Movie Review: The Pacifier

Studio: Walt Disney MPAA Rating: PG for action violence, language and rude humor. Mom Rating: 3 out of 5 Kid Rating: 4 out of 5 Cast: Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford, Brittany Snow, Max Thieriot, Brad Garrett, Carol Kane Writers: Robert Garant, Thomas Lennon Director: Adam Shankman Let me start by stating the obvious: this movie is not going to win any awards. The premise of a Navy Seal sent to protect a family consisting of five out-of-control kids is as predictable as a poopy diaper gag, and it's such an obvious ploy for Vin Diesel to expand his action-hero fan base into the family audience (a la Arnie in "Kindergarten Cop") that I had no desire to see it. But the previews tickled my 9-year-old daughter so much that it was placed at the top her her "must-see" list, and you know what? I kind of liked it. The professional critics will tell you it's cliched (it is), unbelievable (true) and fluff. The suspension of disbelief you have to attain to get into it is huge (a babysitter who shops at Costco while the troop of girls in his care are selling their cookies in the parking lot? Without any supervision? A weapon sought by terrorists is hidden in a home and the government doesn't move the entire family to a safe house?) However, in my book, fluff is OK for a family film -- as long as it doesn't try to be anything else and it holds your interest. And this does, thanks to the unique charm of Vin Diesel and a cast of TV veterans who know how to do a lot with a little. Not all parents will find this movie appropriate for their children. Its PG rating was earned honestly. The film starts with an action sequence that ends with the death of the family's father, a security expert who created a program that can render a country's nuclear arsenal useless. There are more violent scenes sprinkled throughout the film, ranging from a fight sequence between Diesel and a couple of ninjas to a disturbing (but funny) bit where the youngest daughter's scout troop beats up and hogties a troop of boys. I laughed at that -- but felt guilty while I was doing it. (The violence is the cartoon sort -- while some participants die, there is no memorable blood or other consequences.) This movie also contains some bathroom humor, centered around poop. Lots and lots of poop. If you don't find this kind of thing funny, you are a more mature person than your children. This is the kind of thing they will remember and talk about with their friends. Diesel plays Navy Seal Shane Wolf, who had been assigned to rescue the security expert from terrorists who tried to steal his program. The fact that the man died on his watch weighs heavily on him, and when he is then assigned to protect the man's family, he knows he must make good. You see, everyone thinks the late inventor hid his program somewhere in his house -- the same house he shared with his wife and five children.

Shane Wolf is sent to protect them against the various agents and ninjas who are watching the house and trying to steal the program, and to find it himself. Oh yes -- the mother has to fly to Switzerland because the key to the program may be in a safe deposit box there, and she is delayed for over two weeks because she does not know the password her husband had left to allow her entry to its contents. And the nanny quits, which leaves Shane in charge of the entire brood, who are told they will do it "my way, not highway." (The kids have no idea what that means, and neither do I). Did I mention that Shane hates kids? And doesn't know how to change a diaper? The kids are all troubled. The teenage boy and girl have been cutting classes, and the boy is bullied by the entire wrestling team, led by its coach (who is also their K-12 school's vice principal, played with comic relish by "Everyone Loves Raymond's" Brad Garrett). He's really harmless, and besides, "He has tenure," sighs school principal Lauren Graham, who coincidentally is a retired CPO, having served four years at a naval base before college. (When I took screenwriting in college, I was told that the audience would forgive you just ONE coincidence. Apparently, the guys who wrote this script missed that lesson.) The middle child, an 8-year-old girl, has scout meetings three times a week (HUH? That's just nuts!) and has to deal with a troop of boys who declare a turf war over the Costco parking lot where both are trying to raise funds. The toddler can't sleep until someone sings and dances for him at night, and the baby -- well, the baby doesn't have any problems and only seems to be there so that Shane can do funny stuff with diapers and baby powder. Fortunately, the child actors, led by Brittany Snow as the oldest daughter, are sweet and appealing, even when they are in their "acting out" hostile phase. In addition to Garrett and Graham, the cast includes Faith Ford as the mom and Carol Kane as the nanny, who seems to be channeling an older -- and bitter -- version of Simka, the character she played on "Taxi." These guys can all steal a scene with their eyes By the end of the movie, Shane solves the kids' problems, saves the world and closed, and they ably support the action for Diesel and the kids. discovers he likes kids after all... all in the course of two weeks.

Movie Review: Hugo

Kids movies are usually aimed at parents. Parents are, generally speaking, exhausted. Which means a movie like Hugo is always going to be up against that. So let s make it simple: yes, it s directed by Martin Scorsese, who isn t exactly known for his fun for all ages approach to movie-making. Yes, it is to some extent about the early days of movie-making, which is the kind of ultra-specific topic that makes audiences wary of reviewers who talk it up (after all, who s going to love a big-budget look at the early days of film-making more than people obsessed with film). Yes, it is in 3D and does run over two hours. And if any of that is enough to scare you off, that s your loss, because you ll be missing one of the most magical movies to come along in ages. It s 1920s Paris, and lurking in the bowels of the city s main train station is Hugo (Asa Butterfield) a young boy who divides his time between manually winding all the stations clocks and trying to repair a strange clockwork figure. Conveniently for us, all this running around and peering out at things from behind clock faces does an excellent job of setting up who s who and what s what at the station, most notably that Hugo has to stay out of the clutches of the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who seems to delight in throwing excess children into a police van bound for the nearest orphanage. Caught trying to steal spare parts by a toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who has a stall at the station, Hugo ends up befriending Isabelle (Chlo Grace Moretz), who seems to be the toymaker s granddaughter. He teaches her about the wonder of movies by sneaking her in to see the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last; she teaches him about the power of books by taking him to meet crusty bookseller Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee). Gradually she teases out Hugo s backstory: his father (Jude Law) was a museum worker who died in a fire, then his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone) brought him to the station to help with his clock-winding job and promptly vanished. His father was trying to repair the clockwork figure before he died, and Hugo thinks (though he knows it s crazy) that if he can repair the automation it will deliver a message from his dead father. This is exactly the kind of tragic story that gets like Isabelle on side, and one of this film s many delights is the way that the plot ticks along like one of the station s massive clocks. Each mystery has its own logical, satisfying solution that points to the next stage in the story, and along the way just about everyone is revealed to be more than what they seemed. Suffice to say the toymaker has a deeper and much sadder past than first suspected, and while it s not exactly a spoiler to reveal he has something to do with the earliest days of motion pictures, exactly how it pans out is both heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting (and it s based on a true story). Bring tissues and plenty of them would be my advice, it s awfully hard to enjoy the 3D effects while wiping away tears. While the performances are excellent right down to the smallest roles Butterfield is a real star here, while Kingsley will break your heart Cohen is a surprise and a delight, proving he doesn t have to be pranking gullible Americans to get laughs. Scorsese takes great care in giving us an entire community inside the train station, and seeing the way that the many supporting characters individual small stories play out in and around Hugo s bigger adventures is yet another of this films many joys.

Hugo is Scorsese s first film in 3D and he uses it brilliantly, giving a real sense of space to the station and its many shops and hidden spaces without resorting to the usual cheap 3D tricks until he does, at which point it s clear that they re not merely tricks. He s pointing back to the earliest days of cinema when movies were designed primarily to startle and amaze and showing how the magic and sense of wonder those films had can still work today. This film is a blatant love letter to those early days of cinema, but it celebrates them as something alive, made by people who wanted to entertain and enthral. Scorsese extends this love of cinema to his own effort, filling it to the brim and then some with everything you could possibly want in a film. Kids have adventures, grown-ups fall in love, there are close shaves and narrow escapes and adventures under the sea and a movie studio made entirely of glass; what s not to like?

Movie Review: The Immortals

Come with us now to a time where shirts weren t so much optional as off the menu entirely and no mountain was complete without a bunch of half-naked demigods chained up in the basement. The sword and sandals genre has always been over-the-top and lurid, but since 300 revived it with a heavy dose of CGI it s pretty much been an excuse for film-makers to go nuts with the painterly landscapes and rippling abs. With the race on to create the most garish, insane and bloody take on the ancient Greeks, it was only a matter of time before someone called up Tarsem Singh, director of the gorgeous-looking but otherwise pretty silly The Cell. And the result? You ve never seen anything like it. Well, apart from that Ferrero Rocher ad with the Gods dropping chocolates off the side of Olympus. We re back in the days before humanity had either iron or trousers, and the evil King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) is leading his army of murderous mask-wearing thugs across Greece searching for the magic bow that will free the imprisoned Titans so they can once again attack the Gods. Off in his peaceful cliffside fishing village, Theseus (Henry Cavill, soon to be playing Superman) bums around being taught various manly things by an old fisherman (John Hurt) while everyone else scorns him for being a (literal) bastard. When word arrives that Hyperion isn t far away the village is evacuated, but because he s a bastard Theseus and his mother are told they ll be the last to leave. Theseus expresses his displeasure at this plan by kicking some serious arse. From there things get complicated, and not just because the old fisherman turns out to be Zeus (Luke Evans) in disguise. The village falls under Hyperion s sword, Theseus is taken prisoner (and given a very good reason to hate a whole bunch of bad guys), and he promptly teams up to try and escape with virgin oracle Phaedra (Freida Pinto) and bawdy thief Stavros (Stephen Dorff). C mon, Stavros spends all his time hitting on Phaedra and saying things like will you go south with me, or will you go the way of the ladies - bawdy is letting him off lightly. Eventually the whole thing wraps up in a giant battle, but long before that the story hasn t so much fizzled out as been gently laid to one side to allow more room for the steady stream of astonishing imagery. Forget your basics like a god dropping out of the sky to create a tidal wave in a sea made out of oil or a giant metal bull with people being roasted inside; what about magic horses that die the moment they stop running? One God belting another so hard he turns into and this is neither joke nor exaggeration a coffee table? Or a bad guy in a bull helmet running around a maze in a shout-out to the original myth of Theseus? And then there s Mickey Rourke wearing a helmet that looks like a crab s

claws, prompting at least one audience member to revive the Andrew Dice Clay-era insult snapperhead . This film s real triumph is that none of the above ever comes off as laughable or stupid. Written down like that it sounds silly, sure; in the context of a film that from frame one is totally up-front and unapologetic about the way it s going to throw insane but visually stunning concepts at you, no way. Everything here is all deadly serious, right down to the in-any-other-context hilarious no shirt / meterhigh headgear look the minor Gods are rocking. Which is as it should be: this is the age of myth (which the film self-consciously highlights as it goes on), a world where the Gods are real, people have visions of the future and magic exists why shouldn t it look strange and mystical and completely overblown? Not to mention sexy: this is a film where Hollywood heartthrob Stephen Dorff plays the scruffy sleazeball sidekick, so clearly anyone not totally buff was left on a mountaintop to die as a baby. And while shirtless guys are the order of the day, Pinto (or her body double) has a jaw-dropping 3D arse shot. As Sir Mix-A-Lot once said even white boys got to shout . What really separates this from a particularly lavish late night Paris fashion show is the violence (or maybe not, depending on which fashion shows you ve been attending). Forget heads rolling though there are a lot of decapitations here this features one slow-motion action sequence built entirely around a dozen heads actually exploding. Tarsem s painterly approach to visuals works extremely well when it comes to the many action sequences too: he forgoes the now-standard rapid edits and shaky camerawork for long slow-motion takes that pan across the action and allow you to actually see clearly what s going on as Theseus slashes his way through a squad of soon-to-be-blood-gushing foes. So while visually this has the aesthetic of a high-end video installation, it also has a villain whose main goal after killing the Gods for allowing his family to die is to crush the testicles of every man who isn t him (and he s got a big henchman with a mallet to help him out). It s this combination of gorgeous visuals and extremely bloody and brutal action that makes Immortals such a strange and compelling experience. Well, that and Dorff saying with a straight face the line I am a thief, my lady if I were free of these chains I d steal your heart.

Movie Review: The Adventures Of Tintin

Growing up, the Tintin books got me through a lot of hard times, and when I found out I wasn't alone in finding solace within the pages Herge spent decades creating, I was overjoyed. Entire generations of people all over the world were, at various times through their lives, affected by the startlingly precise, layered and compelling stories in which Tintin, Captain Haddock, Snowy, Thompson and Thomson, Professor Calculus, General Alcazar and a slew of others flit through nimble, perfectly structured detective stories. Because that's what Tintin is, really: a detective. Technically, he's an investigative reporter, freelance, from Belgium. But part of his universal appeal is his simultaneously noble and borderline pigheaded pursuit of the truth; one gets the impression that even if he wasn't a reporter, he'd still seek out wrongdoing and expose it to the light. He is unwaveringly brave, an excellent marksman, has superb deductive skills, and is a forgiving but unerring judge of character; he places his complete faith in his best friend, Captain Haddock, and in his dog Snowy. But he performs a kind of social juggling act with the terrifyingly inept Interpol agents, Thompson and Thomson, allowing them to blunder about on their own, and using their contacts when needed. But if you grew up reading Tintin, or even watching the animated series, you'll know all of this. And if you're one of these fortunate people, you'll no doubt already have fairly strong opinions about The Adventures of Tintin. And when someone takes something that formed a fairly pivotal role in your life, and reinterprets it for a global audience, there's always the chance that you'll leave the cinema grinding your teeth so hard that dogs within a three mile radius begin howling a mangled cacophony of what sounds a bit like 'Elevation' by U2. And many critics already feel this is the case; they feel that 'their' Tintin has been pulverised into something unrecognisable. But Tintin doesn't belong to any one person; Herge created Tintin for everyone, and my Tintin (which, incidentally, is totally dark and sublime and far more nuanced than yours) is never going to be what appears on the big screen. Neither is yours. And you know what? That's fine. Suck it up. The Adventures of Tintin is just someone else's take on the heroic exploits of the heroes you know and love. Or, more accurately, the heroes you think you know and love, because in reality, it's probably been many years since you even picked up a Tintin story. This particular spin on Tintin (or 'Spintin', if you're a total jerk) is directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings). It has a screenplay by Steven Moffat (of Doctor Who fame) Edgar Wright (of Spaced,Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim fame) and Joe Cornish (writer ofThe Adam and Joe Show). The voice cast are equally accomplished; Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) voices Tintin, Andy Serkis (Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and patron saint of motion capture actors) brings Haddock to life, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (see Edgar Wright) do Thompson and Thomson, and Daniel Craig (the latest James Bond) fills the shoes of our villain. The film effectively combines and reinterprets the events which take place in the books The Crab With

The Golden Claws, and The Secret of the Unicorn. Tintin purchases a model ship from a street vendor, takes it home, and ends up having it stolen from him. Eventually, he chases various leads and meets Captain Haddock; the two strike up a fast, if not ungainly friendship, and begin a race towards a treasure hidden by one of Haddock's descendants. Where people are going to take issue with this film (read: cry about it like entitled babies) is in the filler. You see, the books aren't enough to fill 107 minutes of screen time, and the filmmakers have decided to pepper the movie with far more action sequences than you might remember; there are some spectacularly long chases, filled with explosions, nail-bitingly close shaves, drunken near-misses and flagrantly unbelievable stunts. But as far as this lifelong Tintin reader is concerned, none of this compromises the spirit of the source material. The Adventures of Tintin is vastly different from the books on which it is based; it's almost Darwinian, like it's evolved away from it's distant ancestors. But Tintin retains all the qualities which make him great. Haddock is still a bumbling drunk - and for those of you who maintain that here, he's not the Haddock they remember, I'd like to insist you go back and read the first two books he appeared in, in which he was an absolute wreck. It was his ongoing adventures with Tintin which sobered him up and made him truly great. Snowy doesn't talk like he did in the comics, but he retains the intelligence he always had. In effect, it's a total revamp of the Tintin mythos, replete with surreal action sequences and liberal lashings of slapstick, but it manages to convey the core values of Tintin without, I feel, compromising what made the characters so vital. The animation is breathtaking. I'm aware that 3D is a truly frustrating phenomenon for many people, and I'll even acknowledge that it's very likely a cinematic blind alley, but here, it works. It's not essential in any way, shape or form, but it works. The characters benefit from motion capture more than I can express in words, and were it not for the trademark Herge exaggerated noses or moustaches borne by characters, you'd think you were watching real people. It's not going to be universally loved, but to be frank, my tolerance for childishly stalwart 'devotees' whose inability to cope with a new spin on an old classic, such as Tintin, is in pretty short supply. I left the cinema grinning like an idiot, and the entire row behind me, made up of middle aged Belgians proudly waving flags, walked out of the screening clapping one another on the back, bobbing around me joyfully like giddy balloons. If that's not a ringing endorsement from a die-hard fan, I don't know what is.