribute to the Coens’ “Blood Simple,” with its theme of the tangled web of deception and betrayal. Ray is a successful construction manager working on a resort project, comfortably married but having an affair with Carla (Claire van der Boom), a pretty, young hairdresser uncomfortably married to a man who has never told her about the hidden bag of cash in their laundry room ceiling and doesn’t know she knows about it.

Carla tells Ray she will get the cash so they can run away together. But in order to deflect suspicion from them, they will have to make it look like the money was burned in a fire. Ray hires Billy (co-screenwriter Joel Edgerton) to burn her house down while they are all enjoying a Christmas picnic and therefore thoroughly alibi-ed. Things start to wrong, and then wronger, and then, well, if you’ve ever read a novel by James M. Cain (or tried to make a cell phone call with a fading battery or leave a message with an unreliable person) you know that things will spin sickeningly out of control with the inevitable logic of a nightmare.

The noir-ish plot works well in the sunny Australian setting. It’s summer in December Down Under, which adds to the disorienting tone of the film for Northern Hemisphere-ites. The Edgertons keep us wavering from support of the characters who are our on-screen representatives to horror as they cross over line after line, finally giving up any pretense of rationalization as each step gets them more directly involved and more deeply enmeshed. Every encounter leaves them more culpable, their victims less deserving. No wonder Ray doodles row after row of men in claustrophobic little boxes stacked on top of each other. They look like tiny prison cells, or maybe the filmed frames of a movie thriller.

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Mother and Child

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 6:35 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexuality, brief nudity, and language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, inter-racial romance
Date Released to Theaters:	May 7, 2010

Rodrigo García, who showed great taste, restraint, and sensitivity in telling the intertwined lives of women in “Nine Stories” and “Things You Can Tell Just from Looking At Her” shows less of all three in the clunky, awkward “Mother and Child,” bringing together the stories of three women who struggle with loss as mothers and daughters.
Annette Bening is Karen, a hospital worker who is kind to patients and to her dying mother, but brusque to everyone else. She gave up a baby for adoption when she was 14, and she thinks of her constantly.
Kerry Washington is Lucy, happily married but unable to have a child. She and her husband are trying to adopt.
Naomi Watts is Elizabeth. She has excellent skills as a lawyer, but she is restless and never stays anywhere long. She is distant, self-contained, but something of a sexual predator, with a special thrill in messing with men who seem settled.
These three stories begin as separate and then weave together, echoing and underscoring the themes of maternal loss and longing. But Garcia’s gift for sketching in complete and complex characters eludes him here, and even these three extraordinary performers cannot rescue the story from soapy melodrama.

(more…)

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Drama Family Issues Movies -- format

Preacher’s Kid

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 8:29 am

Former Destiny’s Child singer Letoya Luckett has the title role in this touching story of a sheltered young woman from a small town who joins a traveling gospel show. She finds her values and her faith challenged by the temptations of the world and must find her way back home. Her father, too, must learn to open his heart in this story of a prodigal daughter and the power of redemption and forgiveness.

What makes this story work is a lovely performance by Luckett and the glorious music. The unabashed portrayal of the sustaining power of faith even in the most difficult and humiliating moments is touching and inspiring.

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Drama Musical Spiritual films

Leap Year

Posted on May 4, 2010 at 8:20 am

A movie’s premise can be implausible and still work. The audience does not have to buy into whatever it is that the hero and heroine are after long as we believe that the movie’s characters believe in it. But in “Leap Year,” the premise and its ensuing complications are so preposterous that it just can’t work, despite the best efforts of its adorable leads and postcard-pretty settings. It has become something of a tradition to lead off the year with a weak romantic comedy, and we can cross the 2010 edition off the list.

The ones to blame here are screenwriters Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, also responsible for the mind-numbingly painful Surviving Christmas and Made of Honor. Once, many years ago, they made a fresh and endearing little film about a high school graduation party with a cast of promising newcomers and a soundtrack of unexpected treats. That was “Can’t Hardly Wait.” But since then, they have made one formulaic, synthetic failure after another.

Their first movie had heart. Everything since then has been about what can get studio approval. These are “elevator pitch” movies — the premise is based on a successful film and can be summarized in an elevator ride, and the deal-makers rely on established stars with a lot of appeal to make it work. Their last movie tweaked “My Best Friend’s Wedding” by making the BFF who wanted to stop the nuptials the guy. This one takes the idea of the glossy “French Kiss,” the classics “I Know Where I’m Going” and “It Happened One Night” and about two dozen other squabbling-couple-dealing-with-a-disaster-prone-journey movies and, as Woody Allen once said of his mother’s cooking, “puts it through the de-flavorizing machine.”

Amy Adams in full twinkle mode plays Anna. She is, predictably, uptight, a bit of a control freak, and dying to have her perfect-on-paper boyfriend propose to her. But alas, he gives her diamond earrings instead of an engagement ring, just before he leaves for a meeting in Dublin. When her ne’er-do-well father (John Lithgow) — can his unreliability be the source of her need to be in control? — tells her that in Ireland, women can propose on February 29, she decides that in spite of her lifelong fear of flying, she will pop over to Dublin to pop the question.

But of course the best-laid plans of perky heroines in romantic comedies always go wrong, and here enters the complication. Handsome bartender Matthew Goode, for reasons that are too dull to go into, agrees to get her the rest of the way to Dublin, and all of the predictable problems line up like an obstacle course between us and time to go home. Car problems. Party crashing. Having to pretend to be married. Some flickers of romance that are quickly crushed by some un-funny contrivances and pratfalls. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

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Date movie Romance

The Tooth Fairy

Posted on May 4, 2010 at 8:09 am

Cute kid + The Rock in a pink tutu = movie deal.

After the success of The Game Plan, Dwayne Johnson (nom de wrestling: The Rock) has become the go-to guy for movies about taming the gentle giant. So once again, the fun is seeing Johnson playing an arrogant jock who is schooled by just about everyone.

This time, Johnson is a hockey player named Derek who has been knocked down to the minor leagues following an injury. His nickname is “The Tooth Fairy” because his blocking is so aggressive that it sometimes knocks out the opposing player’s teeth. He is proud that he leads the league in penalty time. But he is cynical and disappointed in his life, and when a young fan says he hopes to play professionally, Derek bluntly tells him that it will never happen.

Derek is dating Carly (sweetly played by Ashley Judd), a single mom with a cute little girl and a sulky middle school boy. Derek impatiently almost tells Carly’s daughter that there is no tooth fairy. That night, under his pillow, he receives a summons. Suddenly, he has sprouted wings and is wearing a pink tutu. For the crime of failing to believe, he has been sentenced to two weeks of duty as a tooth fairy. With guidance from an administrative fairy (the towering Stephen Merchant of the UK’s “The Office” and “Extras”) and the fairy godmother (a regal Julie Andrews), Derek is outfitted with all of the necessary equipment (including a male version of the uniform) and sent out to retrieve some teeth and tuck money under some pillows.

This turns out to be quite a challenge. Breaking into people’s homes for benign reasons is still breaking and entering, and Derek will need his shrinking gunk, amnesia powder, and invisibility spray. And there will be times when a tooth fairy emergency will come at the wrong moment, and misunderstandings will have to be straightened out. The film has a number of screenwriters who seem to have missed a meeting on consistency in the tooth fairy rulebook and the wings themselves are not very attractive. But everyone is game, the silly humor is good-natured, and Merchant is not the only one who has some fun making Johnson seem small.

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Comedy Fantasy For the Whole Family