MirrorMask

Posted on September 18, 2005 at 2:21 pm

A curiously distant story is surrounded by enchanting visuals and special effects in this Alice in Wonderland-style tale of a young girl who has to solve a puzzle in a magical land in order to get back home and help her mother get well.

Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) has, as her mother points out, a life most kids her age would love to run away to. Her parents own a little circus. Helena performs as a juggler, but wishes she could stay in her room, making up stories and drawing pictures. Other girls might wish they could join the circus, but Helena wishes she could run away to “real life.” In an angry moment, she says she wishes her mother was dead.

And then Helena’s mother (Gina McKee of Notting Hill) becomes ill and has to have surgery. While she is gone, Helena somehow gets transported to The Dark Lands, a place of fantasy and magic. Nothing is right because the Queen of Light is sleeping and cannot awaken until a missing object is found.

Helena doesn’t just not know where it is; she does not know what it is. Still, she is confident she can find it. She sets off with Valentine (Jason Berry), an adult but an unreliable companion. Helena has to answer the riddle, find the key, and outsmart those who try to stop her to figure out why there is a young woman who looks just like her in what looks like her bedroom, behaving in a way that appalls her. She meets up with two queens, one asleep, one who will do anything to keep her, both looking a little familiar. And through these adventures she learns more about herself and begins to grow up.

But this movie is all about the sights, not the story, and the sights are glorious, all burnished shades of gold and scritchy lines. The magical images will engage and fire the imagination of the audience, even if the story sometimes feels cool and understated.

Parents should know that sensitive viewers of all ages may find some of the images and characters in this movie disturbing. Characters are in peril and a young girl worries about whether her mother will survive an operation. There are unhappy confrontations. Teenagers kiss, which another character finds gross and upsetting.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Helena wanted something different from a life that many kids her age would love to have. What was the most important thing she had to learn on her journey? What was the most important thing that Valentine had to learn? Parents and children often feel, like Helena, that adolescence is like swapping the person you know for someone who looks the same but feels and behaves very differently, the “real” one feeling as though he or she is living in a strange new place. What stories, like this one, have that as a theme?

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy The Wizard of Oz and (for older children and teenagers) Return to Oz, as well as other movie visits to fantasy lands like The Never-Ending Story, Labyrinth, Willow, The Dark Crystal, The Phantom Tollbooth, My Neighbor Totoro and Alice in Wonderland. They may want to take a look at the work of Saul Steinberg and Ronald Searle, whose drawings may have inspired some of the images in this film. And they will enjoy the novels of Neil Gaiman.

G

Posted on August 30, 2005 at 3:21 pm

Audacious, ambitious, and provocative but uneven and ultimately unsatisfying, this long-delayed film adapts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of class, love, and power, The Great Gatsby, to the present. Instead of Jay Gatsby, the gangster who can’t forget the girl he lost, we have Summer G, the gangsta, the head of a successful hip-hop recording label.

Richard T. Jones is commanding as Summer G, whose college romance with Skye (Chenoa Maxwell) ended when she married Chip Hightower (Blair Underwood), heir to a publishing dynasty. He has taken a house in the Hamptons not far from where the Hightowers have a home.

When Skye’s cousin Tre (Andre Royo) comes to interview Summer G, Chip asks him to cover for him so that he can see his girlfriend without Skye’s finding out. Tre refuses, until Chip reminds him that the magazine Tre works for is owned by Chip’s father.

Summer G then puts the same kind of pressure on Tre. He will not cooperate with the interview unless Tre helps him see Skye. Again, Tre refuses at first, then reluctantly agrees.

Summer G’s recording artists are staying with him. One who has not had a hit for a while becomes increasingly dependent on his girlfriend, who goes away for what she says will be just a few days and then stops returning his calls. Another becomes bitter and manipulative when she believes Summer G is not giving her the chance she deserves.

The Fitzgerald novel has plenty of material for an update that raises some contemporary issues of race and class and culture, but this film falters and misses the point and butchers the metaphors, turning a brilliant story into a soapy love triangle.

Jones has a commanding presence and Underwood does what he can with a cardboard cad of a character. But Royo is weak and Maxwell is hopelessly bad and the uneven, bumpy narrative and long delay between completion and release support the rumor that the movie has been recut following unssuccessful test screenings. Fitzgerald famously placed a green light on the dock in this novel. This review is intended to place a red light on any plan to see this film.

Parents should know that this movie has extremely strong language (including the n-word), drinking, smoking, drug references, sexual references and situations, and violence, including guns, with characters injured and killed.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Skye decided to stay with Chip instead of Summer G and how the movie differs from the original book.

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy the earlier film versions of “The Great Gatsby,” especially the with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and a television miniseries.

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Based on a book Drama

Four Brothers

Posted on August 21, 2005 at 5:13 am

We start out on the side of the four adopted brothers who reunite to find the people who murdered their mother, but they lose us in this over-violent and under-sincere story that strays from justice past revenge and into mindless vigilantism.

Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan) is a tough but warm-hearted woman who spent her life getting children out of foster care and into permanent homes. But there were four incorrigibles she could not place, and those were the ones she adopted herself. She made a family with impulse-control-impaired Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), captivated by a hot-tempered honey Angel (Tyrese Gibson), family man/play by the rules Jeremiah (Outkast‘s Andre Benjamin), and would-be rock star Jack (Garrett Hedlund).

At first, it looks like Evelyn was in the wrong place at the wrong time in a random gang-bang convenience store robbery. But then it appears to have been something more sinister, an orchestrated hit. Who would want to kill Evelyn Mercer?

Her sons do not want to wait for the police (Terrence Howard and Josh Charles) to answer that question. They go off on their own, asking questions and insisting on answers. Their preferred method of insisting involves pouring gasoline on the subject and lighting a match.

Director John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood, 2 Fast 2 Furious) knows how to film action scenes, but this time he seems to have forgotten how to make us care about the outcome. Without dramatic legitimacy, it all just seems noisy and gratuitous.

We begin as sympathetic to the brothers because of their loss. But they keep telling us how endearing and honorable and committed they are instead of showing us. Howard, the summer’s breakthrough actor following brilliant performances in Hustle and Flow and Crash shows more class and charisma in his brief appearance as a sympathetic policeman than all four of the brothers combined. A movie that has so little sense of how it comes across that it overestimates the appeal of its main characters is a struggle to sit through; one that underestimates the appeal of its other performers is a crime.

Parents should know that this is an extremely violent movie, not just in the portrayal of many violent confrontations with heavy artillery but in the almost nihilistically excessive nature of the damage. Characters drink and use drugs. They use strong and crude language, including homophobic insults. The bad guy is ruthless and enjoys humiliating other people. The movie has sexual references and situations and non-sexual nudity. A strength of the movie is the portrayal of strong inter-racial family and romantic relationships. But it is too bad that a movie that is so careful to avoid racial stereotypes in the good and bad guys descends to a cliched “spitfire” characterization of a Latina woman.

Families who see this movie should talk about how people like Evelyn Mercer can change the lives of people around them.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Singleton’s version of Shaft. And they might like to see the movie that inspired this one, The Sons of Katie Elder, a western starring John Wayne and Dean Martin. And they may enjoy seeing outstanding performances by Howard and Taraji P. Henson (who plays Jeremiah’s wife) in very different roles in Hustle and Flow (very mature material).

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Bad News Bears

Posted on July 23, 2005 at 7:47 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Extremely crude, vulgar, and profane language for a PG-13
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character abuses alcohol and smokes
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild comic peril
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie, but some stereotyping
Date Released to Theaters:	2005

Here is a list of reasons to remake The Bad News Bears:

And here is a list of reasons not to:

1. It’s been done. And re-done. And re-re-done. The original 1976 movie sparked a perennial series of movies about scrappy little sports teams made up of losers and klutzes who somehow, in the space of one quick montage or two, develop skills, understand the importance of teamwork, find some respect for themselves and each other, and provide redepmption — and often romance — for their previous cynical and/or burned-out and self-centered coach. In the last few weeks alone, Kicking & Screaming and Rebound have tried to apply the formula to soccer and basketball.

2. Times have changed. When the original was released almost 30 years ago, less than a decade after the institution of the Motion Picture Association’s rating system, it was still a shock to hear crude, vulgar, and profane language spoken to and by children. In 1976, the idea was so outrageous it was impossible to take it seriously and there was some appeal in the frank unpretentiousness, even subversiveness it brought to a post Ball Four-world just getting used to the idea of athletes being less than idealized all-American heroes. Since then, we are used to, even exhausted by the no-illusions bad behavior by athletes. And, in part because of the success of the original movie, we are used to, even bored by the idea of kids using bad language.

3. The original wasn’t that great to begin with, and whatever appeal it had has diminished over time. Take away the gimmick of the bad language, and there’s not much left in the original version or the remake. The script’s idea of updating is to change the sponsorship of the kids’ team from “Chico’s Bail Bonds” to “Bo-Peep’s Gentlemen’s Club.” This provides an excuse for frequent reaction shots of the Bo-Peep girls cheering in the stands.

4. Most important of all — it may have been possible to make a worthwhile remake of The Bad News Bears, but this is not it.

This is a one-joke movie, and the joke is not a good one. The 2005 edition is, it must be said, Bad News.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Morris Buttermaker, a washed-up baseball player (his career in the major leagues lasted less than one inning) turned exterminator who is hired to coach a baseball team made up of 12-year-olds that is only in the league because of a lawsuit. Buttermaker is there for the paycheck.

The kids are obnoxious and hopeless. So is the coach. They get so badly creamed in the first part of their first game that they forfeit. But then, inspired in part by the arrogance of the championship team’s coach (Greg Kinnear), Buttermaker decides to do some actual coaching. The kids improve. And when Buttermaker seeks out the daughter he has not seen in three years to get her to join the team as a pitcher and gets her to entice onto the team a juvenile delinquent-type with an attitude problem who can throw and hit, the team starts to score, then win. And guess whose team they play in the season’s last big game?

There was a 10-year-old sitting in front of me who laughed uproariously every time someone in the movie used the s-word. He laughed a lot. Most of the movie is the same thing over and over — either Buttermaker or the kids saying something completely obnoxious and inappropriate. It doesn’t work any better the 99th time than it does the first.

Furthermore, for anyone who cares about these things, Buttermaker’s decision-making and redemption seem completely arbitrary. I’m not saying we need an “aha!” moment with a light bulb going on over his head, but there should be some sort of narrative basis for character development, even in a slob comedy.

Director Richard Linklater, who handled the same theme superbly in School of Rock, does not have the benefit of a terrific script this time. The characters are not involving or believable.

The movie’s one asset is the always-underappreciated Billy Bob Thornton, whose understated delivery and impeccable timing give the flimsiest of dialogue some snap and verve. He has the kids come with him on an exterminating job and when two of them start to spray each other with the lethal chemicals, he tells them to stop. You just have to hear how he then says, “That stuff’s expensive” to understand what it means to be a movie star. Someday someone will give him a part in a much better movie and that will be very, very good news indeed.

Parents should know that this is one of those movies that drives a truck through the loopholes of the MPAA rating system. Most will find it unsuitable for chldren. It features constant crude, vulgar, profane, insulting, racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise imappropriate language used by and to children, but because it does not include the limited “automatic-R” words, it gets a PG-13 rating. It has jokes about cancer, child abuse, casual sex (a t-shirt reads, “She looked good last night,” a visit with the children to Hooters), and disabilities. A coach insults his players and they insult eadch other (though it omits the most famous quote from the original movie, with a highly un-PC description of the team). Fathers speak abusively to their children. The coach is unrepentent (most of the time) and irresponsible. He drinks constantly (including drinking and driving). He smokes, lies (and tells a child to lie), and has what appears to be a one-night stand with the mother of one of his players. A strength of the movie is its portrayal diverse characters, including a disabled kid who is tough and resilient.

Families who see this movie should talk about Buttermaker’s comment that once you quit, it makes it easier to keep quitting. What is a “moral victory” and was this a good example?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the original The Bad News Bears as well as some of the movies it inspired, including The Mighty Ducks and Sandlot.

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War of the Worlds

Posted on June 26, 2005 at 1:50 pm

“Is it the terrorists?” a frightened child asks, because that is the scariest thing she knows. But what makes this thing scary is that it is something no one knows. It is beyond our knowledge, even beyond our imagination. Earth is under attack and no one knows by whom or what they want.

These are not the “let’s play musical notes together” aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the Reese’s Pieces-loving, bicycle-flying botanist alien from E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. There’s no “Take me to your leader,” or Klaatu Barada Niktu. These aliens don’t even want to keep humans on as slave labor as in Battlefield Earth. They don’t want us to understand or negotiate with them. It does not seem to be about power or plunder. They just want to destroy us. As one character says, “This is not a war any more than there’s a war between men and maggots. It’s an extermination.”

Steven Spielberg knows two things better than anyone else who ever made a movie, and both are in top form here. First is his extraordinarily evocative sense of family life, the way every detail of home and connection (even, maybe especially the most frayed of connections) tell the story and make us care about it. A ribbon, a mirror, a boot, a box of family photographs, a Beach Boys song –- the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the unthinkable sustains a “golly” factor that grabs our throats and our hearts at the same time.

The special effects in the movie are dazzling. Just when we thought that we were so accustomed to the limitless wonders of CGI that we could never be stunned in a theater again, Spielberg just plain knocks our socks off. My husband counted eight spontaneous “Oh my Gods” coming from me during the movie. It isn’t just that it all looks real, seamlessly integrating the effects. It’s that what looks so real is so “Oh my God.”

The images are fresh and imaginative and yet perfectly believable, mixing the normal with the inconceivable, from the vast alien machines to the buckling of the earth and the apocalyptic landscapes. The most vivid images are when we see the trappings of everyday life transformed. In one moment of complete insanity, the bells at a railroad crossing start to clang, and the striped barriers come down as though it is a perfectly ordinary day and the commuter train is about to arrive on schedule. Everyone stops and takes a breath and then the train comes in, filled with flames.

Spielberg’s other great trick is his mastery of scale, and again, that use of context brings the story literally home. At least half of the “Oh my Gods” were responses to wow-style reveals of new threats, new invasions.

And Spielberg makes invasion into a theme, from the very beginning, when with stunning economy he sets the stage for all that is to come.

Our hero-to-be, Ray (Tom Cruise) arrives home late. His ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), pregnant by her new husband, is standing there with a hand on her hip. The new husband is handsome, a little sleek-looking in a black turtleneck, but clearly so nice you can’t even bring yourself to hate him, though Ray has clearly tried. Even though the ex-wife is late, she decides to carry their daughter’s suitcase into Ray’s house. Ray is very uncomfortable as she opens his all-but-empty refrigerator and peeks into his messy bedroom. He feels invaded. His children seem alien. And yet, in one of the most understated but meaningful moments in the movie, a shared joke between Ray and Mary Ann shows us a glimpse of Ray’s asperity and resolve.

But all of that is under the surface. When we meet him, Ray has long been used to disappointing people. It is not clear which is worse, the sullen animosity of his son Robbie (Ray wears a Yankees baseball cap; Robbie pulls out one with a Red Sox logo) or the patient lack of expectations from his daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning). But when it becomes clear that something very, very bad is happening, Ray will do anything to keep his family safe. This will be his story more than it is the story of the battles. The movie is at heart, well, heart.

And Cruise does heart well. He and Fanning anchor the film with outstanding performances of conviction and charisma. Rachel’s protection of her “space” and Ray’s efforts to care for her memory and spirit all echo the invasion theme. The story moves well from the large scale destruction of a city to a small-scale intrusion into a shattered basement retreat occupied by three people. Throughout, the focus is on Spielberg’s favorite subject, the family as fortress. The government barely exists, the army is dedicated and honorable but overmatched.

And, as Ray points out, the humans are almost as dangerous as the aliens. Ray is not the only one who will do anything to keep his family alive and the ochlochratic chaos means that nowhere is safe.

The story is affecting, the action scenes are thrilling, the issues are resonant. Yet it is not ultimately as satisfying as less skillful movies like Independence Day. It may be wiser and it may have more artistic validity, but summer explosion movies call out for a more complete resolution than the Wells book allows. A valid but subtle point is lost, not for lack of respectful presentation, but perhaps because ot it.

Spoilers alert: Parents should know that this is an extremely tense and intense movie, with constant peril and violence. Many characters are killed. Many are neatly vaporized, but there are scenes with dead bodies, a brutal off-camera murder, a death by impalement, guns, grenades, lasers, and other weapons, and some grisly images. Characters use brief strong language. There are tense confrontations between family members. Some viewers will find the behavior of the humans more disturbing than that of the aliens.

Someone once said that the aliens in movies tell us more about what we are thinking about than about any likely real-life extraterrestrials. The UFO movies of the cold war era were, under this analysis, a reflection of our fears about communism and the atomic bomb — with the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still as examples, contrasted with the more benign aliens of Spielberg’s other movies. What does this movie tell us about our current fears?

Families who see this movie should talk about how the story has changed since it was originally written by H.G. Wells more than 100 years ago. How was that era’s interest in the relatively recent scientific discoveries reflected in the book and how has the current version used modern concerns to connect to a contemporary audience? What do you think about the balance of the story between the action and the personal drama as Ray’s character has to become more responsible and
find a way to communicate with his children. How did both parts of the story help each other? In a situation like this, who do you help? Who do you accept help from?

Families who appreciate this film may enjoy listening to the legendary Orson Welles broadcast. This version of the book has the radio script as well. The text is also available online at Project Gutenberg. The new version has a small tribute to the George Pal movie. They will also enjoy Independence Day, one of the all-time best alien invasion movies, and they might get a kick out of Battlefield Earth, one of the worst, and Signs, one that has a bit of both.