Secretariat

Posted on January 24, 2011 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	PG for brief mild language
Profanity:	Brief mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense scenes, family conflicts, sad death
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 8, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	January 25, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004DK5CW4

This is the story of two champions. One is the most celebrated horse of the 20th century, the only non-human athlete to be included on Sport’s Illustrated’s 1999 list of the top 100 athletes of the last hundred years for achieving one of the most sought-after titles in sports, the racing triple crown, with records unbroken decades later.

The other was the housewife who won him by being on the losing side of a coin toss.

Secretariat, called “Red” by everyone but the officials and record-keepers, was a winner from his very first moments, when he astonished the small group who observed his birth by standing up more quickly than any foal they had ever seen.

His owner was a bit more of a long shot. Penny Chenery Tweedy was a housewife and full-time mother when she took over what she and her family thought of as temporary management of her ailing father’s farm. The farm was in trouble. Its one asset was the upcoming coin toss to determine which of two foals about to be born would remain with the farm, and which would go to the owner of the stud horse. Penny (Diane Lane) lost the coin toss but won the horse she wanted, bred for both speed and stamina. She called him Red.

Director Randall Wallace knows how to make an audience cheer (he wrote “Braveheart” and wrote and directed “We Were Soldiers”). By focusing on the least likely character to succeed and the challenges she faced, he adds some tension to the story. We know Secretariat is going to win, but do not know whether Penny will be able to keep him, or how her decision to take over the farm will affect her family. And he introduces us to Secretariat’s team, played by a superb supporting cast. John Malkcovich adds flair as Quebecois trainer Lucien Laurin, who “dresses like Superfly and is trying to retire.” Senator/”Law & Order” star Fred Dalton Thompson plays mentor Bull Hancock with just the right avuncular rumble. Margo Martindale, one of those know-her-face-but-don’t-know-her-name character actors, delivers the perfect combination of asperity and loyalty as the devoted assistant who came up with the name Secretariat. Newcomer Otto Thorwarth shows us why the right jockey matters so much, and “True Blood’s” Nelsan Ellis is enormously moving as the man who spent more time with the triple-crown-winner than anyone else. And what a pleasure, as always, to see the exquisite Diane Lane, at last in a role worthy of her talent and beauty. In this movie, she is the champion who gets to run the race she was born for.

The Company Men

Posted on January 20, 2011 at 6:04 pm

Remember all those executives George Clooney fired last year in Up in the Air? Here is their story.

Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, and Tommy Lee Jones play characters who work at an enormous conglomerate and feel confident in their value to the organization and not at all the kind of people who get laid off. That might have been true in past recessions. But they come from the heavy building side of the company. That might have been how the company started, but in the post-meltdown world it is the past, not the future. CEO James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson) explains that the future of the company is in health care, infrastructure, and power generation.

And so, “difficult decisions had to be made in situations where redundancies surfaced.” And therefore euphemisms had to used, the passive voice employed — so often the case when everyone else is pretty much unemployed.

The first to go is Bobby Walker (Affleck), a top salesman who has the bad luck to be selling something that is not health care, infrastructure, or power generation. He walks into the office bragging about his 86 at the golf course before work, and shortly after is walking out with everything in a cardboard box. Phil Woodward (Cooper), a factory guy who made it to the executive suite — and who has a daughter very excited about the senior class trip to Italy — doesn’t last much longer. And finally, the head of the division, Gene McLary (Jones), the CEO’s oldest friend, is riding the euphemism and cardboard box express, too.

It turns out that people who are fired go through the same Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages that we experience in facing death, though not exactly in the same order. In these cases, it seems to be anger first, and then denial. They may skip bargaining and go straight to depression. And not everyone makes it to acceptance. Bobby goes from “I can’t let anyone know I lost my job” to “I need to look successful” to “We can’t leave our home,” to accepting the sequential blows of his wife’s return to work, moving back to his parents’ home, and asking the brother-in-law who always needles him about the big shot life for a job helping to put up drywall.

Writer/director John Wells (television’s “ER”) has a good feel for the corporate world — the analyst meetings in hotel ballrooms, the Wall Street jargon, the CEO pay packages. And he has a television writer’s economy for evoking the range of situations and emotions. While he also has a television writer’s feel for structure, he seems locked in to television drama’s three-part storyline, just too conventional, predictable, and neat, especially in the last half hour. It comes down too hard on the facts we all know too well, the imperial CEOs (with pay 700 times that of the average worker), the difference between what is legal and what is ethical, the difference between building something other than figures on a balance sheet, the “real people” honor and generosity of the people who get their hands dirty literally rather than metaphorically.

It’s the small details and moments that work best in this film. The layoffs come to people with busy lives predicated on keeping jobs they once thought depended only on ability and integrity. Everyone has an event to attend; everyone has a lovely house to pay for. Gene comes home to the gleaming surfaces of his gracious home and peeks at the five-figure price tag on his wife’s new table. Phil is told by a cheery but frank “outplacement” counselor that he should remove “ancient” references like service in Vietnam from his resume and dye his hair. There’s an understated moment where the brother-in-law (a fine Kevin Costner) shows that a real leader puts his workers first. Rosemary DeWitt can convey more about her understanding and support in putting lotion on her legs than most actresses can do with a page of dialogue. And the movie delivers the message that the workforce is not all that gets downsized; so do dreams, hopes, plans, pride.

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Trailer: I Am

Posted on January 12, 2011 at 8:00 am

Director Tom Shadyac directed some of Hollywood’s biggest and wildest and highest-grossing (in both senses of the word) comedies: “Ace Ventura,” “The Nutty Professor,” “Liar, Liar,” and “Bruce Almighty.” He had everything money could buy.

And then he almost lost it all. He was severely injured in a bicycle accident. It made him think that what he had was getting in the way of what he really wanted. So he began to give away his money. And he took a four-person crew on a journey to ask the most thoughtful people he could find to ask them the most profound questions he knew.

I Am features Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and many more with their thoughts on our world and what we can do to make life better for everyone. It opens next month.

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Alpha and Omega

Posted on January 11, 2011 at 8:00 am

Two young Canadian wolves representing the extremes of the social scale join forces in the animated “Alpha and Omega,” which keeps them stuck in the bland middle. Though the visuals are in 3D, the film barely manages to register in one. “Alpha and Omega” gives us an episodic story with an uneasy mix of slapstick and peril that drains the momentum, along with lackluster art direction that saps the visual interest.

Kate (the voice of Hayden Panettiere) was born to be an alpha wolf, daughter of the pack leader and trained to hunt caribou. Humphrey (Justin Long) is the happy-go-lucky omega.

Caribou are getting scarce, and the uneasy truce between the wolves led by Tony (Dennis Hopper, in his penultimate role) and the wolves led by Kate’s father, Winston (Danny Glover), is fraying. There’s also some nattering about eastern vs. western wolves that makes them sound like rival college football teams or gangsta rappers.

Tony proposes that the packs join forces, with a marriage between Kate and his jock-like son to bring the two groups together. But American forest rangers capture Kate and Humphrey and carry them off to Idaho, hoping they will repopulate the area.

With some guidance from a golf-playing goose (even the wildly funny Larry Miller can’t give that character any vitality) Kate and Humphrey (an “African Queen” reference?) start for home. Their adventures on the way back include being shot at by a man who thinks Humphrey has rabies and being chased by bears who mistake Humphrey’s playful snowball for an attack on their cub.

Tony threatens war unless Kate shows up in time to marry his son and unite the packs. But Kate is not the only one to discover that alphas and omegas can make a good team.

Kate is an appealing heroine, and so it’s a relief to see an all-ages movie that does not require the responsible, capable character to “loosen up” and get in touch with her silly side or the fun-loving character to become serious to find love and happiness. But the script fails to give Kate and Humphrey some other purpose to propel the story forward. Despite a perilous road trip and an imminent feud between wolf factions, we do not see Kate and Humphrey learn or change in any way that seems to matter. The result is a story with all of the dramatic tension of a dial tone.

The movie depends on the difference between the two kinds of wolves, but it is oddly reluctant to decide what that means. The alphas act like, well, alphas: strong, brave, smart and kind of bossy. They are not unkind to the omegas but they are dismissive and condescending. There’s a half-hearted attempt to make the contribution of the omegas appear equivalent because they remind everyone to have fun and “keep the peace.” It seems forced and insincere, especially when the genuine contributions made by Humphrey come from being brave and smart, not funny and playful.

The background animation has some lovely touches but the character design is poor. It’s not accurate enough to make the wolves seem like animals and not expressive enough to make them seem like characters we can care about. The characters’ expressions during vertiginous drops on a hollow log sledding down a mountain are so flat that the 3-D effects just don’t matter.

We’ve been spoiled this year by two top-quality 3-D animated films, “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Despicable Me,” and one that qualifies as a masterpiece, “Toy Story 3.” Those films are the alphas that make this one seem like a Saturday morning cartoon show.

Season of the Witch

Posted on January 6, 2011 at 6:24 pm

This is sword-and-sorcery film named after a Donovan song that features a joke swiped from “Jaws” — a priest looks balefully up at a looming demon and actually says, “We’re going to need more holy water.” It is a hopeless mish-mash that feels like they were making it up as they went along. It’s also dull.

Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman play Crusades-era knights and best bros named Behman and Felson who like to engage in jocular banter as they mow down infidels. When the commanding priest sends them to kill unarmed civilians, telling them they are not allowed to question him because he speaks for God, they go AWOL. They come to a town afflicted by the black plague. The Cardinal (a pustulous Christopher Lee) orders them to deliver the witch they believe responsible for the pestilence to a distant abbey, where there is a book with the necessary incantation to defeat her powers.

And so, there is a journey, hauling the accused witch in an iron cage, guided by a swindler who says he knows the way and accompanied by a priest and an alter boy who wants to be a knight. They encounter a rickety bridge, demon wolves, and some beautiful Hungarian scenery while the girl in the cage (Claire Foy) runs mind games on them and we check our watches to see how much more before it’s all over.

The production design by Uli Hanisch and the cinematography by Amir M. Mokri are stunning. Sadly, the vapidity of the script overcomes their atmospheric effect.

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