reviews Archives - Page 11 of 15 - Ramblin' with Roger

MOVIE REVIEW: The Muppets

With all the big, Oscar-bait movies coming out in the fall, what is the one movie I wanted to see most of all this week? If you’ve read the title of this piece, you already know. I think it’s in no small part to a very clever campaign of faux trailers online – Green with Envy is still my favorite – that kept up the interest and bringing the Muppets back in the limelight.

The movie is about two big Muppet fans, Walter, and his brother Gary (Jason Segal). They and Gary’s long-time girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) take a trip to Los Angeles and discover, though, that lots of people HAVE forgotten Kermit the Frog and his cohorts. Worse, there is an unfortunate contractual provision that will make things worse.

I didn’t see most of the movies, but I was a huge fan of The Muppet Show TV program. This entry, which we saw at the local Madison Theatre at a not-that-crowded Saturday matinee, seemed like a logical extension of where the various Muppets have been over the years. I sought out the three critics (out of 125) who panned the film. One said, “Except for a few good zingers from balcony dwellers Statler and Waldorf, there isn’t much here for mom and dad.” Oddly, I had just the opposite sense; I went with the wife and daughter, and I’m convinced that the adults enjoyed it more than the daughter did. And SHE said she wanted to watch it again.

Another: “The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or the 1979 movie.” Well, yes, and that is precisely the whole point. And finally, “The Muppet charm, always more at home within the intimate frame of a TV set, is gone here.” A paean to nostalgia by someone who just didn’t get it. This is a film where classic 21st-century copyright infringement plays a pivotal role.

I loved this movie. My wife and I laughed out loud, even when the daughter didn’t. The guest performers – Mickey Rooney? – were well used. Segal was very good as both writer and actor. Ever since I saw her in Enchanted, I knew Amy Adams would be great. Chris Cooper, unsurprisingly, is a great villain. My favorite moment in the movie involved two instruments and two/four people. Yet there is a bit of melancholy as well, as happens sometimes when old friends try to rekindle the past.

I’d give it a 3.8 out of 4.

Oh, on the way home, a total stranger and I were torturing my daughter by singing a song from the end credits, which is one of the Muppets’ 20 best musical moments, complete with video.
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Lest I forget, a quite decent Toy Story short, Small Fry, precedes the movie. Is that how therapy works?

Rod Serling biography by Joel Engel

One of the things I was able to do in the Adirondacks a couple of months ago was to read the bulk of the book Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone – a biography by Joel Engel. I wanted to finish it because I had borrowed the book from my father-in-law and I wanted to return it; that was my internal message, not his external one.

In the Methodology and Sources section of the book, author Joel Engel expressed surprise that in 1985, a full decade after the death of the celebrated television writer Rod Serling, there had not yet been a Serling biography. So Engel made inquiries and ended up writing a book about a man whose fans adored him, but who, despite his considerable success, was riddled with self-doubt. As Engel notes in the Prologue re Serling in 1967: “Submitted for your examination: a man who’s dying inside. Not so many years ago, he rode the crest of a golden wave he thought would never end…But that was before giving birth to the Creation…Each day, he hears fewer whispers of his greatness, and those still heard cannot be believed from inside the private hell to which the Creation has doomed him.”

The Creation, of course, was the seminal series The Twilight Zone, whose writing and hosting made him both successful as a writer but also a celebrity; yet he doubted his writing abilities, and scorned his own celebrity.

Chapter 1 was about Rod Serling’s dad Sam, who was too poor to go to college and become the engineer his skill set would suggest he could have become. He ended up enrolling in secretarial school and took his bride Esther to Panama, where she almost died of yellow fever. When the Serlings returned to Auburn, NY, they discovered Esther was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult, and the doctors assured the family that Robert, born in 1918, would be their only child. Sam then felt that he was doomed to work for his father-in-law’s grocery business, in Cortland, then Syracuse.

But the doctors were wrong. Rodman Edward Serling was born on Christmas Day, 1924. Sam moved south to Binghamton to buy his own grocery store and when it proved successful, the family moved to Bennett Avenue on the city’s middle-class West Side. He was attracted to the place that became a relatively worker-friendly town for the vast immigrant population. More importantly, Binghamton became, for Rod “a kind of geographic womb to crawl back into – and that’s your hometown,” a feeling not shared by Bob, BTW.

“Rod attracted people to him by sheer force of personality. He received constant praise, even adoration, and soon found it difficult to live without them.” At some level, this would continue to be the case for most of his life.

Chapter 2 involved Rod Serling as a paratrooper in World War II, a function he had to plead for because of his diminutive stature. Engel tells about the campaign in the Philippines in 1945, and how the absurdity of war – one friend was killed by the food supply dropped from the air to save them – that colored Rod’s eventual writing career.

Subsequent chapters addressed his evolution as a writer from radio station intern to some encouraging radio drama submissions to some success with this new medium called television. Despite some great volume of work, when the focus of TV production moved from live stagelike NYC shows to the filmed Hollywood product, it was a bit like starting over.

Nevertheless, despite his eventual success with The Twilight Zone, Rod’s “need to please,” and his disdain for, yet attraction to, fame and success made him not quite satisfied.

Due in large part to his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit – he even smoked during a classroom appearance at his alma mater, Binghamton Central High School in 1970, I can testify personally – Rod Serling died on June 28, 1975.

The Engel book is quite interesting, especially the first two chapters. But it is all well researched. If the latter chapters are somehow less enjoyable, maybe it’s because the subject of the book was unable to be content with his life, believe his success, be happy with his first writing critic, his wife Carol. Like his father, he wanted more than he achieved and like Sam, he died young pursuing it.

Movie Review: Dolphin Tale

For the first time ever, my wife, my daughter, and I went to a movie theater together. Usually, it’s the daughter and I, or the wife and I. On Columbus Day, we all went to the neighborhood cinema, the Madison, to see Dolphin Tale.

It could have been called Dolphin Tail. From Rotten Tomatoes: “Dolphin Tale is inspired by the amazing true story of a brave dolphin and the compassionate strangers who banded together to save her life. Swimming free, a young dolphin is caught in a crab trap, severely damaging her tail.”

I was surprised to discover that it turned out to be a good movie. Not a great one, but one where I was willing to be taken in by young Sawyer Haskell (Nathan Gamble), disaffected at school but with a peculiar connection with the mammal he helped to save. He ends up being a regular at the sanctuary where the dolphin was being treated, without the knowledge of his mother (Ashley Judd). Clearwater Marine Hospital is run by marine biologist Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick Jr.) with the assistance of his staff; his wise father Reed (Kris Kristofferson) tries to let his son do things his way. Morgan Freeman shows up about halfway through the film in a critical role.

Yes, it’s a message film, where Sawyer, along with Clay’s daughter Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff), shows the grown-ups that they ought not to give up too easily, even after bad weather and worse finances. And at 1:52, it was about 15 minutes too long. But it was inspirational in the end, and it’s the kind of movie one can take a child 1) without being mortified by what’s on the screen and 2) without being bored to death.

I liked it, and my wife and daughter, probably more so.

MOVIE REVIEW: Crazy, Stupid, Love.

This grand romantic gesture about grand romantic gestures conjures up the bittersweet magic of first loves, lasting loves, lost loves and all the loves in between.” – Betsy Sharkey. DEFINITELY TRUE

The Daughter was still away, and the Wife, surprisingly, suggest we see TWO movies in one day. Was she kidding? That’d be the kind of crazy idea I’d come up with. But after the 12:10 pm showing of The Help, we went home to have supper, then went out for the 6:40 pm showing of Crazy, Stupid, Love.; crazy, stupid, punctuation. It had gotten mostly positive reviews. And this would become a mini Emma Stone film festival.

So we went to see C,S,L. and we both loved it! And now I’m trying to deconstruct why. Part of it is that it got right to the storyline without a lot of exposition. In that first scene in the car, we recognize that Cal (Steve Carrell) is very happy in his marriage but that his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) is not. He ends up at a bar and takes Don Juan lessons from Jacob (Ryan Gosling), with some unintended consequences.

So I decided to get lazy and go to Rotten Tomatoes and clip the top critics’ remarks to see how they matched up with mine.

“It’s romantic, touching, a little risqué and screwball, yet reassuringly down-to-earth.” – Colin Calvert. TRUE

“A multi-threaded and well-organized comedy full of pleasant surprises and appealing characters.” – Eric D. Synder. TRUE

“This grand romantic gesture about grand romantic gestures conjures up the bittersweet magic of first loves, lasting loves, lost loves, and all the loves in between.” – Betsy Sharkey. DEFINITELY TRUE

“I laughed all the way through, thanks to both consistently clever dialogue and deft delivery from Carell and Gosling, who clearly relished a chance to flex his comic muscles.” – Elizabeth Weitzman. Mostly TRUE. I didn’t laugh every minute, though the woman sitting across the aisle two rows up, may have.

“Adult dramas and comedies should at least have a toe in their audience’s lives.” – Ann Hornaday. I think the movie does do that, for the most part.

“A Midsummer Night’s PG-13 sex comedy.” – Carrie Rickey. Not only is this TRUE, I had already concluded that the big scene near the end when A is after B and B is after C, etc. was Shakespearean comedy, but then thought that was too pretentious; maybe it wasn’t.

“The movie suffers perhaps from too many characters and subplots but all the actors appear to have fun with their characters.” – Kirk Honeycutt. I balk at the first part. I’ve watched movies with too many subplots – “I can’t remember – who is THAT?” – and this was not one of them, at least for me. But the second part is TRUE.

“‘Crazy, Stupid, Love’ is a sweet romantic comedy about good-hearted people. Imagine that.” – Roger Ebert. OH YEAH, TRUE.

So I liked it, perhaps more than I expected, A- or, at worst, B+ territory.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Help

No, the Help does not solve the issues of race in America; it was not designed to do so.

The Wife and I went to see the movie The Help a couple of Saturdays ago in a very crowded room at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. We had been looking forward to seeing it since we caught the trailer. Our anticipation was further enhanced by happening to catch Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays the primary “villain”, for lack of a better term, on CTV while we were in Toronto a couple of weeks back, describing her role as “delicious.”

And I was going to write my impressions right away, but I got distracted by issues in the press surrounding the movie and the book upon which it was based. They are that essentially it’s a white woman who wrote about the black experience, with the film being the latest example of Hollywood’s historically lunkheaded, white-guilt appeasement genre.

Well, I’ve not read the book. As for the issues of the movie, I don’t think they were making a documentary, so if the moviemakers didn’t get it 100% correctly, that’s OK; most Hollywood films don’t. Beyond that, though, there were some well-meaning white people in America in 1962, even in the South, even in Jackson, Mississippi, so making the one of the white leads as heroic (in vast contrast to most whites in the film) doesn’t make it some sort of sellout. No, it does not solve the issues of race in America; it was not designed to do so.

Anyway, let me tell you how I immediately felt after seeing the film: the first 1/5 was interesting but not particularly engaging. The last 80%, though, I either laughed or gasped or cried. I enjoyed it on that level; actually, I liked it quite a bit. The acting was universally fine, but especially Viola Davis, who just might get an Oscar nod.

From Rotten Tomatoes: The Help stars Emma Stone as Skeeter, Viola Davis as Aibileen, and Octavia Spencer as Minny-three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. From their improbable alliance, a remarkable sisterhood emerges, instilling all of them with the courage to transcend the lines that define them, and the realization that sometimes those lines are made to be crossed-even if it means bringing everyone in town face-to-face with the changing times. — (C) DreamWorks

This was a film about people who were invisible, black maids who often raised white children, eventually finding a voice through a crazy notion of college-grad-returns-home Skeeter, who is faced additionally with the mystery of why her family’s maid (played by the terrific Cicely Tyson) had suddenly left. At 145 minutes, it IS too long, but I didn’t find it histrionic as some did. Perhaps this is true, though: “It is a formulaic Hollywood feel-bad and then feel-good work, one in which beautifully bathed-in-sunlight characters say Very Important Things while the music swells.” As I said, I liked it anyway, especially with smaller roles by Alison Janney, Jessica Chastain, and others.
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Yet another movie controversy: Is gaining 15 pounds really “torture”? Actresses pack it on and lose it again for “The Help” — what’s the big deal?