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.

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posted 9/17/13

Everyone’s Hero (**1/2)

-->? Back in the old days when baseball was segregated, a Yankee groundskeeper’s young son, named Yankee Irving, undertakes to recover Babe Ruth’s stolen bat, aided only by a talking baseball called Screwie. It’s animated. The voices include Rob Reiner as Screwie, Whoopi Goldberg as the bat, Brian Dennehy as the Babe, and Robin Williams as the villainous owner of the Chicago Cubs. Chris Reeve gets a posthumous co-directing credit, and the late Dana Reeve is a featured voice. There’s some mild humor, like the way the scout who steals the bat keeps getting hit on the head.

+ Not surprising for a big-budget cartoon, old New York and the railroads that carry Yankee away are expertly rendered. Nobody ever says the words “Negro Leagues,” but at least the inclusion of a player for the Cincinnati Tigers might spark kids to ask about this interesting chapter of American history. The emphasis on rail travel helps evoke the era.

- Just because it’s a kids’ film is no excuse for an ending as schmaltzy as the one here. Yes, yes, if you keep trying you can do anything, it says. Okay, but no, you can’t. Not really. For example, the Tigers ballplayer who helps out Yankee won’t get to play in the same league as the Babe for another 15 years. And even if it’s a kids’ movie, I still think it’d have been nice to include some period-style music and avoid dialogue about giving kids a “time-out.” Personally speaking, I also had trouble with the idea that I was supposed to be rooting for the Yankees.

= **1/2 For kids under 10 or so, this G-rated movie should be fairly diverting, perhaps slightly above Saturday-morning cartoon level, but more like a solid single than a home run. A more authentic story might have added more adult interest, but escapist fantasy with a heavy dose of positive-thinking preachiness is the whole ball game here.

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The Ant Bully (**1/2)

A cartoon boy sees things from a new perspective after being shrunk to insectoid proportions, but as far as originality, you’ve seen it before.

It took me half an hour to get over the ick factor watching this movie full of screen-filling, if animated, insects. Angular, shiny, and purplish, they’re almost realistic, to the extent that that’s a good thing. Seems like it was only a few years ago (1998, actually) that both A Bug’s Life and Antz appeared. Where Antz was a Marxist allegory, this version of a kid book merely aspires to being a cartoon version of an After School Special. A preschool special, more accurately. A boy gets bullied, then “bullies” some insects by spraying their anthill with a hose. How was he to know that these were brainy, English-speaking ants whose voices are those of Julia Roberts, Nicholas Cage, and even Meryl Streep? By shrinking him to their size, they teach him a Valuable Lesson. He uses his knowledge of humans to help them combat their insect enemies as well as the mighty exterminator (Paul Giamatti.) The ants have built a whole god-devil mythology. We never learn much about the god part, but the exterminator is the devil. (He works for Beals-a-Bug pest control, which is about as funny as it gets.) The boy also learns that thinking positively will help you accomplish things. True to a point, but, to paraphrase Dusty Springfield, wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ won’t get you suction cups on your arms to help walk up walls or provide you the skills to persuade your fellow nerds to unite against the local thug. But it’s nice to think so, and so this is a nice movie to park the tots in front of and admire the amazing CGI footage.

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Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (**1/2)

Garfield gets to live the life of a look-alike British feline who’s also just inherited a castle. Okay, but Garfield: The Movie had a better story.

I expected to hate Garfield: The Movie but found it unexpectedly amusing, thanks in part to Bill Murray’s surly rendering of the title character’s voice. (The cat and some other animals are computer-animated; the dog Odie, other animals, and the humans are real.) Breckin Meyer, who is plaid personified, returns as Garfield’s mild-mannered owner, Jon. Perky Jennifer Love Hewitt returns as his perky girlfriend Liz. Notwithstanding the Dickensian title, Mark Twain, specifically The Prince and the Pauper, is the inspiration for the sequel. Even if you don’t know Twain from Grisham, you’ve seen this mistaken-identity plot before. True, the British prince that Garfield switches places with is a cat. But, although I liked Billy Connolly as a villainous usurper, I was less engaged than in the first film, which presented better opportunities for Murray to do his curmudgeon act. And the scene where Garfield teaches the other animals to make lasagna is tedious and, well, cheesy.

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Cars (**3/4)

Pixar Animation’s seventh feature film is also its weakest, set in a world where everyone’s a car, the humor is tepid, and life is about as exciting as watching auto racing on TV. Okay, not that dull.

This is the seventh in a string of wildly successful features released by Pixar Animation Studios, now owned by Disney. All of the earlier ones (the Toy Story movies, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles) have not only been big hits, but are beloved by audiences and critics alike. Cars, directed by Toy Story’s John Lasseter, has the top-notch computer animation that no doubt goes part way to explaining Pixar’s success. But story-wise, it’s a dodgier affair.

It begins with an auto race, where we can see that the cars are driving themselves, and that the audience too consists of cars. Everyone’s a car, but the fastest is cocky Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). In the film’s only memorable line, he nicknames his chief rival “Thunder,” noting that “thunder comes after lightning.” But pride goeth before a fall, and so Lightning must learn an Important Lesson about needing others. This he learns from the forlorn folks in a left-behind town on old Route 66 (the old song’s heard in two versions), most notably the old racer appealing voiced by Paul Newman. Cars isn’t awful, but it’s less funny and probably has less all-ages appeal than the other Pixar flicks. It also continues the Pixar pattern of giving much more prominence to the male characters (The Incredibles being an exception). Bonnie Hunt plays a lawyer who doubles as a sort of love interest for Lightning, but all the physical work is done by the he-cars. (The racers are all male, too.) Hunt’s paean to the pre-Interstate highway system is more touching than anything else. The theatrical release of Cars was preceded by the charming, Academy Award-nominated short One Man Band.

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The Wild (**1/4)

New York Zoo animals go on a rescue mission to the jungle. The plot may confuse children, and the characters are nothing special, but Disney’s animation shines.

I guess the easy way to dismiss this animated-animal clunker would be to say I liked it (slightly) better when it was called Madagascar. Both movies feature a group of animals who travel from a zoo to the jungle. In each case, it’s the New York Zoo. Ho hum. But the movies are different. The zoo and the characters in this one are a lot more fanciful. The NY Zoo here features several phyla engaged in the largest curling match south of Medicine Hat. The younger kids may already be lost at this point. I will say that Disney’s animation was spectacular. I would have been scared of the lion, Samson, except he’s cowardly. Another thing different about this is that there’s a male squirrel trying to put the moves on the female giraffe. There were no intimations of anatomically improbable bestiality in Madagascar. This is, sadly, the best running gag in the movie. The most amusing character was the British-accented koala, who, like a lisp-less version of Ice Age’s Sid, fails to earn the respect he craves. The main story is about how Samson (Kiefer Sutherland), a single dad, has some communication gaps with his young son, who runs away, and also runs up against some uppity wildebeests. Ho hum. This movie made me think, although mostly as an alternative to listening to the dialogue. I was thinking the same thing as after I saw the credits for Hoodwinked, which is that Janeane Garafolo, who voiced the giraffe, sounds just like Anne Hathaway. Also, why is the male-female ratio in all of these animated animal films about four to one (even higher here)? Are all of the females home baking? So many places to let the mind wander when watching this.

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posted 8/24/13

The Shaggy Dog (**1/2)

This recycled Disney movie features Tim Allen as the assistant D.A. whose career path is interrupted by his sudden transformation into a sheepdog. Too much family stuff, not enough comic transformations.

This is what I call a gimmick movie. Ideally, the gimmick movie should a) follow the logic of the gimmick and b) exploit the gimmick to its fullest. (Shallow Hal fails the first test, for example, because Hal inexplicably only sees some people’s inner beauty.) The gimmick here, borrowed from its 1959 namesake, is that Tim Allen sometimes turns into a sheepdog. The actual plot more resembles The Shaggy D.A., the 1976 sequel. In those movies, a magic ring causes the ado; the script here (credited to five writers) tries to relate it to DNA. Yet this only highlights that Allen’s transformations don’t have much logic, thus failing the first test. (It’s either sloppiness or a sequel setup that at the end, he’s still, as far as I could tell, not cured.) Kids probably won’t notice this, but Shaggy Dog only gets about a “C+” on the other test. Too much plot time is tied up with the evil doings of the DNA scientists, including Robert Downey Jr., playing a witness in the case Allen is trying. Apparently there’s also a rule that if you remake an old family film (see also Yours, Mine, and Ours and Cheaper by the Dozen) you have to add in a subplot about Dad’s work interfering with his home life. Can someone declare this plot officially tired? On the other hand, I think Tim Allen’s starting to grow on me. Unlike with Steve Martin, I never feel like he should be doing something better.

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posted 9/9/13

Doogal (*1/2)

Catch this animated dog while you can, ’cause its boring self will be gone and forgotten very, very soon, notwithstanding some famous names in the cast.

This is actually a re-dubbed, misspelled, apparently director-free version of the British computer-animated movie The Magic Roundabout, which was an adaptation of a TV series about a dog called Dougal, who in turn was formerly a French dog called Pollux. Judging by the IMDB ratings, the law of entropy has led to increasing, and severe, decay. What’s bad? First, the hero has just less than no personality, and an annoying ten-year-old-boy voice. (Singer Robbie Williams was the UK Dougal.) The other voices are better. There’s a train-load of talent—and not just Chevy Chase (!), the voice of the train, and Whoopi Goldberg, but people like William H. Macy, UK holdover Ian McKellan, and, narrating the story like it’s Aesop, Judi Dench. Jon Stewart voices the villain, Zeebad, “a blue spring who tries to freeze things by shooting ice out of his mustache” in Stewart’s words. There’s a good spring, too, “Zebedee.” In this movie, even the names are annoying. The plot has something to do with Zeebad trapping Doogal’s best friend in a frozen carousel and he and his animal friends having to find some magic diamonds to rescue her. I promise that any kid who sees this movie will not give a flying snail or a dumb bunny whether they rescue her or not, especially since she already seemed like a stiff in the two minutes of the movie before she gets frozen. Doogal is also chock full of the sort of savvy/timely cultural references young children are sure to pick up on, everything from Phil Collins’s “Sussudio” and The Shining, to, of course, Iron Butterfly’s 1968 proto-metal epic “In-A Gadda-Da Vida.” At the same time, adults who might get all that (and Stewart’s lite-snarky patter), or even kids older than about seven, are not going to be enthralled by a weak animal tale with a Barney-like message about friendship. In short, this is Zeebad movie.

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posted 9/10/13

Curious George (**3/4)

 Oh, that mischievous monkey!

“George was a good little monkey and always very curious.” So say all of the children’s books by H.A. and Margret Rey. It’s taken over half a century for someone take on the challenge of bringing this powerful prose to the screen. Unlike in the books, the title character is subordinate to “the man with the yellow hat,” who is here called Ted, works in a museum, and has the voice of Will Ferrell. Still, the tone isn’t too different from the books. Light, pleasant. Probably too Saturday morning cartoonish to really stand out, but enjoyable. The charming but quiet songs Jack Johnson gives the proceedings an unusually mellow feel for a kids’ feature.

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Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (*3/4)

Less annoying but duller than the 2003 Cheaper, this sequel has Steve Martin again acting like an ass when his clan vacations near a filthy-rich childhood rival (Eugene Levy).

Eagerly awaited by Steve Martin’s accountants, this sequel to a remake finds Martin and Bonnie Hunt summering at a lake with their clan. According to Hunt’s voiceover, the theme is “learning to let go.” However, the actual theme is, Dad’s being a jackass (again) trying to compete with his filthy-rich childhood rival (Eugene Levy) and his overachieving kids. The kids (all 20) pretty much get along, so things are not quite as noisy and frenetic as the 2003 Cheaper. Fine by me, but this movie was about as dull as watching a neighbor’s vacation slides for 90 minutes. I imagine anyone who liked the first one will like this too, but slightly less. Exactly one line made me laugh, when one kid says, “Cool, we’re following poo!” I imagine if anyone makes a third in the series (perhaps subtitled Still Not Cheap Enough), they’ll be saying the same thing.

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circulated via email 12/29/05 and posted online 9/19/13

Zathura: A Space Adventure (***)

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In this adaptation of a book by children’s author Chris Van Allsburg, two brothers play a board game that takes them on a real-life journey into space. The side story is that the brothers don’t get along, and the game brings them together even as it threatens to kill them. This could be corny, but I liked that they seemed like real kids. The younger one has to ask the older one for help reading the instructions, for example.

The game is mostly an excuse to present the boys with all manner of happenings and/or special effects. If it were a real board game, it wouldn’t be a very good one, and the space world presented in the movie doesn’t represent a coherent vision. But that’s a quibble. Overall, it’s an appealing fantasy, reminding me of 1980s movies like Flight of the Navigator and The Last Starfighter.

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circulated via email 11/17/05 and posted 9/25/13

Chicken Little (*3/4)

This is Disney’s pre-Thanksgiving turkey. The old fable gets reworked from a cautionary tale about gullibility to a weak, computer-animated (and possibly computer-scripted) tale about father-son bonding. Despite the best vocal efforts of Zach Braff, the title character is as bland as, say, boiled chicken. His companions include a large pig, Runt (Steve Zahn), who warbles disco tunes when nervous, and an ugly ducking (Joan Cusack) who has a crush on CL and whom you’ll probably want to crush underfoot the third or fourth time she tells him he needs “closure” with his dad (Garry Marshall). It’s the kind of film that affects hipness by having the its beastly junior high schoolers speak in soon-to-be-dated sitcom slang. By the fifteen-minute mark, it’s already trotted out the cliché of having CL (unconvincingly) save the day on the ball field. Switching gears, it then becomes the mildest sort of satire of War of the Worlds (the Spielberg version), though the film’s target audience won’t get that. The bright graphics and genial animals should be pleasing enough for the under-7 set, but older kids and adults can probably find something more fun to do.

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circulated via email 11/10/05 and posted 10/2/13

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (***)

This girl-and-horse movie is set in Lexington, Kentucky, though you wouldn’t know it by most of the accents. As with Seabiscuit (whose race scenes were shot on the same track), it’s the story of a broken-down horse and its (metaphorically) broken trainer/owner (Kurt Russell). The added element is Dakota Fanning, who here cements here reputation as the go-to girl for playing precocious pre-teens. (She’s in four films just in 2005.) Call this Weebiscuit. As with Russell’s recent Miracle, the title gives away the fact that this won’t be the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy, so the end is pretty anti-climatic. However, debuting director John Gatins (who scripted the decent formula picture Coach Carter) otherwise keeps the clichés and the melodrama to a minimum. I’m not sure I’d tell adults to leave the kids at home, but it’s a family film they won’t roll their eyes at. As movies about young girls bonding with their dads thanks to a horse go, it’s a cut above 2004’s Racing Stripes, which was actually about a talking zebra that thought it was a horse. Kris Kristofferson plays the estranged dad of Russell’s character. Incidentally, the horse that inspired the film is Mariah’s Storm, another filly that returned from a leg injury like the one “Soñadora” here sustains. Notwithstanding the title, the humans are all invented by Gatins.

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circulated via email 10/27/05 and posted 10/18/13