My sister Jenny, who’s the mother of three children and is still nursing the third, accompanied me to a preview screening of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. How realistic was the movie? Midway through the film, she leaned over to me and whispered, “My milk just dropped down.”
I didn’t even know what that meant. I don’t have kids myself, and my intention was to write a single guy’s reaction to the movie—maybe a cultural critique of whatever new feminine mystiques were portrayed. But What to Expect When You’re Expecting caught me off-guard: it’s kind of like a baby itself, lovable in its lack of ambition.
You want a film that tackles the tougher realities of love and parenting, stay home and stream Rabbit Hole or Kramer vs. Kramer or Precious even Juno. What to Expect director Kirk Jones, working from a screenplay by Shauna Cross and Heather Hach, aspires simply to tell a few pregnancy stories that have happy endings. There’s just enough tension and ambiguity to make the characters empathetic, and more than enough charm and humor to keep spectators engaged.
The film follows four different pregnancies and one adoption, but there’s not so much plot that I won’t veer into spoilerville if I try to write more than one paragraph about it. So here’s the scorecard: you have a thirtysomething couple who have finally conceived after years of trying (Elizabeth Banks and Ben Falcone), that guy’s dad and his young new wife who’s alsoexpecting (Dennis Quaid and Brooklyn Decker), a twentysomething couple who own competing food trucks and conceive through an act of what may or may not be hate sex (Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford), a celebrity couple who hook up and knock up while dancing together on a reality TV show (Cameron Diaz and Matthew Morrison), and a relatively poor couple (they have to rent instead of own) who are facing uncertainty that’s not purely economic (Rodrigo Santoro and an impressively glowing Jennifer Lopez).
The core story is Banks’s and Falcone’s, and both are ridiculously charming—as, really, is this entire cast in a film that has no real villains except bad luck. Ancillary characters, including a real-talking dad played by Chris Rock and a retail clerk played by a scene-stealing Rebel Wilson (“Can I take my 15-minute Facebook break?”), provide above-average comic relief. The film percolates along like the well-crafted entertainment it is, and it has enough heart that by the end I had to get tough with myself about not being allowed to cry during a movie I was supposed to be there to make fun of.
The movie is “based on” (though “inspired by” or “franchised from” might be more accurate) the eponymous guidebook, and based on Jenny’s indifferent appraisal of the book, the movie might actually be better-written. Like the book, though, the film gives comfort and lays out some of the issues you’re likely to find yourself dealing with when in The Family Way. They made that movie too, but it was about the easy part of procreation.
You might object to the ceaseless violence in Battleship, and you may not care for its unapologetically corny dialogue, but you have to admit that at least the film has a positive, uplifting message: people of all nations, races, colors, creeds, genders, ages, sexual orientations, political parties, and disability statuses will come together and embrace our shared humanity one day. That day, to be precise, will be the one on which we face an invasion by hostile alien beings from a distant planet.
Battleship is based on the game first published in 1943 (that’s a long time in development hell), when victorious players would presumably have pictured themselves in the shoes of Admiral Nimitz taking revenge on the Japs. The movie’s producers seem to have concluded that the most appropriate way to adapt the game for the big screen was to create a film that’s essentially an act of penance: when the going gets tough (that is, when an alien spacewreck lands on top of 25,000 people in Hong Kong), everyone buries their hatchets and joins forces to fight the power. To list only a sampling of the pairs of people seen to fight alongside each other in this film, there’s American and Japanese, man and woman, white and black, young and old, disabled (in combat, natch) and abled, nerd and jock, and fat and thin. It’s a testament to the concise craft of screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber that at least four of those pairings describe the same two characters.
The film’s plot is what you might get if a den of Cub Scouts stayed up all night drinking Mountain Dew, shooting Nerf guns, and brainstorming. Sometime before the end of the Obama Administration, the U.S. has learned how to communicate well in excess of lightspeed and has built and launched a satellite for the purpose of sending a big howdy to an Earth-like planet in a distant galaxy. (Now that’s what I call a recovery.) Said planet promptly responds with an invasion of the summer’s second major crop of Aliens of Convenience: fearsome beings with powers precisely calibrated to be just almost too tough for Earth’s defenders to ovecome.
In this case, those defenders consist of one Navy destroyer trapped with the alien fleet (the aliens can kind of fly, but they decide to float instead just to be sporting) under a force field the aliens have erected to defend themselves from the rest of the world’s armed forces and also to help compel the ne’er-do-well Lieutenant Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, an actor whose surname would be better-suited to any other board-game movie adaptation) to man up and prove himself worthy of putting a ring on the bodacious bod of the admiral’s daughter (Brooklyn Decker). (Rihanna’s job as Gunner’s Mate Second Class Cora Raikes is to smile sassily and sweat sexily. She excels at both.) Can Hopper do it? Will we all be saved? Whoa! You don’t think I’d put a spoiler in this review, now, do you?
I’m going to choose my words very precisely here: Battleship is in no way a bad movie. Director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) knows exactly where he wants to go with this material, and he rams the film forward like the good soldier he is: loud and proud. If you walk into a Battleship screening with expectations inappropriate for a film that takes as its source material a game consisting of ten toy boats, four plastic trays, and a handful of red and white pegs, you have only yourself to blame.
The film’s conclusion makes no explicit promise of a second chapter, but the fact that the climactic battle involves a steam-powered vessel with analog systems is a perfect setup for a sequel that will take this epic conflict to the next level: Electronic Battleship.
Barnabas Collins is the latest in a long line of Tim Burton heroes who are tragically but picturesquely disabled such that they cannot satisfy the ones they love—and also the latest in an only-slightly-shorter line of those heroes played by Johnny Depp. Burton himself has such a disability; in the director’s case, it’s the inability to sustain the imagination required to end a movie as interestingly as it begins. Dark Shadows is yet another Burton movie that goes completely off the rails with an overblown and incoherent action climax that turns the audience’s chuckles into yawns. Tragic.
Burton’s Dark Shadows is based on the cult TV series of the same name, a daytime soap that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971 and is now regarded as a cult classic. In our vampire-obsessed pop-culture moment, there’s vast potential to have fun with the idea of a campy supernatural soap opera. Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith have a tiny bit of that fun, and then they start blowing things up.
In the film, Collins is turned into a vampire in the Colonial era by comely serving wench/witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green), who he spurns for a woman he loves (a perfectly cast Bella Heathcote). When construction workers unearth Collins’s coffin in 1972, he finds that his family’s fishing empire has taken a turn for the worse due to two centuries of stiff (so to speak) competition from a company founded and still run by the deathless Bouchard. (The Collins family must have good insurance, since it seems oddly laborious for Bouchard to ruin the family by means of market forces rather than by simply—as the witch demonstrates the ability to do—sending their properties up in smoke.)
After an appropriately Gothic prelude, Dark Shadows peaks briefly and early as Barnabas acclimates himself to the Me Decade. Though Grahame-Smith is lacking in the storytelling department, the screenwriter has a lot of fun weaving high-diction dialogue for Depp to spout as he discovers television and hippies and Erich Segal. Soon, though, the vampire falls for the nanny (Heathcote again), and Bouchard looks to repeat her kill-one-and-coffin-the-other trick. Awkward sex and boring violence ensue.
Gene Siskel had an excellent question he’d pose regarding movies: Is this movie more entertaining than a documentary about the same actors having lunch? Dark Shadows suggests another question: Could your local improv comedy troupe do a better job with this material if given the same premise and instructed to riff on it for 90 minutes? I’ll be they could, especially if you threw in that $100 million budget.
Sometimes you’re watching a movie and you start thinking about all the people involved in it. There must have been a writer, and a director, and a set designer, and an entire production team. Did any of them realize just how…weird this movie is? With the strangest movies, it’s hard to know. Such is the case with The Peanut Butter Solution, a 1985 Canadian film that Jezebel calls “the most horrifying film of all time”—despite the fact that it’s intended to be a light family comedy. (Maybe the songs by Celine Dion had something to do with it.)
Young Michael has a run-in with ghosts who scare the hair right off of him, but then helpfully suggest a cure: painting peanut butter on his head, which works all too well. See The Peanut Butter Solution on April 25 at the Twin Cities’ best movie theater as part of the Trylon Microcinema’s Trash Film Debauchery series. Here’s the scariest fact about this cult classic: Jif actually paid to be the peanut butter Michael paints on his head.
I’ve heard that judging a movie by its trailer is just as bad as judging a book by its cover, which is fine. Never in my life have I been upset with a cover for making a book look cool, and not once have I ever, under the good-cover-bad-book circumstance, thought to myself “That was a terrible book, but damn if that cover wasn’t fantastic.” In terms of great trailers, Wrath of the Titans is up there with the greats: Pineapple Express, Cloverfield, Terminator Salvation, and The Strangers. And like most of those movies, it fails to live up to the expectation it set for itself.
Wrath of the Titans is directed by Jonathan Liebesman—whose other credits includeBattle Los Angeles and Darkness Falls (it’s about the Tooth Fairy)—and stars a host of actors with varying British accents, including Sam Worthingon, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Rosamund Pike—each hero better looking than the last. While neither the cast nor the effects were all the surprising to me, I was shocked to find that it took three people to write the story of this meh-pic (like epic, but meh) film.
If you’re worried about seeing this movie because you haven’t seen Clash of the Titans, never fear: there is about a minute of recap at the start of the film. This sequel picks up at a time when the people of Greece are no longer praying to their host of gods, causing the gods to weaken. Perseus (Worthington) has made a promise to himself that he will ignore his godly half and embrace his human side for the sake of his son. Unfortunately, this promise couldn’t have come at a worse time for the people and gods of Greece. Deep below the surface of the earth Hades is plotting with Ares (the god of war and half brother to Perseus) to drain Zeus (Perseus’s and Ares’s father) of his power to awaken Kronos (the father of Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon), and release him from his underworld imprisonment to take over the world. It is up to Perseus—with the help of beautiful Queen Andromeda and the bumbling Agenor, half-god son of Poseidon—to save the universe from Kronos’s escape from Tartarus.
While I don’t typically go to a movie like this for the story elements, the plot has an exceptional number of holes, the editing is pretty poor, and the filmmakers seem to focus on the parts of the story they assume the audience will find interesting, rather than just dealing with the stuff I found interesting. For instance, there’s a 15-minute lead-in about a spooky, huge labyrinth that the lead characters must move through in order to get to Tartarus. There’s a special map, and a fight to even enter the maze, but then with a few shifts, some tumbling rock, and a couple bruises they’re out of the tunnels and into the underworld. Lickety split. Daedalus would be really pissed if he saw this movie.
And fine, yes, the effects are really, really excellent—especially one terrifying dream sequence where Kronos’s hand is just massacring a crowd of people. However, when will we live in a world where moviemakers just spend the money to add a good story to a movie like this? Or at least stop hiring such excellent editors for their trailers?
When I presented my first “Defenders” selection back in August of 2011 at the Trylon Microcinema, someone asked me what movie I’ve seen the most times. There are a few that come to mind: Back to the Future, Drugstore Cowboy, Ed Wood, Babe, andHarold and Maude. I’ve seen Harold and Maude three or four times in the theater—most recently when it was shown as a midnight movie at the Uptown in March of 2006—but I’ve probably seen it over a dozen times in total, including annual screenings on DVD. While I consider a dozen times a lot for watching the same film, that’s nothing given that Harold and Maudescreened at the now long-gone Edina Westgate Theater (located at 4500 France Avenue, now Edina Dry Cleaners) from 1972 through 1974, for an astronomical 115 weeks and 1,956 screenings!
This Wednesday, March 21, the Heights Theatre will honor the Westgate Theater by screening Harold and Maude to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its incredible streak.
The term “cult classic” gets thrown around a lot, but Harold and Maude is one of the true cult classics, and, in fact, could have been one of the very first films to receive that moniker. It’s is one of the most original and unorthodox “romantic comedies” ever produced. I put those words in quotes as it is a hard film to categorize, but those are two that come to mind. Not only does the film offer a warped look on romance, death, funerals, and pranks, it still holds up as one of my favorite films ever and one of the best films of the 1970s.
In the opening moments, we see the preteen Harold (Bud Cort, who later said the miraculous run of the film at the Westgate helped his own acting career) putting on a vinyl record of Cat Stevens’s “Don’t Be Shy” playing. It sets up the film perfectly as Harold is about to do the unthinkable: hanging from a rope in a staged suicide. While we never see Harold’s head until the credits are over and we have no idea what is happening until he kicks over a footstool, his mother (a wonderfully stuffy Vivian Pickles) comes into the room and says, “I suppose you think that’s very funny.” It’s still a chilling and provocative scene, every time I see it, yet I still laugh knowing what is to follow. We learn shortly after this scene that Harold is obsessed with death and craving attention. Immediately following his first staged suicide, he is right back at it again, lying in the bathtub with fake blood covering the room and walls, until his mother replies, “My God, this is too much. I can’t stand much more of this,” but Harold’s demented humor continues to grow.
Once Harold meets Maude (a glorious Ruth Gordon), an 70-something woman who keeps showing up at funerals like himself, they become interested in one another, and so begins one of the most touching romances in film history. As their friendship grows, so does their love toward one another, and the more mischief these two kindred souls come up with, the closer we feel their connection.
The film, directed by Hal Ashby (Bound for Glory, Shampoo) from a first-time script by Colin Higgins, also features an amazing soundtrack by Stevens. I don’t know whether a film like Harold and Maude would get made today by a major film studio. A few years ago, there was talk of a remake, and I hope that never happens, as this is still a truly remarkable original film and I would probably boycott a newer version. The film was a commercial flop for Paramount Pictures when it was released in December of 1971, although both Cort and Gordon received Golden Globe nominations for their performances and it’s been cited by the American Film Institute as one of the funniest films of all time.
The Heights is only showing the film once, and if you can’t make the screening, there is good news on the horizon for DVD/Blu-Ray collectors. Harold and Maude has been out of print for many years, but the fine folks at the Criterion Collection are going to be releasing a new remastered version of the film on June 12.
Harold and Maude may not be for everyone, as it deals with death and romance in morbid ways, and my mother still says, “It is one of the strangest movie’s I’ve ever seen.” It still feels as honest and touching today as it did when I first saw it, and I’d happily watch it at least a dozen times more.
If they read this review, the producers of In Darkness will likely groan at the headline. Does every movie about the Holocaust now have to be compared to Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece?
Well, no—but the parallels here are undeniable. Like Schindler’s List, In Darkness (now playing at the Edina Cinema) is a portrait of a man who could have stood by the sidelines while the Nazis tortured and murdered Jews, but instead chose to put his own life at risk to save Jewish lives. And like Schindler’s List, this film is based on a true story centering on a character who works a miracle despite the fact that he himself is no saint.
In this case, the man is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a Polish sewage worker who encounters a large group of Jews hiding in the Lvov sewers after fleeing the deadly ghetto. Socha can’t save them all, but he moves a small group to a tiny overflow chamber where they wait out the long months of German occupation.
It’s a gripping survival story, and director Agnieszka Holland keeps the film bristling with furtive life. We balance on the precipice with Socha’s Jews: they try to remain aware of the deadly danger surrounding them even as, over months’ time, they succumb to the occasional temptations to normalize their circumstances. The adults have affairs, the children enact pageants, and there are occasional excursions to the surface—sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of sheer desperation.
Wieckiewicz—an acclaimed stage actor in Poland—has a Bob-Hoskins-like talent for balancing hard-bitten gruffness and lightness of spirit. This is the story of a man who, as David Denby notes in The New Yorker, “knows that, for the only time in his life, he has the chance to do something remarkable.” Working with a script adapted by David F. Shamoon from Robert Marshall’s 1990 book In the Sewers of Lvov, Holland keeps the pace taut and the characters believable from start to finish.
Writing about Katherine Boo’s new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, I noted that journalists like Boo work in the hopes that telling a story can make a difference. In Darkness is similarly an act of witness—capped, unfortunately, with heavy-handed end titles that add an unnecessary tsk-tsk to a film that speaks for itself. This isn’t an easy film to watch, but it’s an anguished and articulate addition to a crucial canon documenting the horrors of the Holocaust, reminding us that the Shoah was an unspeakable atrocity that real human beings perpetrated upon other real human beings. As long as we remain human, it could happen again.
You might not be able to fully gather the premise of The Nine Muses just by watching the trailer, but British/Ghanaian director John Akomfrah’s film created quite a stir among critics at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The film is described as “part documentary, part personal essay” about the immigration from the UK to Alaska in 1960 and beyond; Variety called it “cerebral and sensual.” The Nine Muses makes its Minnesota debut at the Pillsbury House Theatre on Tuesday, March 20. In exchange for an Abe Lincoln, you’ll see what the buzz is all about.
