Short Term 12 (***1/2)

A group home for troubled teens is the primary setting for this unsensationalized drama. It tells the story of the staff members, not many years older than those they supervise, but concentrates most on two, Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who have a relationship outside of work. And it tells the stories of a few of the teens, but mostly an anti-social girl (Kaitlyn Dever) who’s just arrived.

This is a bit of a tearjerker at times, but is optimistic in its view that difficult childhoods can be overcome. This is the view that Grace, who is senior among the supervisors, takes. She speaks with the compassion of someone who’s been there, as indeed she has. Yet she still struggles to overcome her own difficult past as she also deals with an unplanned pregnancy.

Short Term 12 shares its title and setting with a 2008 short by its writer-director, Destin Cretton. He tells the story like someone who, like Grace, has been there.

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viewed 9/25/13 7:15 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 9/25/13

Nanny McPhee (***1/4)

Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay for this odd little gem about an odd-looking nanny (Thompson) who magically teaches five lessons to seven unruly children.

Emma Thompson, whose previously screenplays include Wit and Sense & Sensibility, brings a similar degree of literacy to this effort pitched at a younger audience. As well as adapting a trilogy of books by Christianna Brand, she plays the title role, though you might not realize it to look at the grotesque makeup effects applied to her. Colin Firth is the other star. A kind widower raising seven kids alone, he’s proven inadequate to the task. We might now call him overly permissive, but this is back in England, a somewhat art-directed England like the one at the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in a time before Dr. Spock and cosmetic dentistry. The kind widower’s children have driven away 17 consecutive nannies with their appalling behavior. The scenes of hurly-burly that establish this point are not really so different from the ones in Yours Mine and Ours and the Cheaper by the Dozen movies (and that’s three remakes I’ve referenced). Yet I found them so much less annoying here. One thing different, besides the setting, is that this odd little gem is told much from the point of view of the young folks, less from that of the exasperated grown-ups. At the same time, it doesn’t seem like a “kids’ movie.” Adult problems with money and family relations (specifically a half-wicked aunt played by Angela Lansbury) intrude. The adults sometimes use words that kids (the ones in the audience, too) won’t likely know. At the same time, they will be able to easily follow and delight in the story of the mysterious nanny who teaches the children five lessons with the help of her magic cane.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13

Parental Guidance (**1/2)

This family comedy put me off immediately by having the main character, Sacramento baseball announcer Artie (Billy Crystal), mock a woman’s looks in front of a stadium full of people. He’s fired after the game, not for this act of humiliation, but for not being technologically hip. In the scheme of the movie: 1) this appears to be the first time his employer has ever mentioned that this is a problem; 2) Artie has possibly never even heard of Twitter, and possibly does not have a cell phone (I assume this because otherwise a later plot point makes no sense); 3) after determining that Artie has no technological awareness, his boss would ask him who is favorite angry bird is;  4) someone (the boss), anyone, would utter the line “Everyone has a favorite angry bird.” Really?  This sort of iCarly-level level of subtlety (in writing and acting) is par for the course, at least in the first half of the movie, which then concerns Artie and his wife (Bette Midler) traveling to Atlanta as emergency babysitters for their grandkids, to whom they are not close. The story clumsily wavers between portraying the kids’ parents, but mostly the mom (Marisa Tomei), as crazy helicopter parents whose style conflicts with Artie’s way of doing things and portraying Artie as the crazy one, while trying to make both of them sympathetic. They are, mostly, but much of this feels terribly artificial.

 

At one point, the two grandparents marvel at their daughter’s ability to remember that “Book of Love” is  their favorite song. How can she remember that? She was three or four years old. It’s unexplained why she wouldn’t have heard the song after that. (The scene does provide the opportunity for Midler and Crystal to do an acapella duet of the 1958 hit.) We’re also supposed to believe Artie didn’t know his daughter had worked for ESPN for five years and didn’t know his grandson’s name, even though he’d seen them less than a year before. Artie’s daughter is supposed to never have mentioned to her husband that Artie signs off every game by saying her name. And his granddaughter fake-laughs at Artie’s joke in a way I have seen many times in sitcoms but never in real life, because in real life it would appear as obviously false to the joke teller as to everyone else.

 

If your inclination upon reading this is to say, it’s just a movie, you may view this as the “feel-good” comedy I heard one middle-aged woman describe it as upon exiting the theater. Crystal and Midler make a surprisingly believable couple, and when the film doesn’t strain for laughs—and most of the laughs are strained—it becomes a decent family drama. In the real world, of course, tension between grandparenting and parenting styles (Artie’s problem) and between attention to spouse and attention to the kids (his daughter’s) are real issues, and the movie’s attempt to address them is worthwhile. Still, the primary appeal will be to those still requiring parental guidance.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 12/13/12 at Rave UPenn; posted 1/28/13

 

Friends with Kids (***1/4)

IMDb link

viewed 3/28/2012 7:35 at Ritz 5

The Nanny Diaries (**3/4)

A recent college graduate takes a detour on her career path to work for an extremely demanding female boss in Manhattan. Though she mocks the values of the people she works for, she nonetheless gets drawn into their world and strives to please them, at the cost of her personal life. You could easily mistake this plot for that of The Devil Wears Prada, another movie adapted from a bestselling novel. (In fact, a copy of Prada can be seen in a beach scene.)

The young graduate, Nan, is here played by Scarlet Johannson, the wicked boss by Laura Linney; there’s also a four-your-old child and a little-seen husband, played by Paul Giammatti. Linney’s character is called Mrs. X. Whereas this gives the novel the feel of a confessional, in a movie, where we can actually see Mrs. X, it merely seems awkward. One thing that was changed from the novel is that the heroine now has no experience. Her potential employers’ apparent willingness to overlook things like references, sort of explained by her being white and native born, still strains credulity, especially given Mrs. X’s overall overprotectiveness.

This is the second non-documentary feature from the married writer-director team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. As with their acclaimed American Splendor (which starred Giammatti), they incorporate some fanciful visuals into the movie, including a couple that nod to that most famous of movie nannies, Mary Poppins. As excessively narrated by Johannson, the movie is an extended metaphor in which the wealthy Upper East Side wife is seen as a unique culture, like that of a tribe in some faraway place. Clever, but more so as an idea than as actually executed in the movie. Primarily this is so because the story actually reveals little about either nannies or the wealthy elite that you wouldn’t already imagine. The narration apologizes in advance for engaging in “geographic profiling,¨ e.g. the observation that “adultery is pathologically ignored” among these ladies of leisure. Of course, stereotypes can be true, but rarely tell all. Where Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was, in Prada, both a type and something more, Linney is the perfect picture of the spoiled trophy wife, but only that. (Giamatti is even more one-dimensional.) Where Prada was witty and sharp, The Nanny Diaries is merely likable, the wishful-thinking ending being symptomatic. (“Don’t think having money makes it any easier,” we’re told. Really?)

This is the kind of movie I like. It’s fun to watch the clash of different values; it’s interesting to watch the behavior of those whose money insulates them from having to do things they don’t want, like take their children to school. The relationship between the nanny has some interesting parts, even if the boy’s rubberband transition from hating to loving her is too easy. Except for the way the heroine gets simultaneously courted by a dozen women without even trying, which is embarrassingly silly (men, maybe), there’s nothing particularly bad about this movie. But nothing good enough to recommend, either.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07