List: Passover Movies

Posted on April 19, 2011 at 9:59 pm

Reposting — Hag Sameach! Passover is not just about remembering the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It is about telling the story. Thousands of years before people talked about “learning styles,” the Seder included many different ways of telling the story, so that everyone would be included, and everyone would feel the power of the journey toward freedom. The Haggadah makes the story come alive through taste, smell, and touch as well as sight and hearing, and through the example of the four sons it presents the story to the wise, the simple, the skeptic, and most especially to the young — one of the highlights of each Seder is when the youngest person present asks the traditional four questions, beginning with “Why is this night different from all other nights?”If they had known about movies back in the time of Moses, they would have included that form of story-telling, too. For younger children, The Prince of Egypt and Joseph – King of Dreams are a very good introduction to the story of how the Jews came to live in Egypt and how Moses led them out of slavery. Older children and adults will appreciate Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments and the more recent versions of the story, starring Burt Lancaster, and Ben Kingsley.

Gulliver’s Travels

Posted on April 19, 2011 at 8:00 am

A cringe-inducing catastrophe with all of the appeal of fingernails on blackboard, this movie’s first early warning sign should have been the omission of Jonathan Swift from the opening credits.

I thought at first it was an arrogant oversight. Now I think it is more likely his ghost showed up and threatened to haunt the film-makers and their descendants forever if they did not remove any mention of his name. Swift is the man who wrote the book, with satire so biting and fantasy so thrilling that it has endured for almost 300 years. It will survive this, too, but just barely.

The story has been updated so that Gulliver, like every other aspect of the story, is downgraded (and degraded). In Swift’s book, he is a surgeon. Here, played by a doughy and lusterless Jack Black, he is a guy who works in a newspaper mailroom, too insecure to try to get a promotion or ask out the beautiful editor he adores (Amanda Peet, who does her best to pretend she is in a better movie).

In order to impress her, Gulliver plagiarizes some travel pieces. She gives him an assignment to investigate the Bermuda triangle. I know this is a fantasy, but since when can newspapers afford a mail room staff and what appears to be a bountiful budget for investigative travel pieces?

Gulliver gets trapped in a vortex that lands him in a kingdom called Lilliput, populated by people who are just six inches tall. As in the book, at first he is captured, tied down while he is asleep on the beach. He stands up, ripping the ropes open. But there was noting in the book about his pants falling down, and then having him fall backwards with a poor Lilliputian apparently smothered by his, uh, tush separation.

And then it really gets disgusting. Gulliver has to rescue the king from a fire and, finding no water within reach, pees on everything to douse the flames . As dispiriting as that is, it is not as bad as the flaccid torpor of the script, which shows utter contempt for its audience in every line. Every reference, joke, and plot development is tired and predictable. Gulliver collects — guess! Yep, “Star Wars” action figures. At work, he slacks off by — guess! Playing “Guitar Hero.” When he persuades the Lilliputians that he is known as President Awesome back home where he comes from, we see posters all over the city with Gulliver appearing as the hero of every movie or play from “West Side Story” to “Wicked.” Those are hardly recognizable, much less knee-slapping references for anyone under 40.

Even worse, Gulliver is a thoroughly unpleasant character. He reflexively lies to everyone. He is selfish, incurious, and thoughtless. There is a dull storyline about a Lilliputian commoner named Horatio (a sweet Jason Segal) who dares to love the princess (a regal Emily Blunt), but it is ineptly handled. When the princess challenges the bad guy (Chris O’Dowd, the movie’s sole highlight) to come up with a reason for loving her, predictably, he can’t. But then, shouldn’t Horatio demonstrate some understanding or appreciation of the princess to show his fitness? The script and director Rob Letterman cannot be bothered to follow through. It just keeps desperately throwing stuff at the audience, finally including a killer robot.

Letterman, who showed he knows better in “Monsters vs. Aliens,” blows all the possibilities of the book’s shrewd (and still very relevant) commentary for silly sight gags like Gulliver’s using the Lilliputians to re-enact video games and DVDs. A “Titanic” joke! Stop!

A lump of coal in the stockings of everyone behind this mess.

Exclusive Clip: ‘There Be Dragons’

Posted on April 18, 2011 at 12:00 pm

We’ve already shared an early glimpse of “There Be Dragons,” an epic action-adventure romance set during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, in theaters on May 6. It tells the story of London-based investigative journalist Robert Torres (Dougray Scott), who visits Spain to research a book about Josemaría Escrivá (Charlie Cox), the controversial founder of Opus Dei. We are thrilled to be able to share another exclusive sneak peek:

And here’s the trailer:

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Win a DVD of Oscar Favorite ‘The King’s Speech’

Posted on April 18, 2011 at 12:00 pm

I am thrilled to have three copies of this year’s Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Director Oscar-winner, “The King’s Speech,” to give away. If you’d like to enter, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “King’s Speech” in the subject line and tell me your favorite Colin Firth performance. Don’t forget your address! Sorry, but this one is limited to residents of the lower 48 United States only. I will pick three random winners on April 26.

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The King’s Speech

Posted on April 18, 2011 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	One brief scene with profanity used as a vocal exercise
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	Class difference
Date Released to Theaters:	December 17, 2010

One of the best movies of the year makes a king look like an underdog in the true story of a man who had to literally and metaphorically find his voice, with in a very real sense the fate of the world depending on it.
It wasn’t because she didn’t love him, she explains, when she turned down his proposal of marriage twice. It was because he was a prince, a member of the British royal family, and she did not want to live a public life. And then she remembered that she did love him. And that he had a stammer, so she concluded that would keep him on the sidelines. And then she married him, and they had two children. And then he became king.
The Duke of York (Colin Firth), known as Bertie to his family, was an almost-ideal second son in the royal family. He served honorably in the military and took his public duties seriously. He had no interest his brother David’s position as the heir to the throne. But then three things happened. First, radio was invented, and all of a sudden a dignified wave was not enough. For the first time, all of Great Britain (encompassing, at that time, one quarter of the developed world) could hear the voice of their leaders. Second, Hitler’s aggression was making war inevitable.
And third, Bertie’s brother David, by then King Edward VIII, would shatter precedent and become the first ruler in British history to resign, in royal terms, to abdicate, so that he would be free to marry an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson. Just at the moment when the British people most needed to hear their king, they had a king who could not TIFF-Kings-Speech-colin_firth_helena_bonham_carter_kings_speech4.jpg speak.
The best doctors had been consulted, and Bertie had been subjected to treatment that literally went back to Demosthenes. And then the Duchess brought him to Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian actor who had worked with the shell-shocked veterans of WWI. As an actor, he knew breathing techniques and other exercises to help make the spoken word smooth and compelling. And his work with the veterans showed him that the relationship between the therapist and the stutterer — and sometimes the opportunity to talk about the stutterer’s experiences and fears — could be very important.
And so Bertie has, for the first time ever, conversations with someone outside his family. He desperately wants to maintain his dignity, but he even more desperately wants to be able to play this increasingly more crucial role.
The movie may be sepia tones and British accents but it is not at all stuffy thanks to Firth, Rush and Helena Bonham Carter as his wife. Firth shows us Bertie’s struggles to locate his voice and define his role. In one scene, when he tells his little girls (including the current Queen Elizabeth) a bedtime story, it is almost unbearably touching because it means so much to him and the story is so self-deprecatory and loving. People who have trouble speaking spend a lot of time listening and observing. Bertie watches his father and brother with deference, a need for approval, and also a thoughtful evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses as though he is measuring them as a way of creating himself.
The heart of the film is Bertie’s meetings with Lionel, and they are a marvel. Screenwriter David Seidler, himself a one-time stutterer whose uncle was treated by Lionel, worked on the screenplay for decades (the Queen Mother asked that it not be produced until after her death), and it is a masterwork that merits all that went into it. At age 72, Seidler knows what it is to find one’s voice.

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