Human Capital (***1/2)

A must-see for fans of parallel storylines…. Dino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is a social-climbing real-estate investor who can’t wait to buy into a hedge fund run by his wealthy new friend, Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni), whose teenaged son is dating Dino’s daughter Serena. The movie begins, almost, with Dino’s story, but then retells the story from two other points of view, starting with Giovanni’s wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who spends her days shopping, but once dreamed of a career in theater.

The film’s central event is a bicycle rider’s collision with an SUV on a dark highway near Milan. Besides the mystery of who the driver was, the title suggests the greater theme of money. Social class is only a subtext, but it’s a big part of what’s intriguing about the film, a seamless adaptation by director Paolo Virzì of a novel by American writer Stephen Amidon.

IMDb link

viewed 10/20/14 3:20 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Palo Alto (**3/4)

Not about the tech industry, as the title might suggest, nor even, to my eyes, recognizably set in any particular place, this is a mash-up of stories about high school kids based on some stories by James Franco. Franco, who grew up in the posh northern California town, plays a crush-worthy girls’ soccer coach, and Emma Roberts plays April, a nice girl who has a bit of a crush on him. Director Gia Coppola also focuses on Teddy (Jack Kilmer), a boy who has a crush of April, but spends much of his time hanging out with his pal Fred, the two seeming to inspire each other’s self-destructive behavior. [With Coppola being the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola, Roberts being the daughter of Eric Roberts and niece of Julia Roberts, and Kilmer being the son of Val Kilmer (who plays April’s dad), this is quite the showcase for Hollywood talent once- (or twice-) removed.]

In the beginning of the movie April and several of the other female characters play “never have I ever,” a variation of truth or dare, and the depiction of high school here makes life seem like an ongoing game in which kids fear to be truthful, or dare themselves to do often foolish things. (Naturally, alcohol, drugs, sex, and property destruction come up in various ways.) The adults range from harmful to clueless. The tone is more somber, less humorous than most movies about teens.

It’s not bad overall, or sensationalized, except when Coppola tries to be a little arty, as with a weird scene with a whispery voiceover that I think was supposed to be Fred talking to himself. However, the multiple storylines don’t cohere into a real story. Though I liked the actors, the film didn’t feel like it was saying anything new or different.

IMDb link

viewed 5/12/14 7:30 pm at Roxy [PFS screening] and posted 5/23/14

Blue Is the Warmest Color (***)

This film caused a sensation at Cannes, where it won the Palm D’Or, both for its storytelling and for the lengthy sex scenes featuring the two female leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. Also reported was the grueling shooting schedule to which director Abdellatif Kechiche subjected them, but he certainly got results. Exarchopoulos plays Adèle, the a teenage girl who meets the older Emma (whose dyed hair presumably supplies the film’s American title) and is lured by her confident attitude. With a characteristic open-mouthed expression, Exarchopoulos projects an combination of innocence, curiosity, and nervousness. Kechiche favors an improvisatory style that comes across as much in the introductory high school scenes, where Adèle gossips with friends and, briefly, acquires a boyfriend, as in the later, more intimate, ones.

The characters are stronger than the story, which simply carries the two women forward in time, skipping over some potentially dramatic turf, like anything much about the reaction of Adèle’s parents to either having a lesbian daughter or the older girlfriend. Mainly, the film is not about sexuality, but about the intensity of a first crush and the indelible stamp it tends to leave.

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viewed 12/18/13 7:35 at  posted 1/24/14

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

The Spectacular Now (***)

There are basically two types of movies about high schoolers. One plays in multiplexes; it usually has a bunch of actors in their mid-20s, divides the kids into a bunch of types, usually sorted by popularity, prominently features a prom or other party as a major plot device, and can be summed up in a sentence. The other, indie-type feature is usually adapted from a novel, features more age-appropriate casting, a first love, more prominent parents, and main characters who are writers or artists. It can be summed up as a coming-of-age story. This one is a little bit of a mash-up. The main character, Sutter, is played by Miles Teller, an actor in his mid-20s who a few months earlier was in 21 & Over, in which he played a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drank too much. Here he begins as a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drinks too much and is busy trying to get his nerdier pal laid. Pretty conventional, as is the college-essay-question framing device and lengthy narration employed.

The other main character, however, is played by Shailene Woodley, whose angry-daughter role in the Descendants was as memorable as George Clooney’s lead. She’s every bit as good here in a completely different kind of role, a brainy girl who’s into genre novels and Japanese animé. She draws, too. Unfortunately, all of those characteristics are depicted in the very beginning of the movie and dropped thereafter. She is unfortunately mostly a character there so that Sutter can work out his issues. Still, in every scene she is utterly natural.

As for the story, it is kind of a first-love story (first for her — he’s getting over a breakup), in some ways a popular-guy-meets-unpopular-girl story, but also a coming-of-age story. The drinking issue is handled with subtlety. Sutter drinks too much, but he has other characteristics.

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viewed 8/21/13 7:15 at Ritz East and posted 8/21/13

Ginger & Rosa (***1/4)

The more I see films about teens, the more I think they can be divided into films with age-appropriate leads, usually independent films about artistic types, and films in which actors in their 20s play the teens, which are usually more mainstream. But this must be one of very few in which the actor playing the lead is actually younger, by years, than her character. That would be the remarkable Elle Fanning, who just a few years ago memorably played a little girl in Phoebe in Wonderland, and who had a breakout role in 2011’s Super 8. Here she is ginger-haired Ginger, born when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped (as the opening shot lets us know), and now, with the Cuban Missile Crisis looming, worried that others will destroy western civilization, including her home in England. She’s an aspiring poet whose wheelhouse includes deep thinkers Simone de Bouvoir and Bertrand Russell. She plays 45s by the likes of Dave Brubeck on her little record player, with the tics and pops rendered authentically on the soundtrack.
 
Ginger and Rosa are the sort of friends who are so close they can only grow apart. (Rosa is more interested in boys than politics.) Writer-director Sally Potter establishes this with low-lit shots of carefree times that seem inspired by the French New Wave. If this were 1967, these young women might be getting high and listening to psychedelic music, but Potter has chosen to set her story five years earlier, centering the story around a small group of intellectual types (viewers may recognize Annette Bening and Timothy Spall in small roles), of which her estranged parents (Alessandro Nivola, Christina Hendricks) are a part, rather than a larger countercultural movement. Not that the film is especially heady; if anything, it’s about how intellectual pursuits don’t negate earthly desire, or disappointment. And it’s about Ginger’s relationship with a mother she does not respect and a father she idealizes. Potter is known for arty films such as Orlando and The Tango Lesson, but this one is a straightforward narrative that should satisfy those who like sensitive coming-of-age stories. It also announce Fanning as a real talent. She shows the ability to cry on cue and do an English accent, but it’s in a scene where she reacts to learning that her father is an imperfect idol that you can really see her skill — there is heartbreak written all over her face.

IMDb link

viewed 3/14/13 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/15–25/13

The Sapphires (**3/4)

The novelty of its subjects, an aboriginal girl group who cut their teeth entertaining the troops in Vietnam, just barely raises this above showbiz cliché. Despite being (loosely) based on a true story, the prejudicial episodes generate more sympathy than a true understanding of Australia’s history with its native population. But this isn’t Rabbit-Proof Fence, nor the failed epic that was Australia, so it doesn’t need to do that, but only to function as a streamlined underdog story with musical interludes. Funniest moment: Chris O’Dowd, as the semi-alcoholic emcee who becomes the group’s manager, telling them to drop their Merle Haggard covers and embrace soul.

IMDb link

viewed 10/26/12 7:20 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/30/12

Lore (***)

Everywhere in the world, people tend to adopt the attitudes and belief systems of their parents, and this is no less true when those attitudes are repugnant. Lore (short for Hannelore) is the daughter of Nazis; as the film begins, the family is fleeing in the face of the German defeat. Barely into her teens, she winds up leading her four younger siblings on a trek across a land divided among the Allies. But her longer journey involves re-evaluationg her acceptance of her parents’ ideology.

Director Cate Shortland brings the same poetic approach to her filmmaking as in her film Somersault (set her native Australia). This means lots of gauzy close-ups and quiet passages. This is not dull, but in this case I found it emotionally distancing.

IMDb link

viewed  3/20/13 7:10 pm at Ritz Bourse

Turn Me On, Dammit (***1/4)

Movies about horny teen boys are legion in Hollywood, but the subject of teen female sexuality (and, to an extent, female sexuality in general) seems the province of Europeans. Provincial Alma (Helene Bergsholm), nearly 16, narrates this Norwegian comedy. Here’s mountains, here's meadows, she says; here’s her dull town that could be a small town anywhere with mountains and meadows. Alma lives with her mother, fantasizes about a boy, and sometimes calls a phone sex line to aid her fantasies.

If there is any common theme among tales of sexual awakening, it’s humiliation; in this case, a sexual matter makes Alma the undeserved object of ridicule among her classmates. Frank but not crude, this adaptation of a novel succeeds with deadpan wit and the palpable awkwardness and longing of many an adolescent.

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viewed 10/30/11 7:50 pm at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/11

Bully (**3/4)

Thanks to the ratings controversy surrounding the inclusion of a few words that virtually anyone seeing this would already have heard many times, this documentary from Lee Hirsch (Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony) arrives with more fanfare than most. It’s probable that the subjects of the film, none old enough to see an R-rated movie alone, would have heard the words actually directed at them many times. That’s what’s happening when we watch Alex, the most prominent “star” of the film, get harassed and punched on a school bus. Also prominent are Kelby, ostracized in her high school for being a lesbian; Ja’Maya, a 14-year-old whose bullies drove her to an impulsive, foolish act; and two other boys whose parents or classmate must speak for them, because they committed suicide. (For whatever reason, all of the students profiled are from small-to-medium-size communities in the South and Midwest.)

Alex, whose large mouth has gotten him tagged with the name “fish face,” is unique in that Hirsch was actually able to film him on the bus, in school, and at home, his refuge. His social awkwardness is more apparent than with the others. Besides the scenes with his middle-school classmates, we see administrators failing to address the problem. In a scene sure to provoke the most discussion, the vice principal at Alex’s school tells another boy that his refusal to shake hands with his tormentor means they’re alike. Sensibly, he replies yes, but I don’t hit him.

Would that there had been more insight into the ways in which bullying persists. Hirsch eschews an academic approach and so does not present any “experts” on the subject. But, given that the problem of bullying has been getting increasing attention for a few years now, perhaps he could have visited a community that has truly made an effort to address the problem. Perhaps he could have interviewed the kids who bully, or who did in the past. One kid, the best friend of an eleven-year-old suicide victim, does admit that he was a bully in second grade, but stopped as he saw the effect it was having. But he does not explain what was satisfying about bullying or why he began to feel empathy for his victims.


Bully is film that is sure to provoke empathy, and seems almost wholly directed to that goal. Perhaps even bullies will identify with the victims, should they see the movie. Adults may identify with the grieving/helpless parents, or maybe even the vice principal. She is certainly exasperating, perhaps even clueless, but she is also genuinely at a loss as to how to help. No doubt she is like many other administrators in many schools. (Kelby tells a different story; she encountered outright hostility from faculty as well as students. Although the film does not make this point, combating anti-gay harassment may require another sort of strategy.) In the end, the film is silent as to what, in fact, a sympathetic administrator should do to combat bullying. Its solutions begin, and end, with community awareness.

IMDb link

viewed 4/9/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/10 and 4/12/12

The Secret World of Arriety (***1/2)

In the beginning of this charming tale, Arriety, now turning 14, bravely ventures outside in daylight, returning with a huge bay leaf that her mother says will last a year. But she has also been seen by a boy, though he is around her own age. This will mean trouble, because the boy is a “being” while Arriety, living with her parents in a small corner of a basement, is a borrower. Borrowers, as introduced in the Mary Norton novel of the same name, are tiny people who subsist on what full-size people don’t need, or won’t miss. This is one of at least five adaptations of Norton’s novel, including a 2011 BBC version, but it’s the first to use another title and, perhaps surprisingly, the first to be animated. In this way, the story becomes as natural as a fantasy, one that is also a coming-of-age story, can be.

The look of the film should seem familiar to those familiar with the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Sprited Away, Ponyo), who adapted the novel but left the directing chores to Hiromasa Yonebayashi, one of his animators. It’s less frenzied and has few of the grotesque touches common to Miyazaki’s other work, but the colors are just as gorgeous, and there’s a warmth to it. (The dialogue of the adults, at least in the dubbed U.S. version, is similarly stilted at times.) Incidentally, while the larger humans appear to be Japanese, the borrowers do not. (Arriety’s dad, voiced by Will Arnett, seriously reminded me of a young Harrison Ford. Amy Poehler is the voice of her mom.) They are in a foreign land. Compared to mainstream American animation, this is not necessarily slower, but it’s much quieter, content to carry the story forward visually at times. The plot is simpler than other versions of the story; the tone is sincere, not comedic. (A mildly villainous human, voiced by Carol Burnett, does seem a little goofy, though.) Although it gently raises the subject of death, it should be enjoyable to beings of most ages.

IMDb link

viewed 3/8/12 8:30 pm at Riverview and reviewed 3/8/12 (updated 3/18/12)

Pariah (***1/4)

As far I I knew, no one in my high school was gay. Nor did I suspect that anyone was.  This began to change ever-more rapidly in the last 20 years, so that someone can be out to friends, ambiguous to classmates, and closeted to parents all at once. That’s more or less the case with Alike (Ah-LEE-Kay) (Adepero Oduye), the heroine of this semiautobiographical first feature from Dee Rees.

That Alike is a black, lesbian teen certainly provides the dramatic hook, but in form it’s a coming-of-age tale. If Alike is a pariah—though she frequents a local lesbian club with a best friend—it’s as much because she’s introspective and shy as because of her sexuality. Her unexpected first romance is of less note than the relationship with her parents.

The tiny silver lining of the pre-don’t ask, don’t tell era was that, if you didn’t tell—and if you were in high school you almost certainly wouldn’t—no one was likely to ask. But though Alike’s mother (comedy veteran Kim Wayans, surprisingly capable) frets about her daughter’s “tomboy” phase, and her dad asks about boys, it’s apparent that they both kind of know the truth. If it’s true that their level of denial would seem a bit behind the curve were they white,  professional Brooklynites rather than black, working-class ones, it’s also true that this story has played out thousands of times among all sorts of Americans. But this is the first time I’ve seen it on film, and Rees tells it with authenticity.

IMDb link

viewed 1/5/12 at Rave UPenn (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/12/12

Lebanon, PA (***1/4)

Ben Hickernell made a pretty good suspense drama called Cellar that never got shown outside of a few film festivals. But at least he got to make a second movie, and it’s also pretty good. Here, a Philadelphia yuppie with pro-whale and pro-choice stickers on his VW finds himself in a conservative small town following his father’s death. It’s a chance to get away from a marketing job he’s tired of and a girlfriend who’s dumped him. Charmed by a local schoolteacher (Samantha Mathis), he thinks of staying. But different values, and not just saying grace at supper, come along with the change of scenery.

The pro-choice message isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan, as one of the two main plotlines involves the pregnancy of a high school senior who lives across from the father’s house. The other involves the charming teacher, who’s married. The screenplay is solid, though not penetrating. It’s a movie about a small town, but clearly from the perspective of the outsider. Yet the duel plotlines were enjoyable, and I wasn’t sure how either would end. Rachel Kitson makes a credible debut as the pregnant girl, whose dream of going to college at Drexel may be jeopardized.

IMDB link

viewed 10/15/10 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/15–16/10

Hanna (***1/2)

Once upon a time, a girl was raised in the woods in a land where winter covered the forest in white. The man she called “Papa” taught her everything he knew, and he knew a great deal. He taught her hunting and other survival skills, but also books and literature, like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. He taught her to speak in the tongues of many lands. And finally, he taught her to want to leave.

IMDB link

viewed 4/24/11 at Riverview and reviewed 4/25

Summer Wars (***1/2)

Hollywood may be churning out more animated films than ever, but still hasn’t sold Americans on the idea that they don’t need to be family films. (The grown-up oriented, US film My Dog Tulip managed to make about $200,000, or nearly 1/2000 of what Toy Story 3 did.) But the Japanese have no such reservations and made a big hit out of this. Not that it’s altogether serious. In a perfect world, it would have captured the same audience that went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, although the fantasy element is more of a sci-fi thing here. (The version I watched was dubbed very competently, though I didn’t recognize the actors’ names.)

The main character, Kenji, is the sort of nerdy boy who’s often the hero of this type of story. He’s a math expert with no romantic skills who earns some money as a “code monkey” working for the giant computer network Oz. (Think Facebook on steroids.) Of course, there’s a pretty, popular girl, Natsuki, who recruits Kenji for an errand. That turns out to involve taking a train to Nagano, a less-populous area where Natsuki’s family is about to celebrate her great-grandmother’s 90th birthday. All goes well until Kenji’s math wizardry accidentally unleashes a malevolent computer program (Love Machine) that threatens to foul up the family holiday, much of the world’s Internet connection, and worse.

Who is behind this malfeasance? Kenji? Natsuki’s bad-boy uncle? The United States military? And who will be able to stop it? Maybe Kenji. Maybe great-grandma, who humorously wields her rotary phone and list of contacts going back 60 or 70 years. In a world where the electronic infrastructure has gone haywire, the low-tech wizard rules. And when you can’t play computer games, you can always play cards, like the Japanese favorite koi-koi, which is woven into the plot. Alas, only a little is done with the idea of our over-reliance on technology.

The whimsical plot is perfect for animation. The villain’s avatar kind of reminded me of one from the TV show South Park, though the artistry is much better, and the humor is less vicious. The hand-drawn style helps gives the film a warm feel that is well-suited to the story. While the idea of the geek saving the day is fairly familiar turf, the originality lies in Natsuki’s truly colorful clan, who are sometimes at odds, but ultimately come together when the chips are, literally, down.

IMDB link

viewed 1/27/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/28/11

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

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (***1/4)

A small film that got a lot of attention after getting noticed at the Sundance Film Festival, this turns out to have a straightforward story whose novelty lies in the scarcity of movies about people like Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), an obese 11^th grader living with her mother in a Harlem apartment, in 1987. It is worth seeing, in part, for that novelty and the good performances, especially by Sidibe and Mo'Nique, as her mother. (Mariah Carey is a pleasant surprise as a social worker, too.) Precious, who is essentially illiterate, has just been placed in an “alternative” education program after getting pregnant, for the second time, by her mother’s boyfriend. The mother character has, essentially, no redeeming features; she is a walking (but mostly sitting and watching television) argument for welfare reform, ordering Precious around like a servant, reacting to her daughter’s rape-induced pregnancy by blaming Precious for stealing her man.

You can watch this movie and get extremely depressed. Precious has nothing good in her life; she has fantasies, but few aspirations and little hope. Or you can watch her, placed with a caring teacher (Paula Patton), and see it as a an inspirational story showing that anyone can be redeemed. (The voiceovers, taking the place of the first-person narrative in the novel, suggest that, at least the illiteracy will be remedied.)

IMDB link

viewed 12/28/13 on Netflix DVD; posted 1/10/14

Vantage Point (***)

I like the idea of this movie, which follows an attempted assassination of the American president from several points of view, replaying the same 23 minutes multiple times. The action takes place entirely in an unnamed Spanish city, where the president (William Hurt) is to give a speech kicking off a peace summit. We start off watching from inside the control room at “Global News Network,” where a director (Sigourney Weaver) is berating a reporter for mentioning the protesters present at the event. After we follow the shooting and its immediate aftermath, everything rewinds, and we watch again, but from a different view, learning more as the action takes in the secret service agents (primarily one played by Dennis Quaid), a video-camera-wielding tourist (Forest Whitaker), and eventually the usual evildoers.

It’s not exactly Rashomon—different characters aren’t seeing the same events differently, but rather see different pieces of the same event. Still, director Pete Travis does put all of them together quite effectively, and tops it all off with an above-average car chase, even if he does overdo the close-ups. Inevitably, the outcome relies on the perpetrators executing a sophisticated plan perfectly, yet in the end making an error that is a) telegraphed to the audience; b) the sort you've seen in many other movies; and c) one not even a first-time evildoer would be stupid enough to make. The major twists—there are two—are surprises precisely because they’re difficult to believe. Disappointing, but not enough that I still didn't feel entertained. Interestingly, the movie matches an idealistic portrayal of the president, who wisely resists the hawkish advice of his advisors, with an extremely cynical one of the media, who prefer to package the story rather than report it.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 2/23/08

Shooter (**3/4)

? A US special-forces marksman (Mark Wahlberg), hired to thwart a presidential assassination, winds up a target of the would-be killers. Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directed Jonathan Lemkin’s adaptation of the Stephen Hunter novel.
+ I was into this movie for the first half, although I figured out who the villains were. (No big deal, as that gets revealed early.) Here we see the hero display all the tricks of his trade. Like so many criminals, he figures out that Philly is a good place to kill someone and get away with it, so the pivotal scenes take place around Independence Hall, and there’s some impressive aerial footage of the city. With the help of one of the feds and a schoolteacher, he takes on platoons of unfriendly types with just some household items. The main appeal, besides huge explosions, is watching the lone wolf use his superior training to outwit and outfight everyone.
- An exciting setup, but both the premise and the outcome become implausible, then absurd, as the movie goes on. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that I was expecting one of them to shout “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” One actually does say, “I win; you lose.” Twice. But by then the movie has descended into trite formula.
= **3/4 Worth a look for shoot-’em-up fans and conspiracy-movie buffs. Sort of similar to The Sentinel, which is a better movie.

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.

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