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Review of THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES (4K Blu-ray)

February 24, 2024

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+/B

Action-Adventure

Rated PG-13

The fifth film in The Hunger Games series is a prequel that focuses on the back story of young Coriolanus Snow, who in the first four films is the tyrannical president of Panem—a post-apocalyptic nation in North America originally composed of 13 districts (like the U.S.) that correspond to U.S. regions and states. Is it like the book? Mostly. Minor characters are eliminated, as Hollywood typically does, and one memorable scene between the two main characters is MIA. But again, that’s Hollywood.

These days the most successful young adult authors are good at aggregation and know that to really hook an audience the whole series has to be relatable to the lives of today’s readers—and that includes “forecasting” a frightening future based on a metaphoric depiction of the present that, let’s face it, probably already frightens teens and tweens. With little imagination viewers can find parallels to people making headlines today.

For the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling successfully combined various myths and mythological creatures with wizards and dragons and the trappings of medieval times in a cautionary tale about the abuse of power, including villains having a Hitlerian obsession with nationalism and purity of blood. For The Hunger Games dystopian novels, Suzanne Collins looked backward to a classic society that peaked and fell because of, well, a lot of factors.

That is, in The Hunger Games novels and films, there are echoes of the Imperial Roman Empire and the decadence and corruption that brought it to an end. It’s hard not to see such allusions when gladiator games are at the center of the books/films and characters are named for ancient Romans such as Crassus (Coriolanus’s empire-building father, who was killed prior to the start of this prequel—an allusion to the wealthy Roman military leader who was a member of the First Triumvirate that transitioned the democratic republic into an age of imperialism), Coriolanus (not just president, but in history a Roman general and the subject of a Shakespeare play), Casca (one of the assassins of Julius Caesar—in this film, dean of the academy and creator of the Hunger Games), and Volumnia (the mother of Coriolanus—in the film, the head gamemaker).

Viewers see an early, low-tech version of the games and a brand-new innovation: having the tributes from each of the 12 remaining districts “mentored” by one of the Capitol academy elite. With the emphasis on the poorest coal-mining District 12 and the games and mentors from the ruling class, it’s very much a haves versus have-nots kind of film.  

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is set 64 years before the action of the first Hunger Games. Fans and critics were especially hot for its release. Then again, they’ve been hot and full of high expectations ever since Jennifer Lawrence starred as the bow-and-arrow wielding Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (2012, 84% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), followed by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013, 90%—the highest rated film in the series), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014, 70%) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015, 69%). The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes received mixed reviews at 64% fresh, continuing the numerical slide. In fairness, though, when you look at numbers like these you need to realize that they’re generated largely by rabid überfans of the Collins’ series and by critics who can be curmudgeonly no matter what their age.

Just plain fans of the series ought to enjoy The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. The plot is twisty but not contorted, and the pacing is crisp. The costume, set design, and special effects are convincing. The music provided by Zegler is a welcome addition, and there’s enough action to qualify for an action movie. In fact, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was the 2024 winner of a People’s Choice Award for The Action Movie of the Year and also helped Zegler, who plays coal-mining district songstress Lucy Gray Baird, to earn The Action Movie Star of the Year.

The rest of the cast is solid as anthracite. Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow) has the brooding intensity of Adam Driver on a Star Wars turn, while Viola Davis is pretty darned chilling as Volumnia, Jason Schwartzman is the games emcee, and Peter Dinklage brings to life the role of Casca. Seldom, when a film has this kind of cast with memorable performances, will mediocre ratings stick. I expect the audience appreciation for this film to rise over time, because Ballad has relatively few weaknesses. There could have been a few more scenes that suggest the dynamics of the Capitol and districts, and a few more featuring Coriolanus and Lucy to show their relationship progressions and regressions. In addition, this origin story could have used a tad more development to show how Coriolanus transitions from an ambitious but borderline decent member of the upper class to someone who aspires to the heights of his late general father—eventually becoming the ruthless, heartless dictator played by Donald Sutherland in the first four films.

Still, this film seemed much shorter than its run time, which is always a good indicator of quality and audience engagement. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes will get repeat play in our house, and I suspect it will in others’ as well.

Entire family:  No (tweens and older)

Run time: 157 min., Color

Studio/Distributor:  Lionsgate

Aspect ratio:  2.39:1 widescreen

Featured audio:  Dolby Atmos

Bonus features: A-/B+, lots here to satisfy

Trailer

Amazon link

Rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material

Language:  1/10—One loudly exclaimed minor swearword was the only thing that stood out

Sex:  0/10—This isn’t a sexual film; a kiss here and there, a few undergarment shots, and that’s it

Violence:  7/10—People are poisoned, blown up, shot, stabbed, punched, bitten by rabid bats, burned to death in a fire, and attacked by snakes (the latter the result of some pretty impressive CGI); while some of it is bloodless, quick-peddled, or offscreen, the onscreen deaths do pack an emotional punch

Adult situations:  3/10—Some drinking and references to teen drinking, and a man abuses morphine

Takeaway: If you let your kids watch the first four HG films, this one is comparable in terms of violence, etc.; but buckle up. There’s nothing official yet, but the buzz is that The Hunger Games franchise is gearing up for at least two more films

Review: INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (Blu-ray)

December 11, 2023

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B

Action/Adventure

Rated PG-13

Let’s get one thing out of the way:  Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was such a larger-than-life kickback to old-time serialized movie adventures that anything afterwards had to be judged by an unfair standard. So the snark came out after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) was released, and a collective sigh of relief could be heard following the addition of Sean Connery to the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) father-son adventure that brought the franchise back to the level of the original.

Many fans think that Lucasfilm should have stopped with that trilogy, because a sequel made almost 20 years later—Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)—was the weakest of the bunch. But you get the feeling that George Lucas doesn’t have it in him to end anything on a low note, and neither does Harrison Ford, who played not only that iconic Lucas character but Star Wars’ Han Solo as well. When characters reach those kind of heights, there’s a need to give them the type of retirement party that they deserve, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destinydoes that.

It’s a curtain call film, aimed at giving fans one last look at a favorite character and series, with a déjà vu familiarity that is deliberately cultivated through old characters from the earlier films (Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davies both appear) and trigger scenes that evoke memories of many others that fans have enjoyed over the years. The Nazis are here, of course, though in opening flashback featuring a younger CGI-generated Harrison Ford in sequences that look so good they’re bound to further alarm actors worried about AI taking away jobs.

James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) seems like an odd choice to direct, but a fresh pair of eyes apparently helped. So did a return to the real object quest. The two most successful films in the series had plots spun from fictionalized takes on real ancient world  objects—the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders and the Chalice that Christ drank from at the Last Supper in Last Crusade—and Mangold does a nice job of handling the pacing and the complicated fictional history constructed for the real object in this last installment:  the Antikythera, a clock-like mechanical device attributed to Posidonius (but to Archimedes in the film) that was discovered off the coast of Antikythera in 1900. The real device isn’t a time machine, but that’s how it functions in this fifth and presumably final chapter of the Indy saga.

Mangold gets the pacing and tone right, and the special effects and visual effects are top-notch. But the plot can seem a bit far-fetched at times. I’m thinking here of a train scene where Indy and his less physically capable colleague both manage to climb onto the curved roof of a fast-moving train and run from car to car—something that, I can attest from my own experience hopping freight trains, is damn near impossible. And don’t think too long about how time travel plunks Indy down in ancient Greece, where he somehow instantly recognizes Archimedes. Thankfully, the pacing is crisp enough that it prevents you from thinking too much about any plot points that seem a bit too strained,  and that pacing reminds you that you’re watching a contemporary version of the old campy silent and early talky era serials, the installments of which moviegoers saw weekly in neighborhood theaters. They were all far-fetched, and from the beginning the Indiana Jones films have sought to pay tribute to those films by having fun with the genre.

Indiana Jones plays best as a character that reacts to others, and award-winning actress Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, Crashing) is more than capable as a foil that frequently drifts across the line between ally and nemesis. In this installment she plays Helena, the daughter of a professor who was a close friend of Indy’s and whose life’s work revolved around the Antikythera.

There are age jokes, of course, but not nearly as many as you’d expect. The idea of the thin line between friend and foe is also walked by an astrophysicist (Mads Mikkelsen) who worked for the Nazis but now is employed by NASA . . . with his side hustle involving pursuit of the object that was within his grasp back in 1944, and using CIA agents to help him get it. Yeah, don’t think too much about that either.

Antonio Banderas appears as an Indy former friend who also walks that thin line, though as Banderas himself described it, his appearance is more of a cameo than anything fleshed out. There are plenty other minor characters to try to keep straight, but one that bears mentioning is Teddy (Ethan Isidore), who, like Short Round, provides some comic relief but is also well integrated into the plot.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom started to grow on fans over time, while Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull remains a shrug. I suspect that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is one that fans will like more as time passes. Even now, it’s solid entertainment.

At a time when everyone knows ageism is wrong but the U.S. still remains a youth culture, Ford as Indy reminds us that it’s not too late to fight off the gravitational effects of aging. He reportedly took daily walks and also incorporated 40-mile bicycle rides into his routine in order to get in shape for the film. His vigorous onscreen presence is a shout-out for elder RESPECT.

Entire family:  No (probably age 8 and older)

Studio/Distributor:  LucasFilm

Aspect ratio:  2.39:1 widescreen

Featured audio:  DTS-HDMA 7.1

Bonus features:  B-

Trailer

Amazon link

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking

Language:  2/10—It’s funny, but thinking about it in retrospect I can’t recall any language to cite here; it’s not that kind of film

Sex:  1/10—Indy indulges in a rekindled relationship kiss that is tastefully filmed as a long shot, and he is also shown shirtless in at least one scene

Violence:  4/10—Characters are killed, others are speared, and there’s plenty of hand-to-hand fighting, but the tone of the film is tongue-in-cheek and so, therefore, is the violence

Adult situations:  2/10—There is some smoking and some drinking, but not to excess and the quick pacing and focus on action makes all of it recede into the background

Takeaway:  Fans were pulling for Ford and Indy, hoping for a suitable send-off, and I think they got a respectable one—a film that should age well; for my money, Raiders is still tops, followed by Last Crusade and Temple of Doom, but Dial of Destiny isn’t far behind

Review: BARBIE (2023) (Blu-ray)

November 26, 2023

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, Entire Family, Fantasy, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+/B

Fantasy-Comedy

Rated PG-13

Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, merited a chapter in the 2018 book Shapers of American Childhood, and why wouldn’t she? Barbie was a blank slate. For the first time, girls had a doll that wasn’t a baby who dictated pretend motherhood play. With Barbie, they had a doll who was ostensibly a teen or adult, and that invited them to pretend play in a totally different way. They could be more than nurturing mothers.

Sure, Hasbro coined the term “action figure” to apply to a similar sized doll—G.I. Joe—that would appeal to boys, but that was in 1964. Barbie debuted in 1959, and though Mattel marketed her originally as a “fashion doll” with multiple outfits to buy and rotate, she had moveable arms, legs, and head, same as the army doll. Girls could pose her to ride in her pink convertible or boat, surf at the beach, swim in her pool, shop at the stores, or work behind the desk as a business executive. So yeah, a case can also be made for Barbie being the first action figure.

But through four waves of feminist criticism, Barbie also has come under fire for everything from the unnatural “ideal” shape of her body and what it does to girls’ self-image, to some of the things that the talking Barbies said (“Math is hard”) and early attempts at diversity that still used the same body mold and Caucasian features.

Barbie the live-action film (not to be confused with the 42 animated and streaming TV films) celebrates the iconic nature of the doll and is chock full of allusions to the wardrobe and accessories of Barbies past. The thoughts behind Barbie’s creation—“A doll can help change the world” and  “You can be anything”—celebrate the creator’s intent and Barbie’s iconic status. But that’s offset by the campy Zoolander airheadedness of the various Barbies and Kens. Surprisingly, the criticisms are also taken into account, with plenty of jokes and allusions. The result is a rich assessment of a doll that was an important part of postwar American culture—a clever film that manages to have it both ways. For that, credit co-writers Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, as well as Gerwig’s direction.

Barbie, as the world knows by now, stars Margot Robbie as the title character, and Ryan Gosling as Ken, the doll who exists only in relation to Barbie as a kind of accessory.  Almost every other female is also named Barbie to reflect the different models and types that were produced over the decades, and there’s more than one Ken as well. The elevator pitch for this film could have been made between two floors: First Barbie, then Ken has an existential crisis.

Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling nail it as the main Barbie and Ken, the forever California beach-culture kids who never age and never seem to change in a sort of utopian alternate reality where all Barbies are successful businesswomen, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and elected officials, while Kens are just arm candy and perpetual beach boys with nothing to do but be “Ken.” That in itself makes for a clever construct of an inverted world.

There’s also something Elf-like about Barbie. Like Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf, a wide-eyed, naïve Barbie and Ken leave their highly stylized fantasy world full of bright colors for the industrial look of the real world. The result is a fish-out-of-water comedy. Buddy was on a mission to find his “naughty” father, while Barbie is told by “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon) that she needs to travel to the real world to find the child who’s playing with her in order to get to the bottom of why she’s experiencing sudden concerns about mortality and discovering such human imperfections as cellulite, bad breath, and flat feet. Like Back to the Future, the reason for having to go back might be crucial to the plot, but it’s not the source of pleasure. Juxtapositions between the two worlds are, and Ken’s discovery that in the real world men (rhymes with Ken) are in charge. Suddenly he’s embracing “the patriarchy” and bringing those ideas back to Barbieland.

So far Barbie is the highest grossing film of 2023, and the film’s musical numbers received 11 Grammy nominations. Even if it wasn’t half of the pop-culture “Barbenheimer” phenomenon that saw post-COVID moviegoers flocking to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer because they were released about the same time, odds are that Barbie would have been a tremendous success because it appeals to both Barbie fans and critics. Throw in musical numbers and humor, and it expands the appreciative audience even more. And the soundtrack features Ava Max, Charli XCX, Dominic Fike, Fifty Fifty, Gayle, Haim, Ice Spice, Kali, Karol G, Khalid, Sam Smith, Lizzo, Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Pink Pantheress, Tame Impala, the Kid Laroi, and cast members.

Because of its complexity and ideational juggling act, Barbie the movie ends up being as much of a blank slate as the dolls. People will see what they want to see in the film, and that’s almost as phenomenal as Barbie, whose creator, Ruth Handler, also is celebrated. And I mean celebrated. That’s the overall tone of this film, and the music makes it feel like somebody’s birthday—like Barbie’s 64th.

Entire family:  Yes (most of the PG-13 stuff will fly right over their heads)

Run time:  114 min., Color

Studio/Distributor:  Warner Bros.

Aspect ratio:  2.00:1

Featured audio: Dolby Atmos TrueHD

Bonus features:  B

Trailer

Amazon link

Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language

Language:  2/10—One censored f-bomb, references to “phallic”, and a few “bitches” that pop up in one soundtrack song

Sex:  2/10—Construction workers catcall Barbie, who responds that she has no vagina and Ken has no penis; Skipper’s breasts inflate to imitate the short-lived “Growing Up Skipper” doll; male cops and a man on the street sexualize Barbie, the latter by slapping her butt off camera; and Barbie showers, with nothing shown

Violence:  1/10—A comical big fight, with punches, kicks, and silly weapons applied here and occasionally elsewhere that seems clearly cartoonish

Adult situations:  1/10—The Kens drink beer though it’s only pretend beer, as with all Barbie and Ken actions to imitate pretend play of the dolls. 

Takeaway:  This is one film I hope isn’t followed by a sequel, for a sequel, I fear, would totally remove any have-it-both-ways ambiguity toward Barbie and Ken; Barbie works, but I’m not sure Barbie II would

Review of FINAL CUT (2022) Blu-ray

September 18, 2023

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, Horror-thriller, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B-/C+

Horror comedy

Not rated (would be PG-13)

Final Cut is an onion of sorts, a 2022 French film with English subtitles that will vary in its appeal based on how much viewers know about (and appreciate) low-budget filmmaking, how much they like the tongue-in-cheek zombie subgenre of horror, and how many of the film’s subtle gags they happen to catch or find funny.

It’s entertaining in a heady sort of way—more clever than silly, and more silly than laugh-out-loud funny. For me, the gold standard for horror comedy remains the quirky Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a hilarious parody of slasher films and all their familiar tropes. That one is both clever and laugh-out-loud funny. Final Cut is perhaps even cleverer, but funny in a way that makes you smile.

Final Cut, which opened for general release the same day it screened at the Cannes Film Festival, is part of a burgeoning subgenre of films in which the audience watches both a movie plot that unfolds as well as the behind-the-scenes action—a postmodern self-consciousness that directs the viewers’ attention to the process of filmmaking or theater production and the relationship between process and product. Think Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation or Synecdoche, New York, or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Like I said, heady stuff that will nonetheless appeal to fans of the subgenre because it parts the curtain on low-budget guerilla filmmaking, and that can be more fascinating than the movie that they’re filming.

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Final Cut is a remake/adaptation of a 2017 Japanese horror-comedy One Cut of the Dead, but you don’t have to have seen that film to appreciate this one. It just adds another layer to peel away and savor.

Hazanavicius said he wouldn’t have been surprised if some people at the Cannes screening “whistle or boo after 20 minutes.”  That’s because what we think we see for the first 20 minutes or so seems like a generically bad low-budget B-movie that’s chaotic, poorly cast, and shot on the cheap. I say “poorly cast” because the characters have Japanese names though they’re clearly European and speaking French.

There’s an explanation for that and everything else we see in those first 20 minutes, but I won’t spoil it by saying anything more. As I said, it’s a clever onion of a film that can be appreciated as an onion, but much more so if more of the layers can be perceived. I’ll give you one right now:  Yoshiro Takehara, who plays a producer that’s funding the film and has her own ideas about what her money should buy, had the same role in the 2017 original that this film partly spoofs and partly remakes.

In Final Cut, Romain Duris plays a passionate and slightly crazy director who normally directs infomercials and small documentaries and seems out-of-his-league making a film about cast and crew members that, one-by-one, turn into zombies. The character mix seems familiar enough: two daughters who have their own opinions about how the film  should be shot,  an egocentric prima donna of an actor, a crew member who drinks too much . . . on the job, and a bevy of producers to keep happy. As far as the audience goes, Final Cut will keep viewers happy as long as they appreciate the cleverness, but patience is definitely a virtue, for there are many lackluster stretches where you have to give Hazanavicius the benefit of the doubt and wait to see where he’s going with it all.

This gleefully gory, meta film with scatological humor might be played tongue-in-cheek, but even at that it’s only suitable for older teens and adults. In the end, I thought it was above-average, but couldn’t touch Tucker and Dale—even with its satisfying ending. Tucker and Dale grabs you from the very beginning, while Final Cut seems to start slow and gradually build momentum and interest. But as with Tucker and Dale you’ll find yourself thinking about the film later and realizing how clever it actually was. And young filmmaker wannabes will get the same sort of inspiration as they may have gotten from The Fabelmans.

In case you’re wondering, Final Cut didn’t make the cut for awards at Cannes, but it did win Best Motion Picture Score at the Fantasia Film Festival and Hazanavicius earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars.

Entire family:  No (Age 10 and older)

Run time:  111 min., Color

Studio/Distributor:  Kino Lorber

Aspect ratio:  2.39:1

Featured audio:  French 5.1 DTS with English subtitles

Bonus features:  C

Trailer

Amazon link

Not rated (would be PG-13 for bloody violence and gore and brief nudity and scatological humor)

Language:  7/10—F-bombs and other language galore, but the act of reading subtitles while processing visual information somehow makes it seem less impactful

Sex:  3/10—One scene that’s fairly tame and nothing else major that I can remember; rather, anything sexual is mostly talk and allusions

Violence:  7/10—The violence here is intended to be gory and shocking in a campy sort of way; a head gets lopped off, another character takes an axe to the head, an arm gets ripped off, there’s projectile vomiting, but again, all in a campy sort of way

Adult situations:  5/10—One main character is an alcoholic, and there’s drinking and some smoking I think (hard to say because your focus is elsewhere)

Takeaway:  I can see why the director thought audiences might boo around the 20-minute mark, but that’s because of structural decisions the director made; filming it in another sequence or way ultimately wouldn’t have been as effective

Review: THE FABELMANS (Blu-ray combo)

April 7, 2023

James Plath, Family Home Theater Biopic, Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  A-

Drama

Rated PG-13

The Fabelmans was promoted as a “semi-autobiographical story loosely based on Spielberg’s adolescence,” but after Steven Spielberg’s November 2022 New York Times interview, the term “biopic” seems more appropriate. As it turns out, all of the major and memorable events happened pretty much as they were depicted in this 2022 film, which earned seven Oscar nominations. That includes a memorable scene where a timed young aspiring filmmaker meets the great, gruff John Ford in his office.

Even without labeling, audiences would have picked up on at least one similarity between the boy in the film and the famous director’s work:  a scene with boy scouts reminiscent of a sequence from the third Indiana Jones film. In fact, Spielberg recreated exactly the first short films that he made, including one he made with his boy scout troop to earn his photography merit badge.

The Fabelmans (fable-man’s) are an eccentric Jewish family that’s split down the middle of their collective brain. The mother, Mitzi (Best Actress nominee Michelle Williams), is a creative right-brained talent ruled by passion and imagination. A concert pianist, she’s also a free spirit who loves life, loves to laugh, and loves to play-act. The father, Burt (Paul Dano), is a left-brained tech genius who does his best to go with the flow, despite wanting his son to make useful things, as he does does. In their own way, both parents are  creative, so it’s no wonder that Spielberg turned out to be a creative genius. The fun of this film comes from seeing how that genius was nurtured in his adolescent and teen years.

As one of Sammy Fabelman’s three younger sisters (Keeley Karsten, Julia Butters, Sophia Kopera) observes, the youth is most like his mother.

Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) is immediately drawn to filmmaking after his parents take him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth—alternately mesmerized and traumatized by the film’s storytelling and realistic depiction of a train crash.

Mitzi is drawn to her husband’s partner and best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen), who does everything with the family except spend the night in the same house. Bennie is silly and a bit of a free spirit himself. Early on the audience can detect that their mutual attraction is a train wreck in the making.

What results is a fascinating coming-of-age film with a twist:  as Sammy teaches himself how to make movies, the audience learns all the ingenious things that young Spielberg did with a little budget and big ambitions. His special effects and utilization were a marvel, and he learns early that the power that a film can have—especially when it captures people in a way that can be missed or overlooked in daily life. Film can be a means of expression, it can evoke emotions in the audience, and it can reveal truths—some of them painful.

Michelle Yeoh deserved to win the Best Actress Oscar, but so, frankly, did Michelle Williams, who captivates the audience as much as she does her family . . . and Bennie. She brings life to the film in every frame she’s in. Gabriel LaBelle is also convincing as the young hero who copes with anti-Semitic taunts, bullying, parents who are drifting apart, an uncle (Judd Hirsch) who tells him he was meant to pursue his art at the expense of his family, and a first crush that ends up being a Pray-the-Jew-Away comedy in two acts.

Hirsch leans a little too close to familiar stereotypes in his performance as Uncle Boris, a former actor and circus performer, but the rest of the cast blends seamlessly into the landscapes of ‘50s and ‘60s Arizona and California. They were no doubt helped considerably by watching the home movies that Spielberg showed them and the recollections he shared so they could get a handle on how to play them. As Paul Dano said, “For somebody like Steven to share that much of himself with us—with the audience too—it was really a profound experience.

Knowing that this is the life story of one of the great directors of all time—the man who gave us Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, War Horse, Lincoln, The Post, and West Side Story—makes an already compelling film even more so. The average viewers will make connections to many of their favorite Spielberg films, and appreciate them (and this biopic—there, I said it) all the more.

The late Roger Ebert once said, “No good film is too long,” and that almost applies to The Fabelmans, a 2.5 hour film that might prompt many people to head for the snack counter or restrooms or just stretch their legs. Some of the scenes might go on a bit long, but it’s an interesting, episodic story that covers a lot of ground: the breakup of a marriage, prejudice, a painful relocation, a first love, and, most of all, the development of a filmmaker. In the end, you’re apt to forgive Spielberg his one excess:  trying to make a biopic that does justice to his own interesting life and amazing career.

Entire family:  No (junior high age and older)

Run time:  251 min. Color

Aspect ratio:  1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen

Featured audio:  Dolby TrueHD 7.1

Bonus features:  B

Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Code

Amazon link

Trailer

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use

Language: 5/10—1 f-bomb plus a peck of lesser swearwords

Sex:  3/10—Just the start of a teen make-out session, an embrace and hand-holding as signs of an affair, plus Sammy’s mom dances nude in a see-through dress (though all the audience sees is the outline of her shape)

Violence: 3/10—A character is pushed and punched in the face (nose bloodied), and an adult slaps a teen across the face; it hardly counts, but the young director films a war movie with realistic blood and gore from his high school “actors” not that severe because we see the secret behind the screen magician’s tricks

Adult situations:  3/10—Social drinking and smoking, plus the sadness of anti-Semitic bullying and a marriage on the rocks

Takeaway:  Spielberg said he almost abandoned his dream of being a filmmaker after seeing Lawrence of Arabia, thinking he could never reach the heights that David Lean did in that film. But he has done so a number of times, even if he fell just shy of perfection with this one

Review of A MAN CALLED OTTO (Blu-ray)

April 3, 2023

James Plath, Family Home Theater Comedy, Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B-

Drama-Comedy

Rated PG-13

A Man Called Otto (2022) offers another serving of a Hollywood trope we’ve seen many times over: the grumpy widower whose life is brightened somehow by a younger person.

In Finding Forrester the old man was a Salinger-like recluse dogged by a young wannabe writer. In Gran Torino it was a crusty racist war veteran softened by a teenage Lao Hmong refugee. In About Schmidt it was a still-numb and rudderless old coot that found some sense of purpose by corresponding with a Tanzanian boy through a Plan USA program. In Murphy’s Romance it was a widowed druggist who found an unlikely romance with a young single mom. And in Disney’s animated Up it was a gruff old codger with a cane who became stuck with an overly talkative boy scout insisting he help the elderly man in order to earn a merit badge.

There are many more examples to cite, but this Tom Hanks film tweaks the trope to make it both schmaltzier and darker. Otto (“O-T-T-O”) is so lost and depressed after losing his beloved wife to cancer that he tries to take his life onscreen—multiple times, and by multiple means. If this were a Taika Waititi film, those attempts would have been rendered more comically. But director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, The Kite Runner) goes for a deadpan blend of dark humor and pathos that doesn’t quite scream “Don’t try this at home,” the way broader humor might have done.

A Man Called Otto is a bit of a Hanks family affair, with Hanks’ wife, Rita Wilson, sharing a producing credit and son Truman playing a younger Otto in flashbacks. In the early going those flashbacks with Sonya (Rachel Keller) keep the film from being a total downer, like a film version of “Bolero” that plays over and over again because Forster tends to overstate Otto’s grumpiness, anger, and unexplained Barney Fife-like mission of guarding a gated cul-de-sac block of row houses in the Pittsburgh, Pa. area. The average viewer will, at some point, think, Okay, I get it. He’s an angry old bird. Move on. The film runs six minutes past two hours, so it could certainly have used a heavier hand in the editing room.

Though Hanks—like Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, James Garner, and Ed Asner before him—is the focal character and the one who grows and changes, the heart of the film belongs to a pregnant Mexican woman named Marisol (Mariana Treviño), her two young daughters, and her bumbling husband (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Without this family, Otto is a dead man, and without Treviño the film is a train wreck. Treviño has been acting for 10 years, but A Man Called Otto has to be considered her breakout role for U.S. audiences. She received no nominations for her performance, but Marisol’s exhuberance, honesty, and literal foot-in-the-door no-nonsense approach to life and relationships model the kind of virtues and values that parents might hope their children could attain. And her onscreen daughters Abbie (Alessandra Perez) and Luna (Christiana Montoya) get the assist. Scenes with them and Otto can seem cloying at times because they’re so purposefully intended to show Otto beginning to soften, but the young actresses channel their screen mother’s knowing enthusiasm along with their own characters’ innocence and naiveté to make those scenes funny.

Is it manipulative? Heck yeah. You’ll find yourself near tears one minute and laughing the next, and you know it’s because most of the scenes seem shot with the sole purpose of moving the audience. Some viewers will resent that, while others will appreciate a roller coaster ride that dips down for much of the first half and climbs throughout most of the second.

But if you give it any thought, Otto’s depression and anger would have been plenty to pull at audience’s heartstrings without the filmmakers adding a seemingly tacked-on side plot about a friendship that dissolved over automobile makes and a parallel sad medical situation. All of that feels like unnecessary piling on. The film would have been helped by fewer downer subplots, fewer trips to the cemetery, and more diverse characters like Malcolm (a transgender kid who had Otto’s wife for a teacher) and Jimmy (a neighbor whose fitness walking style will crack you up). There’s no happy ending here, only a happy transformation.

Is it family fare?  Perhaps, for families with tweens and older children. I’m a film critic, not a mental health professional, but a UCLA study reported that suicide is the second-leading cause of death among people age 15-24, with nearly 20 percent of high school students admitting that they’ve had serious thoughts of suicide. That’s a crazy statistic. Would it help them to watch a depressed and angry man who thinks he has nothing to live for find his way? Parents who know their children might have the answer. I don’t. I do know this: a film isn’t a substitute for professional evaluation and treatment, but it could very well be a starting point for a discussion that could lead to seeking outside help.

Entire family:  No

Run time:  126 min. Color

Studio/Distributor:  Columbia/Sony

Aspect ratio:  1.85:1

Featured audio:  DTS-HDMA 5.1

Bonus features:  C

Includes:  Blu-ray, Digital Copy

Amazon link

Trailer

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving suicide and language

Language:  7/10—Some audience members seem to bristle at the mere mention of “transgender,” and that word is spoken, along with an f-bomb, a few profane God damns, shits, hell, SOB, etc.; turns out that angry old men have a potty mouth

Sex:  1/10—Nothing here, even in flashbacks, which are intended to be tender; just a few kisses

Violence:  3/10— Otto loses it with a honking driver, physically manhandling the guy and threatening him, and there are lesser examples of physicality

Adult situations:  7/10—Aside from the multiple suicide attempts, two of which have him experiencing a near-death vision of his wife, there’s some alcohol and smoking, and one death

Takeaway:  A Man Called Otto is based on a best-selling novel by German writer Fredrik Backman, so given the number of aging male actors in Hollywood I would say there’s a pretty big incentive for future novelists to keep feeding this trope

Review of TOP GUN: MAVERICK (Blu-ray)

November 2, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Action-Adventure, Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+/A-
Action-Adventure Drama Romance
Rated PG-13

Top Gun: Maverick outgunned all other films at the box office so far in 2022, besting #2 Jurassic World: Dominion by nearly half-a-million dollars. It’s slick Hollywood action blockbuster filmmaking at its finest. 

Critics thought it better than the first Top Gun because of the increased number and authenticity of the aircraft action sequences. With the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, a film crew spent over a year working with six cameras placed inside the cockpits and additional cameras mounted at various spots on the planes’ exteriors. Reportedly more than 800 hours of aerial footage was shot, so the sequences that made it into the film were really something special.

And the planes? The production crew used 20 functioning aircraft and modified them to have the look that they wanted, including the fictional “Darkstar” that was designed with the help of actual engineers from legendary aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

The 1986 Top Gun was so popular that composer Giorgio Moroder and performer Kenny Loggins probably expected to see a hastily produced sequel and earn residuals for their “Danger Zone” theme. But it took almost 25 years before Paramount announced a sequel with Cruise signed, Jerry Bruckheimer onboard to produce, and Top Gun director Tony Scott expected to work behind the cameras again. Then, later in 2012, Scott died and production didn’t begin until 2017, with Joseph Kosinski directing. Then came delays related to COVID-19 and the prolonged filming of those complicated action sequences. But the results speak for themselves. If you don’t already have a big TV, this might be a reason to splurge. Top Gun: Maverick was made for the big screen.

Cruise at 60 looks boyish as ever and because of his action roles has maintained his muscle tone and slender frame. In Top Gun he was paired romantically with Kelly McGillis, five years his senior, but McGillis said she wasn’t asked to be in the sequel. Instead, writers gave Cruise another love interest to take his breath away:  Navy hangout bar owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly, age 48), with whom it’s implied he had a previous relationship—the old heartbreaker.

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Review of WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Blu-ray combo)

September 15, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Drama, PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B+
Drama
Rated PG-13

Unlike many reviewers of Where the Crawdads Sing (2022), I don’t have an axe to grind or a subject to bludgeon. I never read the first novel by 70-year-old Delia Owens that this Olivia Newman film is based on, and only heard about the hype—a Reese Witherspoon book club selection that sold 12 million copies in four years—and the controversy after watching the film. For some people, Owens’ background makes a difference, so I’ll address it briefly, though even without the backstory there’s plenty enough to get riled up about.

The film, like the novel, tells the story of a girl who is forced to fend for herself in the marshes of North Carolina after her abusive father drives off her mother and older siblings, and later bows out of the picture as well. Shamefully, it doesn’t occur to any of her family to take her with them. They just take off, leaving her alone with him.

The townspeople aren’t much better. They dub her “the marsh girl” and obviously recognize her situation, but only one couple shows her any kindness. And they certainly could have done more for her. Kya attends school barefoot, but is treated so shabbily that she never returns. Later, as a teenager after living in the marsh for years, she draws the attention of two young men: one a rich boy with a penchant for partying and taking what he wants, and the other a college-bound youth who at one point decides to teach Kya how to read. Some think that sweet; others call it condescending and controlling or a perverse sort of  relationship imbalance fetish.

Maybe the razors were sharpened after it was brought to everyone’s attention that Owens, like Kya, was (and is still) a suspect in an unsolved murder. In the film, one of Kya’s suitors ends up dead and she stands trial, with David Straithairn playing the kind of down-home country lawyer with uncommon wisdom and empathy that we saw in Harper Lee’s attorney, Atticus Finch. In real life, Owens and husband Mark were working as biologists and environmentalists in Zambia and were being filmed when a poacher was shot and killed . . . on camera. The couple left the country and was advised not to return because they remain persons of interest, as shown on ABC’s 1996 special Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story.

But back to the film. Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild) wrote the screenplay, Witherspoon co-produced, Polly Morgan (The Woman King) was responsible for the gorgeous location cinematography, Taylor Swift co-wrote and sang the theme song (“Carolina”), and Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Under the Banner of Heaven) headed a talented cast as Kya. Though men also are involved in the project, Where the Crawdads Sing feels very much like a female empowerment story and holds considerable appeal because of that.

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Review of COSTA BRAVA, LEBANON (Blu-ray)

September 1, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater Drama, Foreign (subtitles), PG-13 rated Leave a comment

Grade:  B-
Drama
Not rated (would be PG-13)

Americans have never been good at thinking about the future. A 2019 Northwestern Mutual poll found that 15 percent of Americans age 40 and older haven’t even put aside a single dollar toward their retirement years. And if the price of gas isn’t too crazy, no one gives a second thought as to whether the oil will run out some day, or whether the polluting side-effects of petroleum consumption will one day become intolerable. Same with the mountains of trash that Americans produce on a daily basis. Does anyone wonder if there will ever come a time when all the refuse becomes too much for the government to handle?

Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)is an environmentalist fable in Arabic (English subtitles) from Mounia Akl and the Lebanese entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars. A cautionary tale set in the near future, it has an engaging cast and some powerful moments as it tries to sound the alarm to alert people to an impending crisis of waste management. Except that in some countries it’s not all that impending. It’s already happening. Visitors to Egypt’s pyramids, for example, must first drive past mounds of trash pushed to the sides of roads and freeways. And that could happen anywhere . . . and everywhere.

Saleh Bakri and Nadine Labaki star as Walid and Soraya, a couple who eight years earlier decided to leave their Beirut home because of the poor air quality, pollution, and corrupt politics that made life there untenable. Now they live in the mountains with Walid’s aged mother and the couple’s two daughters: a teenager eager for more than the sheltered life her parents provide, and a precocious adolescent. Presumably because of the mother’s previous income from her pre-marriage career as a popular singer, they were able to build a house in the country’s last unspoiled place, an idyllic hillside home that even has the luxury of a small in-ground swimming pool. But it doesn’t take long for this paradise to be lost, and that’s the whole point of the film. Society’s problems are everyone’s problem. There’s no escaping them—even if you try to live off the grid.

You’d think that Walid and Soraya, former activists who met at a protest, would know that. But the impulse to survive and protect loved ones is even stronger than the drive to fight for the change that society needs. Alas, not long after we meet this family, men from the government show up. And like the earth-moving equipment operators from earlier films such as The Emerald Forest or Avatar who displaced forest-dwellers, the workers force the family to make the same hard decision that drove them to the mountains in the first place. On a micro level, Costa Brava, Lebanon could have been about any disaster, because it’s an intimate look—rendered so by Akl’s directorial style—of how one family deals with adversity.

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Review of SO PROUDLY WE HAIL (1943) (Blu-ray)

August 20, 2022

James Plath, Family Home Theater PG-13 rated, Romance, War Leave a comment

Grade:  B/B-
Drama
Not rated (would be PG-13)

Studs Terkel won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two, a title he said was suggested by an army correspondent. “The Good War” was a phrase “frequently voiced by men of his and my generation” because it was the last war fought that was not divisive or controversial, Terkel said. Americans rallied behind the flag after Pearl Harbor, and when everyone is in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, there’s a sense of shared purpose and commitment. That leads to a feeling of solidarity, of shared joys or sorrows that nonetheless bind people into a greater family or community stronger than the individuals themselves. There really is strength in numbers, and patriotism at its workable best is a group activity dependent upon full (or nearly full) participation, not an individual attitude—and certainly not competing attitudes.

All of which is to say, aside from the aesthetics of film, there’s value in watching an old black-and-white patriotic war movie because it can remind us of what patriotism really involves.

Colbert tends to Lake

So Proudly We Hail (1943) is an interesting case in point. Most of America’s World War Two movies were about the front-line heroism of fighting men, designed to keep the recruits coming and the people on the home front encouraged, still feeling the commitment and still willing to accept the sacrifices of wartime patriotism. When So Proudly We Hail was first released, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised the film’s  “shattering impression of the tragedy of Bataan” and producer-director Mark Sandrich’s reenacted battle-action scenes, but complained that “we behold the horror of Bataan through a transparency, through the studiously disheveled glamour of the Misses [Claudette] Colbert, [Paulette] Goddard and [Veronica] Lake.”

To a degree, that’s unfair, because the formula behind every patriotic war movie pulled against the film’s intended realism. I think Sandrich (who would direct Holiday Inn the following year) does a decent job of focusing not only on the professional aspects of military nurses serving in Bataan and Corregidor, but also on their love lives. So Proudly We Hail was billed as the “First great love story of our girls at the fighting front,” and Sandrich does a commendable job of adding romantic involvements to the standard war movie.

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