The Great Buck Howard

Posted on July 21, 2009 at 10:59 am

This story about a retro performer itself has a very retro feeling, as though it is a recently rediscovered artifact. The likable Colin Hanks plays Troy Gabel, who drops out of law school with some vague thought that he would like to write. To support himself, he applies for a job as assistant to Buck Howard (John Malkovich), known professionally as The Great Buck Howard. He is also sometimes known as a magician, which he is not. He is a mentalist, someone who astounds the audience with feats of mind-reading and hypnotism. He was once popular and successful. He guested over 60 times on “The Tonight Show,” back when it was the real “Tonight Show,” the one with Johnny. But somehow, he lost his place on the A List and now performs in small, half-filled venues.

While he can be bitter about his lack of recognition and demanding of Troy, when he is on stage he seems perfectly happy and at home, always apparently genuine with his signature greeting, “I love this town!” And Troy, well aware of the cheesiness of an act that seems more suited to the days of Ed Sullivan than the era of YouTube, can’t help admiring Buck’s showmanship and resilience. A young pr executive (Emily Blunt) arrives in Cincinnati to coordinate the press for Buck’s dramatic new effect. And both Buck and Troy learn something about what really matters to them.

Hanks is a likeable onscreen presence with an easy affability, and he does as much as he can with a character that is written with only one dimension — if that. His best scenes are with his real-life father, Tom Hanks, playing his on-screen father, who disapproves of his decision to leave law school. Malkovich has a lot of fun with his role as Buck, enthusiastically pumping the hands of everyone he meets and showing the character’s mingled sense of entitlement and insecurity, acute awareness of how he comes across to an audience and lack of awareness of how he comes across one-to-one. Its old-fashioned structure and unpretentiousness give it some extra appeal. And even though it is all pretend, it is fun to see Buck’s act.

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Coraline

Posted on July 21, 2009 at 8:00 am

In the grand tradition of Alice, Dorothy, Milo, and the Pevensie children, Coraline enters a portal to a magical world that is both thrilling and terrifying, one that will both enchant her and demand her greatest resources of courage and integrity. And it will teach her that she does being given whatever she wants is not what she thought — that what she thinks she wants may not be what she wants after all.

Coraline (voice of Dakota Fanning) is bored and lonely. She and her parents have just moved into a new home and she does not know anyone. Her mother (voice of Teri Hatcher) and father (voice of John Hodgman, who plays the PC in the Mac commercials) are distracted and busy with work. While they type away furiously on their computers about gardening, they never actually go outside and plant anything. Coraline meets her neighbors, a pair of one-time performers (voices of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), a man training singing mice (voice of Ian McShane), and a boy her age named Wybie (voice of Robert Bailey Jr.), to whom she takes an immediate dislike.

She explores her surroundings and finds a mysterious locked door. Her mother tells her since the house was converted to make apartments it only opens onto a brick wall. But when she tries it herself, it opens into a tube-shaped corridor that leads to a place very like but also very unlike her own home and neighborhood. Everything is brighter and more colorful. The mother and father tell her that they are her Other parents. They sound just like her real parents and they look like them, too, except that they are utterly devoted and attentive and generous, and except for their eyes, which are sewn-on black buttons.

The Other world is enchanting for a while, with all kinds of diversions and performances. Many, like the Other parents, echo the places and characters from home. But then it begins to feel too synthetic and a little creepy. When the Other mother asks her sweetly to replace her eyes with buttons, Coraline goes home. But home is not the same. Something has happened and she will have to return to the Other place for an adventure that will require all of her courage, perseverance, and some growing up, too.

Coraline must follow the storyline and grow disenchanted with the Other place but we have the luxury of reveling in it. The creepier it gets, the more mesmerizing the visuals, ravishingly grotesque and dazzlingly inventive when the Other Mother suddenly elongates, her cheekbones sticking out like flying buttresses and her arms and legs getting spider-y. This is the first stereoscopic 3D film made in the painstakingly meticulous stop-motion system in which no more than 2-4 seconds can be completed each day because every frame requires as many as a thousand tiny adjustments. The 3D effect is all-encompassing and utterly entrancing as we feel as though we are inside the Other world as its uneasy false cheeriness slides away and we discover what is really going on. Like her parents, Coraline has been separated from authenticity of experience, in her case because she is a child. But the journey to the Other world shows her that she has what she needs to become more fully herself and to find a more vivid and vibrant life in the place she once thought of as drab and uninvolving.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Posted on July 13, 2009 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2005
Date Released to DVD:	2005
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000GYI3PY

Mrs. Palfrey (Joan Plowright) did not think of herself as someone who would live in the shabby gentility of the Claremont, a residential hotel in London. We never learn the details of what brought her there or keeps her there, but we do not need to. We learn everything we need to know from the resigned but not cheerless sigh of acceptance as she sees her room for the first time, and from her quiet courage as she walks into the dining room

Mrs. Palfrey has hopes of hearing from her grandson, who works in London. And she may have hopes of finding companionship at the Claremont. But it is an unexpected encounter with a young writer named Ludovic (Rupert Friend) that leads to a true friendship.

A lovely antidote to summer movies filled with crashes, explosions, aliens, and teenagers, this is a bittersweet but touching story for grown-ups told with grace and wisdom.

Knowing

Posted on July 7, 2009 at 8:00 am

When MIT astrophysics professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage in one-note mournful mode) looks distracted and thoughtful as he invites his class to debate randomness vs. determinism, you don’t have to be much of a determinist to figure out that as inevitably as night follows day, John is about to be hit with some Evidence of a Greater Plan. This isn’t determinism, the idea that events that may seem random are a part of some greater pattern. This is just predictable hogwash, and it gets even hogwashier until it arrives at an ending that manages to be inevitable, uninspired, and preposterous.

John’s son Caleb (a sincere Chandler Canterbury) attends a school that is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The ceremony involves opening a time capsule filled with drawings from children on its opening day. But the envelope Caleb is given to open does not have a drawing of spaceships. It has an apparently random string of numbers. John notices that one string is 09/11/2001 and the number killed that day. A night-long Google search later, he has assigned many of the numbers to known disasters — and figured out that the final three dates are still in the future.

And then this becomes just another big, dumb, loud, effects-driven movie. Forget determinism; if one character behaved in a rational manner, the movie would be 20 minutes long. Three dates in the future? That of course means that the first one is there to prove the theory. Next, John figures out that the next one will happen in NY. Instead of staying in Cambridge, he heads for the location so that he — and the audience — can be in the middle of a technically impressive but narratively brutal catastrophe. And then we are all headed for the big finish (and I mean FINISH), but first there is a lot of completely pointless racing around in a fruitless attempt to build some tension.

The movie sinks from dumb to offensive first when it devotes so much loving detail to the graphic, even clinical depiction of pointless calamity and second when it ultimately and cynically appropriates signifiers of religious import in an attempt to justify itself. Professor Koestler, in a world of rational determinism, this movie would never have gotten the green light. Case closed.

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My Sister’s Keeper

Posted on June 25, 2009 at 6:32 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, some disturbing images, sensuality, language and brief teen drinking
Profanity:	Brief strong language (one f-word, a few other curse words)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen gets drunk
Violence/ Scariness:	A theme of the movie is cancer and there are characters who are very ill with explicit and graphic images of treatment and symptoms, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	June 26, 2009

How far would you go to save your child’s life? How far should you go? Those are the questions posed — and largely ducked — in this film based on the best-selling book, My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. The New York Times recently said that in Picoult’s books, which often focus on “terrible things” happening to children, “he assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles multiple and unforeseen.”

The “terrible things” here are inspired by a real-life story. Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), learn that no one in their family matched their daughter well enough to be able to donate bone marrow or blood cells she needs for cancer treatment. So, they decided to have another baby, one specifically genetically tweaked to be able to provide her sister with healthy cells, starting with the blood from her umbilical cord. As she says, most children arrive by accident, but she was designed to be born for spare parts. At age 11, having spent her entire life being pricked and prodded and now being asked to give up a kidney, Anna (Abigail Breslin) hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue for “medical emancipation,” to get permission to stop.

Solomon had to choose between two mothers who both claimed the same baby and he was not related to any of them. But Sara and Brian must choose between their daughters, and they are so desperate to save the one who is sick that they cannot admit to themselves the damage they are doing to the one who is well. The ones who are well — there is also a son who is so overlooked that he sneaks back into the house after being out all night only to find that no one noticed.

Director Nick Cassavetes (“The Notebook”) wisely changed the jarring ending in the novel and is very effective in conveying the matter-of-fact mastery of the details of the symptoms and treatments, a touch of authenticity that is in sharp contrast to the one-dimensionality of the characters. He overdoes the pop songs on the soundtrack, though, with so many montages it feels like a music video punctuated with brief scenes of family anguish. But Picolt insists on allotting tragedy to every character as though she is dealing cards. And she undermines the power of the story and its themes with a syrupy overlay that distorts the issues so that the result is more gooey than dramatic. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel composes exquisite images. But they add to the sense the film does exactly what it says it does not do and ties everything up in a mode that is just too neat and convenient instead of engaging in a forthright and honest way with the issues and the characters. That just rings hollow and ultimately disrespectful to the conflicts it purports to portray.

Patric, who should be in more movies, is outstanding as Brian. The look in his eyes as he watches his daughter go on a special date is heart-wrenching. Diaz, in her first role as a mother, is fine in the quieter moments but never reaches the ferocity that is at the heart of the story. As the sick girl, Sofia Vassilieva is luminious and wise. But the best moments on screen come from Joan Cusack as the judge. Every tiny gesture and look is searingly authentic, a bracing dose of reality in the midst of the gooey saints all around her.