I’m very excited about my return to Roger Ebert’s Film Festival on Thursday. I love this festival, organized by the leading film critic in the world because it is unique. Instead of the usual quirky indies and other unreleased festival fare trying to get distribution, these are gems that have already been released but did not get what Roger thinks is the audience they deserved. Roger brings in the people who made the films to talk about them. But my favorite part is that while most festivals have far-flung simultaneous screenings that make you feel like you are running an obstacle course and always missing what everyone says was the best film of the festival, at Ebertfest there is just one film at a time, all shown at the magnificent Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois. I am especially looking forward to one of the annual highlights — each year, he shows a silent film with live accompaniment from the Alloy Orchestra.
I’ll be reporting in from the festival, so stay tuned. And if any of you happen to be there, come over and say hello! For those who can’t make it, I recommend joining Ebert’s online club. His newsletters, available to club members only, are delightful and well worth the micro-price, less than $5 a year.
It isn’t TV Turn Off week any more. It’s now National Screen Free Week. As Aria Wallace discovered, turning off all of our devices can be difficult, but it can open us up to truer, deeper, more nuanced and more aware connections with our friends and family. ScreenfreeWeek.org has some great materials for families who want to try to unplug for the week. I also recommend the Center for Screen Time Awareness.
Give it a try. No television, no DVDs, no computer except for homework, for just one week. And Mom and Dad, no Blackberries or smartphones while with the family. Go to the library and bring home some great books and go into your closet to bring out some board games. You might discover that you like it, and keep no-screen days every week or every month.
Opening this Week: ‘The Back-Up Plan’ and ‘The Losers’
Posted on April 20, 2010 at 2:40 pm
It’s Mars and Venus time this week with a romantic comedy that brings Jennifer Lopez back to the screen for the first time since “Bordertown” and “El Cantante” in 2006 with “The Back-Up Plan” and the first big guns and explosions movie of the year, “The Losers,” based on a revitalized comic book franchise starting in 2003. In honor of Earth Day, “Oceans” is being released on Thursday as well. It looks spectacular!
“The Young Victoria” is the story of a teenager who became a queen. Before she reigned for a record 63 years and gave her name to an age, she was a girl who was sheltered to the point of claustrophobia. Famously, her first order as queen was that her mother no longer sleep in her bedroom. Like all in power, she was beset with those who tried to pressure and manipulate her, but she proved herself to be wiser and more adept than many far more experienced when it came to staying true to her ideals and her commitment to her subjects. And perhaps even more rare among royals, she married a man with whom she was deeply in love, and was so true to him that after his death she wore mourning for the rest of her life.
Sarah Ferguson, who knows a great deal about being a young royal because she married and divorced the son of the current queen and is the mother of two of her grandchildren, has produced this sumptuous biography, making it respectful without being at all stuffy. Emily Blunt (“The Devil Wore Prada,” “Charlie Wilson’s War”) plays the young queen as naive but with a lively, curious mind, surrounded by corruption but able to recognize honesty and with the courage, even in an era when women were far from equal, to insist on her full authority as monarch. When she plays chess with her handsome distant cousin Albert (Rupert Friend), he tells her she should find a husband who will play the game of political intrigue with her, not for her. And she knows that he is someone she can trust.
It is very satisfying to see the young queen triumph over her enemies, especially the cruel bully who has dominated Victoria’s mother and hopes to rule as regent (Mark Strong). But it is even more satisfying to see her learn from her mistakes and especially to see her allowing herself to be vulnerable with Albert. She is not just a monarch but a young bride very much in love with her husband. Blunt is simply radiant and the film is stirring, touching, and inspiring.
Peter Jackson, whose film versions of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy could be a textbook example of how to adapt a literary work for screen, could find his latest film, “The Lovely Bones” as the example on the next page of how not to. His sincerity and artistry are there, but unlike Tolkien’s triology, Alice Sebold’s book-club favorite is not essentially cinematic. What made the book successful with critics and the public was not the story but the language. Jackson’s efforts to translate the graceful, lucid prose into images loses all of the story’s delicacy and becomes cloying and dissonant. Instead of a poetic meditation on life and the human spirit it becomes more like “CSI” if one of the detectives was dead.
As in the book, we know right from the beginning that Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan of “Atonement” and “I Could Never Be Your Woman”) is dead and telling us her story in a tone of calm, slightly distant regret. She was 14, the oldest daughter in a happy, loving family. She had a crush on a boy named Ray (Reece Ritchie). She and her father made meticulously constructed boats in bottles. And then, one night, walking home from school , a neighbor invites her to see a cool clubhouse he dug beneath the cornfields, filled with candles and snacks and board games. And he kills her.
In the movie’s best scene we and Susie both think that she has escaped the killer (Stanley Tucci) as she bursts out of the underground room and races through the streets. But then we realize just before she does that it is only her spirit that survives. Susie has been murdered. She will watch the rest of her story from a personal heaven, an in-between place for a soul that is not ready to let go.
But the lyricism of the book translates on screen into under-imagined images that look like stock photos used for screen savers or the discreet artwork of a mid-range hotel. Leafy trees, aquamarine skies, fluttering fields, and of course spa music (from Brian Eno) and quavery voice-overs.
Ronen is breathtaking, and Susan Sarandon adds some life as the boozy grandmother who steps in when the parents are devastated by Susie’s loss. The script softens the brutality of the story and irons out some of the sub-plots. But it gives us too much information about the less interesting parts of the story and not enough about what we really care about. But we are never sure whether we are there to see justice done or to put Susie’s soul to rest and by the time Susie meets up with her murderer’s other victims and returns to fulfill one last human longing, it feels more like a campfire ghost story than a meditation on love, loss and the enduring human spirit.
