Thank You! This Site is 19 Years Old This Week!

Posted on July 26, 2014 at 3:59 pm

It seems like yesterday, but it was 19 years ago this week that I first began writing reviews online as The Movie Mom®. Anyone remember Prodigy? The first appearance of my website was via the Sears-owned online service, so long ago it does not even turn up in Wayback searches. At the time, web sites were in the thousands, not the millions, and there were hardly any from corporations or publications. Blogging had not yet been invented, much less Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Vine.

I did all of my own code for the first four years. I could never have imagined that less than two decades later I would be able to post movie clips, much less that I would have written books about movies, had the privilege of weekly radio spots to review films, or had so many wonderful visitors, many of whom send me emails and comment on my posts. That first review is now one of 2500, plus more than 4000 interviews, commentaries, quizzes, giveaways, lists, and more that have me close to 7000 posts. Thank you for 19 wonderful years!

In honor of my anniversary, my ebooks will all be free on Amazon through July 30, 2014 (except for Fathers, free today only)! That’s 50 Must-See Movies: Fathers, 50 Must-See Movies: Mothers, 50 Must-See Movies: Weddings, and 101 Must-See Movie Moments. (Coming this fall: my new one on teachers)

Enjoy!

The Legend of Hercules

Posted on January 9, 2014 at 11:20 pm

Director Renny Harlin has made a Hercules epic with drab, washed-out cinematography, poorly staged action scenes, incompetent acting, bad hair, terrible computer effects, and dialogue that lands more heavily than the title character’s punch. Even at just over 90 minutes it feels much too long. Harlin is way too fond of halting the acting with a slo-mo pause or freeze frame. By the last half hour it was worse than repetitive; it was an infuriating tactic for prolonging the end of the film. Talk about adding insult to injury.

In the first of two 3D Hercules movies scheduled for 2014, “Twilight” hottie Kellan Lutz plays the legendary strong man. Instead of sticking with the perfectly good Labors of Hercules storyline that has captivated audiences for thousands of years, this movie goes straight for the generic sword and sandal epic — there’s the Tessarakonteres with galley slaves whipped to row harder, the battle scenes with soldiers wielding swords and shields, the combat to the death in an arena with thousands of the least persuasive computer-generated audience members ever. There’s some argle bargle about whether our hero will accept his destiny and there’s a love story. There’s even, heaven help us, a going into battle pep talk so beyond Lutz’s capacity that he sounds less like a demigod than like he’s ordering a round of beers for the fellows.

Hercules is the son of Queen Alcmene and Zeus, the leader of the gods. Alcmene has already had a son with her husband, the cruel despot King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins). She prays to Hera for help, and the goddess gives her permission for her husband, Zeus, to give Alcmene another son, who will be half-god and will bring peace back to the kingdom. Amphitryon knows the boy is not his.

We skip ahead 20 years to see Hercules (Lutz) frolicking with the beautiful blonde Princess Hebe (Gaia Weiss). They are in love, but she is pledged to his angry and jealous half-brother, the heir to the throne. Soon, Hercules is sent away on a mission that will turn out to be a trap. He is taken prisoner, sold into slavery, and forced into gladiator-style combat to the death.

The actors were cast for their muscles and fighting skills rather than their acting. That would not be so bad except that they are called upon to spout clunky dialogue in fake — and highly variable — English theater-style accents. But what really takes all the air out of this balloon is its very premise. If Hercules has super-powers and the protection of his Olympian father, it dissipates any dramatic tension or sense of genuine peril. And when the crowd goes wild and starts yelling “Hercules! Hercules!” it is impossible not to think of Eddie Murphy, and wish he would show up to pick up the pace.

Parents should know that this movie includes sword and sandal-style epic action with a extensive fighting and battles, characters injured and killed, also murder and attempted suicide, sexual situation and some sexual references.

Family discussion: Why did Hercules resist his destiny? Why did he give up his special powers for the final battle?

If you like this, try: the original “Clash of the Titans” and Russell Crowe’s “Gladiator”

The Kings of Summer

Posted on June 6, 2013 at 6:00 pm

When Mark Twain had Huck Finn leave the kind-hearted widow who hoped to “civilize” him to “light out for the territories,” he tapped into the dream of all teenagers and the teenagers inside all of us to escape from all rules and restrictions and create our lives from scratch. Peter Pan and the Lost Boys had Neverland. Baby boomers sang along with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young about “trying to get ourselves back to the garden.” Every generation wishes for the simplicity and purity of the natural world. In the wise, touching, and often wildly funny “The Kings of Summer,” three 15-year-olds follow their own call of the wild to run away from home and build a house in the woods. Their parents may see them as boys, but they want a place where they can define what it means to be men.

Nick Robinson, who perfected a look of exquisite pain at the humiliating behavior of his father in a brilliant series of Cox cable commercials, plays Joe Toy. He lives with his widowed father, Frank (“Parks and Recreation’s” Nick Offerman in a witty and heartfelt performance). Of course at that age, a parent does not have to do anything to be excruciatingly embarrassing. It is bad enough that Frank actually exists, but he also has the nerve to tell Joe what to do. Worse, he is dating someone, and worst of all he expects Joe to play a board game with her. The horror!

Joe’s best friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso), is smoldering with his own adolescent fury. His parents say things like, “Rope in the attitude, mister” and just because his ankle is in a cast, they want him to be careful. How dare they! “I’m happy to be where my parents are not,” he says.

Another kid named simply Biaggio (the wonderfully oddball Moises Arias) wants to join them. He does not have any special problem with his family. He just “didn’t want to do nothing.”

Joe, Patrick, and Biaggio build their house in the woods. They breathe the air of free men and rejoice in their liberation from all rules and conventions. They vow “to boil our own water, kill our own food, build our own shelter, be our own men.” If foraging for food in the woods means a stop by the Boston Market across the highway from the forest, well, no one can argue with how good it tastes.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and writer Chris Galletta bring a fresh and sympathetic eye to the story, evoking the pleasure of what feel — for a little while — like endless possibilities. The film perfectly captures that liminal moment when teenagers live in the space between childhood and becoming an adult. And they’re old enough to carry it off, at first. They are young enough to be certain their parents are wrong about pretty much everything — and to be confident that they can do everything better. The house is like something the Lost Boys might build for Peter Pan, with a stolen door from a port-a-potty for the entrance and essentials like a mailbox, a slide, a basketball hoop, and an air hockey table.As is often the case with boys of 15, they look like they are from three different planets. Patrick is muscular and physically much more mature than the others and Biaggio could be 12. Joe is somewhere in the middle. Biaggio’s random and inscrutable pronouncements are amusingly accepted by the other two as if they made as much sense as anything else, or as if making sense did not matter. And of course the most unexpected complication is when a girl comes through the port-a-potty door.

Like that other icon of the dream of escaping the oppression of civilization, Henry David Thoreau, the boys learn that there is a time to go to the woods, and a time to come home.

Parents should know that this movie has very strong and crude language and teen drinking and smoking.

Family discussion: What was the most important thing Joe learned? What about Frank? What would you bring to a house in the woods?

If you like this, try: “Stand By Me”

Related Tags:

Comedy Drama Independent

This is 40

Posted on December 20, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Writer-director Judd Apatow has made the mistake of believing that the audience will find his wife and children and mid-life crisis as relatable and endearing as he does. And there is nothing more fatal to a movie than a gross miscalculation about the appeal of its characters. It’s fine to make a movie about unpleasant people as long as the movie knows they are unpleasant. But this movie asks us to care about the concerns of people who care very little for anything but the most superficial and selfish problems, with no sense at all of how shallow and unappealing they are.

Apatow’s mega-successful “Knocked Up” was the story of a successful professional woman who became pregnant after a one-night stand with a man who was neither successful nor professional. The pregnant woman’s sister Debbie (Apatow’s real-life spouse Leslie Mann) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd) provided a comedic counterpoint, coping with marital stress, including two children, played by Apatow and Mann’s real-life children. In one scene, Debbie and her sister are not permitted into a club because Debbie is too old and her sister is pregnant. Debbie is devastated by the loss of this important validation. Debbie is shrill and demanding, constantly blaming her husband. In one big plot twist, it turns out that the secret he had been hiding from her was not an affair but a fantasy sports group he liked to escape to.

“This is 40” continues the story of Pete and Debbie. She is still shrill and demanding, still constantly blaming her husband, and still pretty much on board with the idea that her self-worth depends on being attractive to strangers in hot clubs. In the opening scene, the week of both Pete’s and Debbie’s 40th birthdays, they are having very enthusiastic sex in the shower when he reveals that his performance has been enhanced with medication. Instead of expressing concern or sympathy or support, she interprets this as evidence that she is no longer as attractive as she was when she was younger. She whines to her personal trainer (Apatow regular Jason Segal) that she is failing to arouse men and he consoles her by saying that she arouses him.

Debbie insists that she and Pete embark on a course of self-improvement that involves graphic depictions of a mammogram and a colonoscopy, and a lot of resolutions about eating better and unplugging the kids from the internet. It does not, however, involve any expressions of generosity, humility, compassion, responsibility, or maturity. Pete and Debbie are aggrieved by the remoteness (her) and dependence (his) of their fathers, but they are not doing much better as parents. I have a sinking feeling that there will a a future sequel for the girls to work out their issues with their parents.

The movie is overlong and saggy, swooping almost randomly from set-piece scene to set-piece scene, and yet it is all supposed to take place in about one week. This continually undercuts any sense of forward momentum and Apatow stuffs his films with so many of his friends that we keep having to be reminded of who all the characters are. And then when we are reminded, we are disappointed all over again. Segal, Chris O’Dowd (“Bridesmaids”), Lena Dunham (“Girls”), Charlene Yi and Melissa McCarthy (“Bridesmaids”) are all trotted out for short bits and some are quite funny (be sure to stay for McCarthy’s outtakes during the credits). And Megan Fox is a standout as an impossibly hot and possibly larcenous employee in Debbie’s boutique. This is Fox’s second top-notch performance this year, following “Friends With Kids” — take that, Michael Bay. There is even an occasional flash of understanding of the challenges of marriage and getting older, as when Pete and Debbie try (but not very hard) to use obviously therapy-inspired tactics for expressing their complaints and disappointments.

But that is not enough to make up for the inert plotline and unappealing characters. For a guy who seems to think about nothing more than the travails of self-absorbed people suffering from arrested development, Apatow has failed to learn that the issue is not growing old — it is growing up.

Parents should know that this film includes extremely graphic and explicit sexual references and situations including fertility issues and an “escort,” constant very strong language, drinking, marijuana, some mild violence (no one badly hurt), family stress, and stealing.

Family discussion: What do we learn about Pete and Debbie from their relationships with their fathers? Why was staying young so important to Debbie?

If you like this, try: “Knocked Up” (featuring the same characters) and “The 40 Year Old Virgin”

The Expendables 2

Posted on August 23, 2012 at 4:37 pm

The Botox budget must be bigger than the catering costs but less than the ordnance in this sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s first round-up of the 80’s and 90’s A-Team for an action extravaganza. That’s A as in AARP.

This time, our heroes: Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture, along with their summer intern and obvious redshirt Liam Hemsworth are on a rescue mission. I’m not going to bother with their character names because the point of this movie is the actors, not the characters.

The guy tied to a chair and about to be tortured is hooded, so you know we are in for a big wink-wink surprise, and yes, it is former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said, “This is embarrassing.” The group rescues him and the Chinese billionaire he was guarding and then literally drops the client off by tossing him out of a plane with Li to guide him down. Li wisely exits the movie at this point, so my hopes for a rematch with Lundgren were tossed out of the plane with him.

Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) calls in a favor that has Stallone and the gang out for a job he insists is simple. All they have to do is retrieve the contents of a safe in a plane that crashed. They will need to take Maggie (the “combat proficient” Nan Yu) along, despite Stallone’s grousing that he does not want to be anyone’s babysitter. Hemsworth comes along for what he says will be his last job because he wants to quit to be with his wonderful girlfriend. He might as well be wearing a sign that says DBTA.

Or, he could be wearing a sign that says, “I am here to let the bad guy show everyone how really, really bad he is. Here I am, cute as a kitten and calling everyone ‘Sir’ and sacrificing myself for the others, so he must be really, really bad.” We also know he is really, really bad because (a) he is played by Jean Claude Van Damme wearing very mean-looking sunglasses and (b) his character’s name is, I am not kidding, Vilian.

The over-the-hill gang engages in various shoot-outs punctuated by lame wisecracks that refer to their iconic roles. Do you want to guess whether someone says, “I’ll be back?” At its best, it’s like watching a theme park stunt spectacular, one set-up after another, with brief distractions as the guys bond by discussing what they would pick for their last meal or just by the usual macho put-downs. Not that any of these guys were great actors to begin with, but they are less so, now. Between the Botox and the scar tissue, their faces don’t really move anymore. As the movie goes on, Li’s decision to literally bail out seems like the wisest move.

Parents should know that this film includes constant mayhem, peril, and violence, chases, explosions, fights, assault weapons, many characters injured and killed, drinking, smoking, and mild sexual references.

Family discussion: What did Barney mean when he said “we keep it light until it is time to get dark.” Why did he agree to fight the bad guy without weapons?

If you like this, try: the earlier action films starring these actors and the first “Expendables” movie

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Series/Sequel