Battleship

Posted on May 17, 2012 at 9:29 pm

As if it wasn’t enough of a challenge to try to create a movie based on a board game — and a board game based on a game that is perfectly adequately played with pencil and paper — this movie has to find its way around the fact that the large armored warships that give the game and the movie its title have been out of commission as everything but museum pieces for decades, replaced by much more powerful ships called destroyers. And yet, director Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”) and screenwriters Eric and Jon Hoeber (“Red“) have somehow managed to add some aliens and a lot of explosions to create a good, old-fashioned summer popcorn movie that is good, old-fashioned fun.

They give us half an hour to meet the main characters. Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, thankfully making it possible to overlook “John Carter“) is an impetuous but gallant young man. His brother Stone (“True Blood’s” Alexander Skarsgård), a naval officer frustrated with Alex’s lack of direction, insists that Alex get some discipline and join the navy. A couple of years later, Stone is a commander and Alex is a promising but still-impetuous lieutenant in love with Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), the daughter of the admiral (Liam Neeson). In the midst of an event called RIMPAC that is like an Olympics of international naval operations, just after Alex gets in trouble for a scuffle with a Japanese naval officer (Tadanobu Asano), something happens that is not part of the program. For four years, a program called the Beacon Project has been sending signals to a planet that is similar to earth and capable of supporting life in the hope of making contact. The signals have been seen as an invitation and the inhabitants of the other planet have arrived, like Columbus. And, as a character points out, if they are Columbus, we — all of humanity — are the the Indians. Except it is more like Columbus arriving with an armored brigade and bombs that slice through destroyers like bullets through tissue paper. And they operate a enormous rockets that operate like Decepticons the size of the Chrysler Building in a world with no Optimus Primes.

The Battleship board game involves trying to guess where the other player’s warships are hidden by calling out squares on a grid, and the Hoebers find a witty way to make that a part of the story, and to bring in a real battleship, too. There’s more than just bang-bang. Alex comes up with some clever, way-out-of-the box tactics and Rihanna is a hoot as a determined petty officer weapons specialist. And in a cute variation on the whole “ET phone home” thing, the aliens need to get to the Beacon Project communication center. The only people who can stop them are none other than the beautiful daughter of the admiral and a wounded warrior she happens to have been trying to inspire by taking him for a bit of a mountain climb. He is played by real-life West Point graduate Gregory D. Gadson, a double leg amputee, in a performance adding some nicely quiet dignity to the story. There is not much quiet or dignity in the rest of the movie, but Berg stages the action scenes with kinetic energy and a sure sense of fun. (And be sure to stay all the way through the credits for an extra scene.)

Parents should know that this movie has non-stop action-style violence with aliens, many explosions and military battles, characters injured and killed, and some strong language (s-words, muffled f-words).

Family discussion: How did the qualities that got Alex into trouble also help him? Would you say the same about anyone else in the story who became an unexpected hero?

If you like this, try: “Independence Day” and “Transformers” – and the board game!

Related Tags:

Not specified

What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Posted on May 17, 2012 at 5:54 pm

No matter how carefully you plan and how diligently you read books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, pregnancy is guaranteed to be different from whatever you think it is going to be. I wish I could say the same for this movie.

These all-star ensemble cast mash-ups are beginning to feel as thin as the old television show, “Love American Style.” It doesn’t help that there isn’t one pregnancy cliche that is overlooked, no matter how many dozens of movies, sit-coms, and cute greeting cards it has already been done and re-done and re-re-done in before.

There is a celebrity fitness coach and reality dance competition show contestant (Cameron Diaz) who becomes unexpectedly pregnant just a few months into a romance with her dance partner (“Glee’s” Matthew Morrison). There is a loving but financially strapped couple hoping to qualify for an Ethiopian adoption (Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro). The husband is nervous about being a father so after his wife offers him a very special sex act to motivate him he starts to spend Saturdays with “the Dudes,” a bunch of stroller-pushing, Snugli-wearing, diaper-bag toting dads whose idea of supporting each other is a Fight Club-style commitment to this decade’s most vapid catchphrase: “no judging.”

Elizabeth Banks plays a woman with ideas about pregnancy so idealized that she has a store devoted to breast-feeding (“The Breast Choice”) and has even written a children’s book about it that is creepier than the infamous Time Magazine cover. She and her dentist husband (Ben Falcone, “Bridesmaids'” Air Marshall Jon) have been trying to get pregnant for years. He is also about to become a big brother. His father is a loudmouth NASCAR champ (Dennis Quaid) married to a decades-younger bride (bright spot Brooklyn Decker) who is pregnant with twins. And there is a pair of rival food truck chefs (Anna Kendrick of “Up in the Air” and Chase Crawford of “Gossip Girl”), whose impulsive encounter apparently did not permit consideration of the importance of birth control.

The movie reads like an extended Caroline Hax “Tell Me About It” column of petty complaints so stunningly self-involved, irresponsible, and selfish that what the movie needs most is a representative of Child Protective Services to take all the babies to better homes. This is one long, loud slog through morning sickness (barfing on live television!), twins, an iPhone app that maps fertility cycles, stretch marks, debates over circumcision, baby names, and combatting the feeling that everyone is doing it better. Serious problems like pregnancy loss and financial concerns are handled as though there is a laugh track and trivial issues like a baby shower are handled as though they actually matter. The big moment comes when Banks’ character confesses to a bunch of future mothers that — insight alert! — “making a human being is really hard.” In yet another tiresome cliche, the clip of her “honest” meltdown goes viral. And then we get to see everyone in labor, making “Exorcist” faces (except for the trophy wife, who sails through labor as she has through the entire pregnancy). “But I typed out my birth plan!” one of them whines cluelessly when it turns out that delivery is not going as she wanted it to. It is another measure of the movie’s disregard of its audience that we go back to the Dudes so they can reverse everything they said the first time. It is not that they have learned anything. The movie is just lazy enough to hope some warm “parenting is wonderful” comments will erase the synthetic waste of celluloid (pixels?) that has gone before. No such luck.

Parents should know that this movie has comic and serious references to reproductive issues including infertility and pregnancy loss and some strong language

Family discussion: Which of these couples will make the best parents? How do you know? Ask your family for some of their pregnancy-related stories.

If you like this, try: “He’s Just Not That Into You” and “Knocked Up”

Related Tags:

The Dictator

Posted on May 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Chutzpah has never been a problem for Sasha Baron Cohen, whose previous films, based on characters he created for television, were semi-documentaries of encounters with ordinary people who did their best to accommodate his outrageously offensive behavior. Whether he was getting a group of people at a rodeo to sing along with an anti-Semitic anthem as an Eastern European journalist in Borat, or get parents of babies to eagerly agree to put their infants in danger in order to be in a movie as the gay fashionista Brüno, Cohen exposed hypocrisy, bigotry, and general cluelessness, as well as the occasional sweetness and tolerance of Americans willing to respect cultural differences. After appearances in mainstream Hollywood films “Sweeney Todd” and “Hugo,” Cohen has returned to his favorite themes with a scripted film, working again with director Larry Charles, in a sharp political satire in the grand tradition of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America.” Except much dirtier. Chaplin never thought of shooting a scene from inside a woman in the middle of delivering a baby.

Cohen plays Aladeen the totalitarian dictator of North African country called Wadiya, which has caused concern in the rest of the world by developing a nuclear weapon. The development of the weapon as well as just about everything else in the country is obstructed by Aladeen’s egomania and peremptory Queen of Hearts-style ordering of executions for anyone who disagrees with him, bumps into him, or offends him in any way. He has an entire wall of famous Americans he paid to have sex with him, including Megan Fox, Oprah, Lindsay Lohan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Aladeen’s closest aide is Tahir (Sir Ben Kingsley), who is plotting to assassinate Aladeen so that he can take over and sell the country’s lucrative oil rights to Exxon, wealthy Chinese businessman Mr. Lao (Bobby Lee), a heterosexual who enjoys demonstrating his power by making male celebrities have sex with him (leading to a perfectly performed and hilarious cameo by a movie star not known for his sense of humor). Aladeen uses doubles (also played by Cohen) as decoys. After one is killed, he finds another who is something of a simpleton.

Aladeen and his new double go to New York so that he can address the UN about the nuclear weapon. Tahir arranges for the dictator to be captured and killed so that the double can sign the papers establishing Wadiya as a democracy that he needs to sell Mr. Lao and other corporations the oil rights — and become monumentally wealthy. Aladeen is captured and there is a funny scene when he talks his captor (John C. Reilly) out of torturing him with a friendly and knowledgeable discussion of torture implements and techniques. He does not get tortured but he does get shaved and thus unrecognizable as the dictator. So Aladeen ends up working in a Brooklyn collective food market run by Zoe (the ever-effervescent and always-game Anna Faris). Despite his contempt for her politics — and her unshaven underarms — he can’t help being captivated by her. Cohen tempers his fascination with the offensive and making the audience uncomfortable with a little bit of sweetness this time, and the story and the film benefit from it.

Parents should know that this movie has extensive crude and intentionally offensive material including racist and sexist and sexual humor, potty jokes, male nudity, and political humor.

Family discussion: How is Sasha Baron Cohen able to make points through satire that are not possible in serious political commentary and debate? Do you think he goes too far and how do you draw that line?

If you like this try: Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” “Coming to America,” and Cohen’s other movies

Related Tags:

Comedy Satire

Dark Shadows

Posted on May 10, 2012 at 6:00 pm

“Dark Shadows” tries to sink its teeth into the legendary 1960’s supernatural soap opera with both ironic distance and visceral thrills. It can be done — see the original “Men in Black” — but wonderfully weird visuals from director Tim Burton and a highly watchable performance by his muse, Johnny Depp cannot keep the tone from faltering and the results are unsatisfying. One big problem is a criminally underused cast. Eva Green matches Depp as Angelique, the woman scorned whose witchcraft turns the young heir Barnabas Collins into a vampire and curses all of the Collins family forevermore. But Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Lee Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, and Chloe Grace Moretz (“Hugo,” “Kick-Ass”) have little to do but pose in Colleen Atwood’s fabulous 70’s costumes. Co-scripter Seth Grahame-Smith, whose genre mash-ups include Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) has produced a script that does not work as tribute or update.

Barnabas Collins was the young son of a wealthy family who came to America in the 1770’s and settled in a 200-room mansion on a cliff near a Maine fishing town. Angelique (Green), the daughter of a servant, loved Barnabas or, more likely, she loved his wealth, position, and power. When he told her he could not love her, she unleashed her witchy revenge. She enchanted Josette (Bella Heathcote), the girl Barnabas loved, so that she committed suicide by jumping off the cliff. When Barnabas tried to follow her, Angelique turned him into a vampire who could not die.

Barnabas is captured and shut into a coffin for nearly 200 years. When a construction project digs him up, he enters the world of 1972, which is almost as confusing and dysfunctional as his descendants. They are: Elizabeth (Pfeiffer), her louche brother Roger (Miller), her sullen teenage daughter Carolyn (Moretz), and Roger’s “I see dead people” son David (Gulliver McGrath). They live in a partitioned-off wing of Collinwood Mansion with drunken caretaker Willie Loomis (Haley), a dotty housekeeper, and a substance-abusing psychiatrist named Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), who came for a brief time to help David after his mother’s death but stayed for years.

No one believes Barnabas at first, despite a convincing resemblance to the family portrait. But he tells Elizabeth he is there to restore the family to wealth and power and proves his good intentions by leading her to treasure hidden in a secret room and he begins to seem no less believable than the other members of the family. With some vampire version of the Vulcan mind meld, he persuades the local captains to switch from their association with the dynamic woman who controls most of the fishing business in the area. She is none other than Angelique, still going strong and still in the midst of a big love-hate thing with Barnabas. And there is Victoria, a new governess for David, who looks just like Josette (Heathcote again).

Depp is clearly having a blast with his character’s gothic formality of movement and linguistic curlicues and Green has a great triumphant/demonic smile. Whenever they are on screen the movie picks up and their intimate encounter is hilariously room-shaking. Barnabas experiences the wonders of the modern age, including some that we take for granted (paved roads, television) and some that feel as mystifying to us as they do to him. Shag rugs? Lava lamps? But the plot is as creaky as the hinges on Barnabas’ coffin.

Parents should know that the ghoulish plot concerns vampires, ghosts, and witches. While some elements are comic, the film has stylized but graphic horror-style violence, characters injured and killed, sexual references and an explicit comic sex scene, some strong language, smoking, drinking, and drug use.

Family discussion: What were the biggest differences Barnabas found when he returned after 200 years? How was he most like and unlike his relatives?

If you like this, try: Episodes of the original black and white television series and the fantasy film “Stardust”

The Avengers

Posted on May 2, 2012 at 1:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout and a mild drug reference
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Brief reference to "weed"
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant comic-book style action violence and peril, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	May 4, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	September 24, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0083SBJXS

“The Dirty Dozen.” “The Bad News Bears.” “The A-Team.” “The Expendables.” Stories about a mixed group of badass tough guys who have trouble with authority but learn to work together are second only to stories about loners taking on The Man in their enduring popularity. Writer-director Joss Whedon, who revitalized science fiction and fantasy with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly” makes “The Avengers” a smart, exciting, and engaging superhero story that deftly balances seven larger-than-life characters (some literally), their personal and inter-personal struggles and their interplanetary battles. The film does not take itself or its characters too seriously but it takes entertainment seriously, serving up plenty of popcorn pleasure. There’s a light dusting of politics (secret WMDs) and character (sibling rivalry, making peace with oneself), and some humor pixie dust to break the tension and add sparkle, but this is about fighting the bad guys, and it does that very well.

There are two super-geniuses. The enormously wealthy businessman Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) gets his super-powers mechanically. Scientist/humanitarian Dr. Bruce Banner (newcomer Mark Ruffalo taking over from Eric Bana and Edward Norton) has somehow become credentialed as a medical doctor and is providing health care to the poor while trying to maintain his equilibrium to avoid turning into an enormous green rage monster. There’s a demi-god: the Norse deity Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who swings a mighty hammer. The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is a former Russian spy and assassin. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) has super-archery skills, shooting a near-endless supply of high-tech arrows with a Swiss Army knife’s worth of super functions. Super-soldier Captain America (Chris Evans) is still adjusting to modern life after having been frozen for 70 years. For him, defeating the Nazis was just months ago and the discovery that the world is still so unsettled and violent is disturbing. But he perks up at a flying monkey reference — that one he recognizes. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is the guy with the eye-patch from S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division) who brings this group of “remarkable people” together, explaining that they might not be able to save the earth, but they can certainly avenge it. If they can stop fighting with each other in a sort of rock-scissors-paper that has them matching strengths and weaknesses to see whether an immortal deity outranks a guy in an iron suit that flies and which is stronger, the hammer of Asgard or a vibranium shield.

When Thor’s brother Loki (a nicely demented Tom Hiddleston, pale as a vampire) steals the tesseract (a glowing blue cube that has the kind of powers you don’t want in the hands of the wrong people), it is time for the Avengers to assemble. Only the most completist fanboys will think that they could not have cut out about 20-30 minutes of the opening sections of tracking everyone down and having them battle each other until they develop some respect and the ability to work together. Some of it is necessary as an introduction to everyone’s powers and vulnerabilities, but we all know they’re going to get on board, so it slows things down too much. Do we really need the “This is not a drill” evacuation sequence? And why must every summer action movie feature a black tie party with a string quartet?

Once everyone is on the team, though, things pick up nicely as Loki’s warriors with long, creepy teeth show up in Manhattan and there is plenty of battle to go around. The bad guys bring all kinds of nasty stuff, including enormous sea-monster-type flying ships. And we get to see each of the Avengers do what he or she does best as they struggle with their own issues to be the heroes the world needs them to be. The Hulk is not the only one who has to make peace with his darker side. “Aren’t the stars and stripes a little old-fashioned?” Captain America asks, wondering what his new uniform should look like? “People might need a little old-fashioned,” says Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), who proudly owns a near-mint (light foxing) set of Captain America trading cards. The idea of heroes sometimes seem a little old-fashioned in these cynical and compromised days, and it is good to see a story that brings that idea back.

NOTE: Stay ALL the way through the credits. It will be worth it.

DVD/Blu-Ray: There are some lovely extras including commentary by writer-director Joss Whedon, a gag real, and behind the scenes features.

Parents should know that this film has constant comic-book peril and violence, chases, explosions, characters injured and killed, and a brief joke about “weed.”

Family discussion: Why was it so hard for the Avengers to learn to work together? What was the most important thing they had in common?

If you like this, try: “Iron Man,” “Thor,” “Captain America,” the X-Men movies and the original comic books