The Kings of Summer (***)

No points for believability, some for novelty and humor, in this story of three teenagers who build their own house in the woods to get away from their parents. Two of the guys (Nick Robinson, Gabriel Basso) are best friends; the other (Moises Arias) is simply tagging along and has the main function of providing the story with a weird human punch line. His trademarks are a vacant stare and showing up unexpectantly. He’ll probably make you laugh.

TV sitcom veterans (including Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally) play the parents. They’re not all such awful parents, mostly just annoying, another reason the premise seems shaky. And they’re a little odd, in a sitcom-y sort way, especially the couple played by Mullaly and Marc Evan Jackson. (On the other hand, Offerman, as he does on Parks and Recreation, delivers some of the bigger laughs with deadpan earnestness.) 

If you are looking for a mildly silly comedy with no deep meaning or characters, you could do worse.

IMDb link 

viewed 5/2/13 8:00 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/3/13–6/6/13

Disconnect (***)

People who liked Crash, the 2004 Oscar winner, and Babel, the 2006 Golden Globe winner, will probably enjoy this. Like those films, it features an ensemble cast and interlocking storylines. In one, two teenage boys target a classmate by pretending, via text message, to be a female admirer. In another, a female news reporter sees a good story in another teen working for an online webcam service. In a third, identity theft brings a couple’s financial and emotional truths into sharp relief.

 

People who didn’t care for those award-winning films might yet like this one for the very reason this is less likely to win an award, which is that it does not scream Important Film quite as loudly, despite culminating in simultaneous confrontational sequences, complete with slow-motion footage. It lacks the cross-cultural aspects—the “we’re all racists” message of Crash, the ethereal “we’re all invisibly connected” one of Babel (though also the visual impact).

 

The uniting theme, as the title suggests, is the need for connection, and the way that the digital world can both provide that and provide the illusion of that. Not everything works — I couldn’t figure out why the prankster kid hates his father so much — but for the most part the characters and stories are credible, if not indelible. Jason Bateman and Hope Davis, as the parents of the teen prank victim, are the best-known stars.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 4/4/13 7:30 [PFS screening] at Ritz East and reviewed 4/5–15/13

Submarine (***1/2)

An affecting coming-of-age story set in Wales. The hero is teenage Oliver Tate, who like many an unpopular boy imagines himself the hero of his own movies. His object of affection (Yasmin Paige) is chosen, he tells us, for her own modest unpopularity, which makes her possibly attainable. She’s not the nerdy kind kind of unpopular but the edgy kind. They have a charmingly odd romance that involves lighting small fires and such, but, in the manner of many a teenage boy, it barely occurs to Oliver that there may be tender feelings behind her cool exterior. And so he hides his, which prominently involve worrying about his parents’ low-functioning marriage. The quiet, odd father is played by Noah Taylor, who long ago starred as the same character in a pair of equally good coming-of-age stories, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The mother is always-good Sally Hawkins.

While maintaining humor throughout, director Richard Ayoade (adapting a Joe Dunthorne novel) evokes the drama of teenage existence with particularity as to character and setting (although the time, probably in the near past, is vague) and universality as to the feelings.

IMDB link

viewed 6/6/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

Easy A (***)

For those who loved the high school comedies of the 1980s and '90s comes an homage so sincere that the heroine tells us how she’d like her life to be like one. The archetypical—though not always optimal—high school movie stars college-age actors and revolves somehow around the themes of popularity and sexual awakening. The plot often turns on a main character undergoing some kind of drastic change that usually only characters in high school comedies undergo. Olive (Emma Stone), an unusually smart, virginal girl, undergoes a drastic change, but mostly insofar as her reputation is concerned. Perhaps reassuring to those who’ve paid too much attention to articles about teen “sexting,” being “easy” (for a girl) is still the source of shame in the age of social media, at least at Olive’s middle class California high school, which means there’s some tricky knot-tying to be done, script-wise, so as to have Olive embracing the literal scarlet letter (see the title) she wears. It does not make her popular, especially with the Christian youth group in the school whose snotty leader (Amanda Bynes, heroine of many a high school movie) functions as the stock villain.

Nothing about the plot or theme, including the romantic ending you can see coming an hour away, makes the movie stand above similar movies. While the Hester Prynne allusions and the silly youth group suggest a condemnation of intolerance, in other ways—like part where the youth group leader absurdly becomes buddies with Olive — the film muddies whether the other students are wrong to judge her or just wrong to believe the rumors. Apparently, as in all other teen movies, the moral is—spoiler alert (sort of)—“how shitty it feels to be an outcast.” Has Olive learned nothing from those old teen comedies?

No, what elevates the movie to slightly above average is that Olive has, and Stone gives her, a bit more personality, or maybe reality, than most similar characters. Meaning, partly, that she’s realistically brainy and genuinely witty, which is good since the plot overly relies on her narration. I also particularly liked Olive’s scenes with her teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) and her (non-dorky!) parents, played by and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. Their hip-couple banter is amusing without making them into caricatures of ultraliberal parenting. I say amusing; the humor is mild. “Remember to cross ‘watch The Bucket List’ off our bucket list,” is one of the funnier lines. Well, it was funny to me.

IMDB link

viewed 12/10/11 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 12/10/11

Juno (***1/4)

A funny, smart tale of a funny, smart girl (Ellen Page) who becomes pregnant and, after first deciding to “procure a hasty abortion,” opts instead to give the baby to an upscale suburban couple (Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman). The comedic drama succeeds by never becoming a “problem” movie. Indeed, Juno is so bright and careful, it seemed like she would’ve gotten on the pill months before having sex with her kinda-sorta boyfriend (Michael Cera). In any case, the story is more about Juno’s relationships with him and with the couple than about self-examination or teen pregnancy as an issue. Page, who essayed the equally self-assured lead in Hard Candy, has a wise-beyond-her-years quality (and speaking voice) that serves well. Juno might have been a friend to the acerbic duo in Ghost World, my vote as the best teen seriocomedy. Other than the fact that Juno decides against the abortion, first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody steers clear of the clichés you might expect and creates a unique voice for the character, though I did find the dialogue affected toward the beginning. For the director, Jason Reitman, it’s a worthy follow-up to Thank You for Smoking.

IMDB link

reviewed 12/08/07

Fred Claus (**1/4)

When you see Santa Claus, did you ever wonder what it would be like to be his never-good-enough older brother? No, of course you didn’t. But someone else did, and the result is this intermittently funny, rarely heartwarming comedy starring Vince Vaughn as the title character.

Reunited with his Clay Pigeons and Wedding Crashers director, David Dobkin, Vaughn departs not much from his usual comic persona, a well-meaning, loquaciously self-absorbed guy who likes to have a good time. For just a bit, the movie seemed like it was going to be a funny, cynical take on the holiday, like Wedding Crashers translated into a Christmas movie. A short prologue, set in some mythical past, finds Fred resenting his do-gooder brother, who gets all the attention from Mom (Kathy Bates). Skip ahead a bunch of centuries and we find Fred getting chased by a bunch of Santas for running a fake charity scam on the streets of Chicago and steering clear of the North Pole until, of course, he can’t avoid it. For his part, Paul Giamatti’s Santa is a decent guy, but compared to him even Tim Allen seems larger than life. A numbers cruncher (Kevin Spacey) is also spending the season in the Arctic, threatening to shut the whole place down if things don’t get more efficient. (They’re still reviewing the naughty/nice list on paper, if you can imagine.) What exactly will be done with the place if it closes is never specified, but there is potential satire in a story about a chubby guy who purports to visit every Christian home in one night and stuffs himself down chimneys. Some jokes are tossed the way of adults, one implying that Santa suffers from erectile dysfunction. Fred, sick of hearing the same Christmas song, overpowers the North Pole deejay (Ludacris, who is, ludicrously, the only black elf I noticed) and gets all the elves to dance to the remix of Elvis’s “Rubberneckin’.”

But at other times someone remembered that the movie is supposed to be a family movie, and the story winds up where it should, albeit in a vaguely unsatisfying way. Some elfin humor and minor sight gags should just barely satisfy the younger set, but the movie feels like a slapped-together attempt to satisfy everybody that makes the North Pole seem like a pretty dull place. Allen’s Santa Clause movies have really mined the Santa-as-regular-guy theme adequately (and beyond, if you’ve seen the cruddy third entry). Someone really needs to start making Santa and his homeland feel truly magical again or I will lose the last vestige of Christmas envy this raised-Jewish kid ever had.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/22/07

Into the Wild (***3/4)

IMDB link

The Last Mimzy (***)

? After finding some unusual objects on a beach (sent from the future), a brother and sister gain unusual abilities. Based on the 1943 story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by the pseudonymous Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore).
+ At its best, the movie is reminiscent of E.T., but darker, almost creepy. The short story is basically a bit of philosophy with a science-fiction underpinning. Less explicitly presented here, the idea is that children have minds that aren’t hard-wired to look at things a certain way, and are therefore more adaptable. The young girl (played by the talented Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) is smart enough to use the word “dexterity” but not to realize that her ability to make objects defy gravity is apt to freak out the adults around her, including, eventually, the government agents. The boy isn’t especially smart at the beginning, so when he suddenly starts demonstrating unusual talent, the parents (Timothy Hutton, Joely Richardson) just don’t understand. Only the curious science teacher (Rainn Wilson) seems to want to. The script does well fleshing out the child characters and extending the premise so that the past connects to the future, and vice versa, in a way that explains what’s going on.
- But it also adds an unfortunate element of pseudoscience. What kind of science teacher has a palm-reading girlfriend whom he calls “very gifted”? Whatever gifts she has are completely unnecessary to the plot and make the scientific advances in the story seem akin to magic. I wish the time wasted on her character had been used to extend the very brief future segments.
= *** Despite the fact that the main characters are about 10 and 6, the film is probably more suited to older children and even adults. There are some lightly comic moments (that’s what the palm-reading girlfriend seems to be there for), but not so many warm and cuddly ones as in E.T.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/29/07

Flicka

? Mary O’Hara’s 1941 novel My Friend Flicka was made into a movie a couple of years after that, and a TV series in the 1950s. Here, Alison Lohman essays the role undertaken by Roddy McDowell in 1943, the teenager who falls in love with a wild mustang. Her parents, Wyoming ranchers played by Tim McGraw and Maria Bello, disagree about whether to let her keep the horse.

+ This is old-fashioned in a good way. Only the abbreviated title attempts to be hip, even though the story is reset in the present day. The relationship between the brother and sister is not the major aspect of the film, but it’s something you don’t see that often. McGraw and Bello also seem like a real couple. In fact, each of the family members is fairly well drawn, and the family dynamic seems organic.

- Lohman is a good actress, but she’s a 26-year-old playing a high-school girl. The supposedly brilliant American History essay that she writes about how the Western settlers nearly wiped out the wild mustang seems remarkably obtuse in its failure to mention the other occupants they nearly wiped out. The story is ultimately very conventional, and the ending anticlimactic.

= *** I don’t know what’s with all the girl-and-horse movies (Dreamer, Racing Stripes) lately, but this is probably the strongest of the lot, a bona fide family movie that won’t leave the older viewers feeling sugar shock.

IMDb link

Failure to Launch (**1/4)

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A stupid premise—Matthew McConaughey’s parents hire Sarah Jessica Parker to date him so he’ll move out of the house—dooms this in the romance department, and most of the comic moments come from the supporting cast.

The title of this Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy is ready made for critics, but I think the name of McConaughey’s character, Tripp, is more descriptive, since it starts out okay but stumbles. Admittedly, the premise is very stupid. Tripp, 35, still lives with his parents (Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw), which provides him with both meal and laundry service and a way to scare off women when they get too serious. The movie’s amusing conceit is that men like Tripp, and their parents, form a whole subculture of learned helplessness. The parents are helpless too, unable to kick their grown sons out. And so, apparently, they must turn to women like Parker’s character, whose job is to date the aging homebodies until they leave on their own. Who knew that the key to becoming independent was to fall in love and then get dumped for the next client? I went home and thanked my dad for not hiring someone to be my girlfriend when I moved back home a few years ago.

So anyway, just like in McConaughey’s prior romantic comedy, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, his relationship with the woman is based on deception. No prizes for guessing what happens. With a setup like this, a movie can never hope to be a great romance, and Launch is only a little better as a comedy. The scenes between the two leads are a snooze. The best parts are those with the parents (including Bradshaw’s notable nude scene) and, especially, Zooey Deschanel as Parker’s peevish roommate. McConaughey’s easy charm should make him a natural for a romantic comedy, if only he can find the right script. (Here’s a hint: it won’t end with the other characters in the movie cheering the happy couple; if the story is good, the audience will do it…although that can be annoying too.)

IMDb link

posted 9/9/13