Trolls

Posted on November 3, 2016 at 5:26 pm

“Trolls” is pure delight, lots of jokes, great music, and a surprisingly wise take on the elusive quest for happiness. Plus, it has that Justin Timberlake song that’s like pure sunshine.

It is tricky to make self-consciously adorable characters happy without being sugary, but it works because they understand the difference between happiness based on generosity, honesty, and courage and pleasure, based on sensation.

The characters are inspired by the so-ugly-they’re-cute troll dolls with the colorful poufs of hair invented by Danish sculptor Thomas Dam (DreamWorks has now bought the company, making the film something of an infomercial for the toys). The trolls all about sunshine, parties, singing, dancing, cupcakes, glitter, scrapbooks, and scrapbooks frosted with glitter. They have fitbit-style wrist bands reminding them every half hour that it is hugging time. The trolls are led by benevolent King Peppy (Jeffrey Tambor), who saved the trolls from the monstrous Bergens twenty years before, and his irrepressibly cheery daughter Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick).

The Bergens are as naturally unhappy as the trolls are happy. The only way the Bergens have ever found to feel happy is to eat the trolls. Once a year, they would raid the troll tree and gobble down as many as they could. King Peppy led them to a secret place where the Bergens could not find them, courageously risking his own life to make sure there was “no troll left behind.”

Poppy decides to have a party to celebrate 20 happy and peaceful years since the trolls escaped from the Bergens. Branch (Justin Timberlake), the one pessimistic troll, warns her that a loud celebration might attract the attention of the Bergens, but Poppy insists. Branch is right — the Bergen chef (Christine Baranski) has been searching for the trolls for 20 years, and the party fireworks lead her to their new home. She captures some of the trolls and Poppy, mindful of her father’s example, goes off to rescue them. Branch, who had predicted the Bergen threat and spent all his time creating a shelter while the other trolls were hugging and singing, had planned to wait out the invasion alone. But Poppy invites the other trolls to hide out there, and Branch agrees to go with her.

And so there is a journey and (literally) colorful characters along the way and once in Bergen-land, where the rescue effort is complicated but ultimately aided by the trolls friendship with a Bergen scullery-maid with a crush on the young king. Her name is Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) and she agrees to help the trolls if they will help her get the attention of the king. There’s a makeover that is half mice in “Cinderella” and half Cyrano de Bergerac. I worried that the film was buying into old-school notions that a girl has to be made over to attract and please a man, but the film is clear that Bridget that she may get a confidence boost from the makeover but she needs to be honest with her crush about who and what she is. And it was very good to see the movie’s honest engagement with the idea of happiness. Even with daunting and scary challenges, a positive attitude can inspire you and those around you. Even the saddest loss does not mean that you lose happiness forever. And the greatest happiness comes from being close to those we love. Hugs and music and dancing always help, too.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy/action peril. Some trolls are eaten by the Bergens, with one especially sad loss of a character’s grandmother.

Family discussion: What do the trolls know about happiness that the Bergens don’t? What is the difference between pleasure and happiness? What is the hardest part of trying to be happy?

If you like this, try: “Megamind” and “Despicable Me”

Our Idiot Brother

Posted on August 25, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content including nudity and for language throughout
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, marijuana, character goes to prison for giving marijuana to a policeman
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	August 26, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004UXUWEC

You can’t really make a bad movie with Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Rashida Jones, Kathryn Hahn, Adam Scott, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, and Steve Coogan. They are seven of the most able and appealing performers of our era. But it turns out that does not necessarily guarantee a good movie, either. The actors have a lot more fun than the audience in this light but strange tale of a man whose irrepressibly sunny and guileless nature makes his angsty sisters frustrated, angry, and then, inexplicably refreshed.

Rudd plays Ned, a leftover hippie who grows organic produce with his girlfriend (Hahn). By inclination and by choice he expects the best intentions from everyone. So, he gives a stranger on the subway some cash to hold onto while he organizes his things. And when a uniformed cop asks him for some marijuana, he hands it over. That one results in some jail time, and when he returns, he finds he has lost his girlfriend, his home, and his dog, Willie Nelson. So, he goes back home, where he briefly stays with his mother and then each of his sisters, creating chaos at every stop.

Liz (Mortimer) is married to a snobbish and self-centered documentary filmmaker (Coogan) and they have two children. Liz is passionate about providing a cloyingly wholesome environment for her children (they are named River and Echo) and has not noticed that her husband is having an affair with the subject of his latest film. Ned breaks River’s finger and, worse, messes up his crucial admissions interview for a tony private school.

He also disrupts the lives of the ambitious Miranda (Banks) who works at Vanity Fair, thwarting her big break by refusing to let her print a story told to him in confidence by a socialite, and flighty Natalie (Deschanel), by revealing to her girlfriend (Jones) that Natalie has been unfaithful with a man and is pregnant.

Jesse Peretz (son of former Harvard professor and New Republic publisher Marty Peretz) directed, from a screenplay by his sister, Evgenia Peretz, a writer for Vanity Fair, and her husband David Schisgall, a documentary filmmaker who has worked with Errol Morris. Given the sibling bond on and off-screen it is especially disconcerting that there is no sense of the chemistry between family members. These characters never show the kind of rhythms and short-cuts in communication that come from decades of shared experience or the affections and retro rivalries of adult family members. It would have been interesting to get a sense of what the family dynamic was like and how it produced characters do different in their priorities and strengths. The script feels more like a chart than a storyline, with each character selected to represent a different New York type. The actors have a lot of fun creating their characters but there is not one believable relationship between any of them, except perhaps Ned’s with the hippie who replaced him at the farm. Peretz never establishes a consistent tone and the reconciliation and appreciation at the end is forced and awkward.

Ned may be right about expecting the best from everyone, but as he learns in the film and we learn about the Peretzes, sometimes they let you down.

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Once Upon a Mattress

Posted on February 1, 2010 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	All Ages
MPAA Rating:	NR
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family situations
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2005
Date Released to DVD:	2005
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000ATQYVK

“Once Upon a Mattress,” a musical version of “The Princess and the Pea,” is one of my favorites. Carol Burnett became a star for her portrayal of the kind-hearted but rather loud princess when it premiered on Broadway and she repeated the part in two television broadcasts. In this version she plays the queen, who will do anything to stay in power, which means stopping her timid son from finding a bride. The songs, written by Mary Rodgers (daughter of Richard Rodgers of “South Pacific” and “The King and I”) and Marshall Barer, are tuneful, witty, and utterly charming.

In supporting roles, Zooey Deschanel (“(500) Days of Summer”) and Matthew Morrison (“Glee”) are fairy-tale perfect. A great family movie!

(NOTE: Some mild references to making babies)

500 Days of Summer

Posted on December 22, 2009 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for sexual material and language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness:	Emotional confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	July 17, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	December 22, 2009
Amazon.com ASIN:	B001UV4XUG

Like its winning hero, this movie wears its heart right on its sleeve. It lays it out for us right at the beginning, making it clear that “this is not a love story.” Oh, and it is a work of fiction. The usual disclaimer from the closing credits appears up front, letting us know that none of the characters should be confused with anyone in real life. Especially one named young woman in particular. Who is then described with an epithet often heard in a kennel.

It’s wrong about one thing; it is a love story. But that does not make it a happy love story. This is, as the narrator obligingly informs us, the story of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who believes in love and believes that he will find true love and it will make him happy, and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who does not believe in love and thinks that her 20’s should be about having fun. A match made in heaven? In the movies, maybe, but not this one.

It has been a long time, perhaps since “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” since a movie evoked the joys and pains of first love with such art and delicacy. We know from the title that the romance will last 500 days. The movie shows us that period thematically rather than chronologically so that we go from a day near the end of their relationship to a day near the beginning that explains what the later one was about. By the time we see those first, early moments of heady connection, we realize how the sweetness of those initial feelings will become almost unbearably poignant. In one encounter late in their relationship, when he comes to a party she is hosting, we see a split screen, one marked “expectation” and the other “reality.” The differences between them are subtle, but telling.

Director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber think very cinematically, using the unique attributes of film to evoke the feelings and experiences of the characters. And Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are two of the most appealing and talented young performers in Hollywood and they create characters who are vibrant and real. We may not know whether they will stay in love with each other, but the audience will fall in love with them.