Rated PG-13 for a sexual situation, brief strong language and some thematic elements including drug use
Profanity:
Very brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Alcohol, mention of drug use
Violence/ Scariness:
Peril, car accident, sad death, illness
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
April 28, 2017
Date Released to DVD:
July 31, 2017
Copyright 2017 STXShow of hands: how many of you listed nine concerts you’ve attended and one you didn’t on Facebook this week? Those lists were as inescapable in April of 2017 as they will be forgotten in May of 2017, except by the clever little bots who now, thanks to new legislation can not only collect all of the information you make available online — they can sell it. So, every bill you pay, app you buy, search you make and much much more will be used to make it possible for corporations to monitor and target you. Those who listed Motley Crue on their concert list will get different ads from those who listed Adele. And maybe that information will be made available to employers or insurers or the IRS or your spouse’s divorce attorney as well. The online world is always a balancing act between super-cool and time-saving functionality and super-creepy intrusiveness.
So “The Circle,” based on the book by Dave Eggers and adapted by Eggers and director James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “The End of the Tour”), imagines a corporation that is like a combination of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon filtered through the dystopian dreams of Edward Snowden and the cultish appeal of, well, pick your favorite charlatan-led cult. Unfortunately, the corporation is more interestingly portrayed here than the characters, and not in a good way. Our heroine is Mae (Emma Watson), a good girl who loves her family and is thrilled to leave her temp job in a drab utility company cubicle to work in the most exciting company in the world, The Circle, on a beautiful and self-contained campus that is part prestige liberal arts college and part Pepperland. She is initially assigned to “customer experience,” where every transaction is immediately rated with either a smile or frown and a numerical score, both instantly transmitted to her supervisor and analyzed by algorithms. The company’s goal is to “make the chaos of the web simple and elegant,” to give customers (some 83 percent of the population) one place for all their needs. That is even more true for the employees, who are not exactly required to rely on the company for all of their personal and social interactions, from support groups (there are two for those like Mae who have a parent with multiple sclerosis) to parties — with live music by Beck — and health care. Those services may be free, but all your data, including biodata are belong to them.
This seems blissful for a while, especially when The Circle generously puts Mae’s parents on the company health plan. But there are VERY CLUNKY harbingers of complications, then problems, then danger. And if by some chance you do not pick up on them, the cardboard-like characters will explain them to you, including one who not only has no reason to be there but has many reasons not to be but is nonetheless there just in case you need someone to warn you about the intrusiveness of this technology. In other words, “The Circle” goes nowhere.
You will probably not need much explanation when Mae agrees to become The Circle’s first fully transparent employee, wearing a webcam (it is on her shirt facing out but somehow is able to broadcast images of her face, a technological challenge even The Circle probably cannot master) 24/7, with timed bathroom breaks, that this is not going to turn out well and that she will carelessly humiliate people she cares about.
The questions posed are important and urgent, and Tom Hanks is superb as the big boss who has mastered Silicon Valley’s faux “don’t be evil,” we just want to make the world a better place post-corporate demeanor and rhetoric. But the last forty minutes it becomes clear that the people behind it have not thought very deeply about those questions, much less the answers, and its complete denial of a character’s moral responsibility for a tragic outcome just makes it all more disconnected and hollow.
Parents should know that this film has very brief strong language, non-explicit sexual situation, some peril including a fatal car accident, illness, alcohol and a reference to drug use.
Family discussion: Would you be willing to be transparent? Does this film change your mind about what you share online?
Trailer: The Circle with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson
Posted on December 11, 2016 at 8:00 am
Tom Hanks and Emma Watson star in “The Circle,” based on the book by Dave Eggers about the promise and threat of digital connectedness. It will be in theaters in the spring of 2017.
Dashing, globe-trotting symbology professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) doesn’t work any harder at trying to prevent a global pandemic than Hanks and director Ron Howard work at trying to make the Dan Brown book into a movie. You can guess how Langdon’s effort works out. I’m here to tell you that the movie does not. Not even close.
Langdon wakes up, disoriented and with a gash on his head. As far as he remembers, he is still at Harvard but somehow he sees Florence out the window. He has no recollection of the past few days and the doctor (Felicity Jones) explains that he has temporary retrograde amnesia. Her name is Sienna. Conveniently, she speaks English — she is English — and several other languages, and even more conveniently she is a fan of his work because she “likes puzzles.” She attended one of his lectures when she was nine years old and has read all of his books with such devotion that she even mentions there is one she didn’t like much.
When an assassin dressed as a police officer starts shooting at them, Sienna grabs Robert and brings him, still in his hospital gown, to her apartment. Pretty soon, they are both on the trail of a puzzle that leads to an impending release of a virus that while wipe out 80 percent of humanity, put in place by a crazed zillionaire who had some very strong feelings about the problems of over-population, and who fell to his death in the prologue, but not before warning darkly that “Humanity is the disease; Inferno is the cure.”
Robert, still groggy, has to figure out how to stop release of the virus. But the clues are simply that that puzzling or interesting. Unlike The Da Vinci Code, where Brown put together a clever and intricate series of clues based on authentic history and art, this one is little more than chase scenes in iconic locations, alternating with yawn-inducing scenes people barking kill orders into headsets and staring intently into monitors.
We also get drearily Delphic pronouncements like “the truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death” and somber almost-adages like “the greatest sins in human history have been committed in the name of love,” squinting at Renaissance frescos, a mysterious group with the PAC-like name The Command Risk Consortium (“We are not the government; we get things done”), a stolen death mask of “Inferno” poet Dante Alighieri, and an absurd pause for a chat about missed chances and regret. Irrfan Khan provides an all-too-brief bright spot, and I would happily see an entire movie about his crisp and unflappable character. As for the rest, one action scene is underwater, but the rest of it drags so much it feels like it might be, too.
Parents should know that this film includes fantasy/action style violence with grotesque and disturbing images, theme of global pandemic, chases and extended peril with characters injured and killed, suicide, betrayal, some strong and crude language, and a sexual situation.
Family discussion: Who is doing the most to address the problems of over-population? Why is Dante especially appropriate for this story?
Dory and Woody — Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Hanks Talk Pixar Voice Work
Posted on September 12, 2016 at 8:00 am
I really enjoyed this conversation between two of Pixar’s best and most distinctive voice talents, Ellen DeGeneres (Dory) and Tom Hanks (Woody). It’s fun and has some real insight into what goes into those performances.
Copyright 2016 Warner BrothersTodd Komarnicki is a Hollywood producer (“Elf”) and writer whose screenplay for this week’s Clint Eastwood film, “Sully,” is exceptionally well-crafted. It was a great pleasure to talk to him about telling the story of Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, and about why Tom Hanks keeps making movies about real-life stories of transportation disasters.
Everyone remembers the news stories about Sully and the images of the passengers standing on the wings of the plane in the middle of the Hudson River. But that was a while ago. How do you draw people back into that story?
The secret was Sully, just meeting and getting to know Sully. He had the untold story which is the bedrock for our film. He had it in his own experience. He didn’t put it in his book but he was able to share it with me. And so going deep with Sully allowed me to uncover all the stuff that the world just didn’t know and because of that it immediately it was obvious that we had a scintillating movie.
The movie begins just after the emergency landing but takes us back in time to help us understand what happened. How did you decide when to give us more information?
I have this storytelling theory which is “the eternal now.” It works for certain stories really, really well and perfectly plugs into Sully. That theory is that everything that has ever happened to us immediately leading up to this phone call between you and me, everything that’s ever happened to us is with us. We have it with us. We can access some of it by memory, some of it just by a sense of feeling. Most of it we don’t remember, but it’s all in there. Then there’s what’s happening right now at the present and then there is of course how the present impacts the moments that follow and so on.
It’s always eternally now and all these things are cooking inside of every human being. So as a storytelling trope that really works because I don’t like the idea of flashbacks. I want everything to feel connected, so just by drifting past the character’s shoulder in a present situation you can go anywhere you want as long as you come back to where we started. That allowed me to go on these memory tributaries with Sully as he was trying to patch his life together. And because he was under such stress with PTSD everything was a trigger for him anyway. So it reminded him of the crash, it reminded him of what he was at stake often losing, they could’ve taken his pilot’s license easily and much more than that. So using memory as a trigger for how to react to the present allowed me to structure the movie that way.
It is so striking that instead of referring to the people on the plane as “passengers” he calls them “souls.”
Yes, I believe that we are all souls so there were certainly 155 souls in that plane. I just want people to remember that it’s not just this crazy impossible thing that occurred but it involved 155 people and their families and their loved ones. The fact that they all survived means that for generations their family tree is going to continue to sprout and that brings me deep joy. To tell that story, that’s really the happiest ending part — these people are alive and are thriving. And because they survived such a dark moment, they are even more effective in the world. Nobody got off that plane and became a worse person; everybody improved after that. So the world is a brighter place because of what happened that day.
One thing that I thought was a very telling detail and very true to life is that nobody paid attention to the safety talk at the beginning of the flight.
Yes, I’m so glad you noticed that. That’s in the script, absolutely. I wanted to highlight that because nobody ever pays attention.
So, do you listen now when you’re on a plane?
Are you kidding me? I elbow everybody near me and I pay total attention! I’ll tell you where your seat cushion that can be used as floating device is or whatever you need. I’m on it.
The phone conversations between Sully and his wife, who are never together throughout the time period of the film told us a lot about who they are and what was going on.
It’s interesting that you singled that out. It works as a metaphor for isolation — that the person you love the most is the one person you can’t help nor can they help you. They’re really stranded on the other end of the telephone line, and they’re stranded on opposite end of the country. There is a deep sense of helplessness. That’s really a chore for actors to convey all that, the relationship via phone. Our actors were at the top of the chart, so they were able to pull it off. It’s very, very difficult to do but the journey for the Lorrie character is from confusion and agitation to finally understanding that she almost lost the love of her life, and that’s really the journey.
So I love that as a storytelling tool. The only artistic license in the film is the fact that I had to compress the time of the investigation, which actually lasted nine months. I had to collapse it into a handful of days. So, that’s why he didn’t go back to California and knowing that I couldn’t have him go back to California allowed me to infuse those phone scenes with all the powers that they needed to really sparkle.
What did being a producer teach you about creating a script?
As a producer the hardest and the most frustrating thing is getting the writer to not give up. A lot of writers reach rewrite fatigue. They take it from the 5 yard line, to the 4 yard line, to the 3 yard line, but then they run out of gas and often in Hollywood writers get replaced for that reason. It’s hard and it’s frustrating and as a writer who produces some of the producers have the instinct of just saying, “If I could just fix that scene.” But that doesn’t work either because you can’t take the power and the respect away from the writer you are working with.
So in this case I had such incredible partners in Alan Stewart and Craig Marshall creatively during the development process and also Kipp Nelson, the Executive Producer. So they were such strong guys that as I was writing and developing, I knew that we were just making it better and better. And because I had no plans to go anywhere as long as they were happy with me I was going to stick around. So it was a great working relationship and a real blessing. And also, I need to give a shout out to Jonathan Coleman who runs my company and he is my editor. He is the first person that sees the material before anyone and he always forces me to make everything as good as the best scene in the script. So that means constant rewriting and something that had worked for five drafts suddenly up against the new scene doesn’t work anymore. You’re always forced and forced and forced and pushed. You need a gadfly like that and I’m grateful for Jonathan.
I know you are a person whose faith matters deeply. Do you have a favorite Bible verse?
I definitely try to remind myself to live by Romans 8:28 which is “All things lead together for good for those who love God.” It allows me to just relax and trust that the God of the universe is in charge and is on my side and it makes life a lot more peaceful. It’s been easier to do that as I’ve gotten older. I’m 50 now and at 30 I believed the same thing but I struggled a lot more with letting it sink in. And so what I would say now is that, that Scripture has allowed me to stop wanting what I want and only want what God wants and by doing that it has made my life a lot sweeter.
I think we have got time for just one more question. I’ve noticed that Tom Hanks seems to be playing real-life people responsible for saving people on vessels a lot. He was on Apollo 13, he was Captain Phillips — what is it that makes him so trustworthy in that role?
Tom is drawn to characters of deep spiritual worth. Tom is a great guy and he wants to play people that are inspirational. He makes choices outside of that too but I would say if you look back at his career he has always played someone that is very soulful even if they are searching. He is not a guy that runs out and plays a bunch of bad guys. He is our Gary Cooper and we’re so blessed to have him.
