Tag Archives: family films

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Kinder, Gentler Alien Invasion

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Home

by Hope Madden

Home – DreamWorks’ latest animated adventure – is the genuinely sweet tale of an alien invasion of earth. Little bubble-driving cowards called Boovs, fleeing their arch enemies the Gorgs, take over Earth, moving the entire human population to Australia. Boovs are a proud collection of conformists, which is why lonesome and blunder-prone Oh (Jim Parsons) is an outcast and, eventually, a fugitive.

He and New York’s last Earthling Tip (Rhianna) reluctantly team up to evade the Boov military and find Tip’s mom (Jennifer Lopez). (This is particularly funny because, in the Adam Rex book on which the film is based, the character Oh is goes instead by the name J.Lo.)

It’s a fish out of water buddy comedy brimming with lessons on bravery and letting your freak flag fly (or not being afraid to be you), which means it resembles about 45% of our current animated output. Still, director Tim Johnson’s the animator behind the nonconformity classic Antz as well as the genius Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode Homer Cubed. Does that mean we can at least hope for some inspired comedy?

Inspired is a strong word.

Like his inescapable TV persona, Parsons is adorably geeky, and Rhianna delivers the required goods as the spunky tween protagonist. Steve Martin also hams it up enjoyably as the Boov’s inept leader Captain Smek.

There are more than a few laughs, and though most of the sight gags are aimed at parents, the entire film is tender and wholesome enough for the very young. And though the 3D is often superfluous, the animation is really gorgeous. Still, there’s nothing new to see here.

If you’re in the market for a film that offers your wee ones positive examples aplenty – girl power, anti-colonialism, nonconformist messages among many, many others – this movie hits every mark, although it does so in a way that won’t leave a big impression. Even if you’re looking for an inoffensive time waster, Home fits that bill. Think of it as a colorful, sweet, blandly likeable 94 minutes worth of teachable moments.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

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Trilogy Finale … No, the Other One

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Some trilogies come to a close with dragons, gold, tiny heroes, legendary foes and Ben Stiller. Wait, what?

Yes, though it may have flown under your radar, Stiller’s Night at the Museum series comes to a close with its third installment. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb completes the arc begun in 2006 when Stiller’s night watchman Larry Daly learned that, after sundown, the exhibits at New York’s Museum of Natural History come to life. (So basically, Toy Story in a museum setting.)

In 2009, Larry and his crew broke into the Smithsonian. This time around, when the golden tablet that reanimates the exhibits night after night begins to mysteriously corrode, the team heads to a London museum to repair the device and save everyone.

Truth be told, this is a series that has been sweet, imaginative but disposable from its inception.

Much fault lies with the series’ director Shawn Levy (Real Steel, Big Fat Liar), an unrepentant purveyor of anemic family fun. The Museum trilogy represents the best of his body of work. Still, he substitutes a busy screen and abundance of characters for actual pacing and energy.

The talent – Stiller, Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan and others – creates likeable, rascally characters, and most draw at least a chuckle or two during the adventure.

We’re to learn that life is about letting go as Larry recognizes his son’s impending manhood, though nothing feels genuine or heartfelt. But why start now? When Levy expanded Milan Trenc’s educational children’s book to a feature film, he borrowed a concept and lengthened it with some inside jokes, some cheap theatrics, and lots of dated gags, but little in the way of heart. Its subsequent sequels rehash the same basic concepts in new museums, and because of an underlying lack of creativity and abundance of coasting on the comic timing of the cast, the sequels have all been about as entertaining as the original.

The concluding chapter offers some coincidental tear jerking as Robin Williams delivers lines more moving because of their real-life context than their importance to the film. There are some other mildly amusing, well placed gags and gimmicks, and an awful lot of rehashing. If you and yours enjoyed the first two installments, the third promises more of exactly the same. The rest of us can overlook the third episode, exactly as we did the first two.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

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It Could Be Worse

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Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

by Hope Madden

I recently attended the advance screening of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, and I have to admit, my own day had been pretty craptastic. What I really wanted to do was drink to excess. But instead, I sat in the dark and watched as Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner parented four children through a crisis-riddled day.

Taken from Judith Viorst’s much beloved children’s book of the same name, the film follows Alexander on the day before and the day of his 12th birthday. At birthday-eve dinner, as Alexander recounts the woes of his miserable life – including accidentally setting his science class on fire while horrifying the girl of his dreams – each of his siblings and parents announces a wonderful life event that happened to coincide with Alexander’s misery.

So, at midnight, he makes himself a birthday Sunday and wishes his too-perfect family would have a bad day.

Well, he realizes the next day that he’s cursed each and every one of them.

And as obvious as the story is, it’s handled here with restraint and dignity.

Director Miguel Arteta – who directed one of my favorite little indies, Chuck and Buck – never panders or condescends. He has respect for his characters, his story, and his audience. It is amazing what a difference that makes in a family film.

Each character is drawn with some depth. Few actors are asked to mug for the camera. Each crisis is, of course, wildly implausible, but somehow this film and this cast pulls it off.

The cast itself helps. Carell and Garner never stoop. They are invested in these characters, and though both parents are too good to be true, they also both have dimension and faults.

As the titular Alexander, young, lisping Ed Oxenbould (Wow! That’s quite a moniker!) turns in an enjoyable performance as layered as the film could allow. He easily anchors the movie.

Plus, one outstanding cameo from the always brilliant Jennifer Coolidge.

Yes, things turn out OK. Great, in fact, and if you have a family that loves you, everything will be all right for you, too.

Beer is great, too, though. I’m not going to lie to you.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

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What’s In the Box?

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The Boxtrolls

by Christie Robb

If you’re looking for a quick Halloween costume for your kid and don’t have any skills, fling ‘em in the car and go see the Boxtrolls immediately. Even if you’ve achieved the Martha Stewart merit badge for craftiness, buckle them in the booster seat. This movie is adorable.

The town of Cheesebridge comes to life after curfew. The Boxtrolls, a group of cavorting wee beasties who wear boxes like turtle shells, roam the streets in search of mechanical doodads to drag back to their underground lair. These guys upsycle trash into musical instruments and fantastical inventions.

But they have a bad rep—accused of binging on babies, they are rounded up by a red-hatted crew whose leader, Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley), hopes to be promoted to a white hat once he captures the last of the trolls.

The trolls are harboring a small boy they’ve dressed in an egg carton (Isaac Hempstead Wright). Raised to think he’s a troll, Eggs realizes he’s a boy when confronted by the daughter of the city’s big cheese and head white hat Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris). Together Eggs and Winnifred (Elle Fanning) quest to discover Eggs’s true identity and prove to the townsfolk who the real bad guys are.

The stop-motion animation from the creators of Coraline and ParaNorman is glorious and filled with bug-eating gross out humor and pratfalls that will delight the younger members of the audience. But there are enough cheese-based puns and ruminations on the nature of good and evil to please the adults.

Certain scenes might be a bit too scary for the very small.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

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Pass the Reese’s Pieces

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Earth to Echo

by Hope Madden

Homey, middle class subdivisions. Kids on bikes. Spooky government types with flashlights and potentially evil aims. An adorable extra terrestrial who needs a friend. Lord, that sounds familiar.

E.T. gets a superficial but harmless reboot in Earth to Echo, the tale of three best buds spending their last night together before a neighborhood construction project sends their families in different directions. Rather than waste what little time they have left, they take off on a grand adventure that will test their bonds and see a couple of unpredicted additions to their group of pals.

What the film lacks in originality and depth, it sometimes makes up for with loose energy, naturalistic performances and good humor. Newcomer David Green collects a talented cast of mostly unseasoned youngsters to carry his tale. He curbs sentimentality nicely, and builds a giddy momentum appropriate for a “kids on a secret mission” storyline.

The screenplay by Henry Gayden offers some very humorous lines to a group who works to establish specific, believable characters. Reese Hartwig, in particular, gives the nerdy friend cliché a funny, nuanced turn, but the film boasts impressive performances all around.

Echo, though – the alien at the center of the kids’ adventure – never gets the chance to become a character at all, which seriously diminishes the overall impact of the drama and adventure. It’s one of many underdeveloped plotlines and characters, symptomatic of a storytelling style too slight to fit its content.

No one knows how to dig below the surface – not the director, the writer, or the young cast. As likeable as everything about the film is, it offers such a superficial treatment of the ideas it conveys that it rarely feels like a film. Instead, it presents a workmanlike restringing of dozens of reliable, familiar images and ideas from better films.

Worse still, it distances itself from an honest emotional impact. Yes, Spielberg was heavy-handed with sentimentality. But is there really a need for E.T.- lite?

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

 

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Rocket Makes Its Own Luck

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The Rocket

by Hope Madden

The Rocket, an Australian film set in Laos, is a deviously familiar movie. It deposits a well-worn storyline in an unusual context, not to prove the universality of the human condition, but to draw attention to our cultural differences.

According to his tribe’s beliefs, Ahlo (the vibrant talent Sitthiphon Disamoe) should have been killed at birth. He is a twin – the brother of a stillborn – and one twin is always cursed, though there’s no telling which is which. But Ahlo’s mother convinces his grandmother the baby should be spared and his secret kept.

Well, that secret gets spilled when Ahlo becomes the convenient scapegoat for tremendous family upheaval, tumult and tragedy. What is there for a plucky kid to do but prove he is not bad luck?

The casting director got lucky, that’s certain. Disamoe is more than adorable – although he certainly is that. His childlike logic, stubbornness and heartbreaking hope capture your imagination.

Troubling for other reasons entirely is the outcast Ahlo adopts as his “Uncle Purple,” a James Brown fanatic and village drunk played with swagger and heartache by Suthep Po-ngam. Cinema has offered many a pairing of unaccepted youngster and unappreciated oldster, but the bitter magic these two generate is something unique. Their damage is no run-of-the-mill angst and their collaboration is surprisingly moving.

There is certainly something familiar in the plotting: an uplifting story, a ragtag bunch of misfits, and a competition that could win them their future. But the context and setting are so wildly unpredictable that nothing about The Rocket ever feels stale.

Deftly maneuvering through a series of culturally saturated, often politically charged mishaps, Mordaunt uses the Laotian backdrop to give weight to what might otherwise have been a simple tale of the boundless optimism of youth. And yes, sentimentality flavors every scene, but what’s unexpected is that the presence of death is a constant shadow.

The Rocket is a film littered with motherless children, refugees of progress, and the ghosts of war. It’s a scruffy, haunted, vivid charmer about displaced souls, of all things. But it’s with this damaged but hearty population that Mordaunt spins a memorable and satisfying tale of resilience.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars