Tag Archives: children

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Diary of a Wimpy Kid 4 star

September 20th, 2010 by surlaroute

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“Who wants to see a movie about a kid who’s stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons?”

So good does this movie start that before that line above was even uttered (by the narrator/hero Greg, no less), I’d actually forgotten the only reason I did want to see such a movie…

I’m not familiar with the book source but it’s evident from the Peanuts-style music and quirky line drawings the tone and style they’re going for. A breakfast scene where Greg’s little brother sits simultaneously peeing in the potty while munching toast points up even further that this isn’t your average middle school movie (is there even an “average middle school movie”? I don’t know lol). In fact it’s at this early stage that I began to panic that this was actually one of those great movies about kids that gets rated such that kids can’t actually see it. Less than 20 minutes later Greg actually pees all over his older brother, so it’s certainly not shy about exploiting the typical funny buttons of its target audience. I’m assured by the IMDb that it’s “suitable for kids” everywhere it’s being shown, which is a relief.

From here we’re thrust immediately into a “shirts and skins” sports class scenario that could have been ripped directly from my own childhood. It’s at this nightmare class that Greg and his less cool friends encounter Chloe Moretz – that sole reason I originally wanted to see this movie at the start – sitting peacefully reading under the bleachers. In a scene I’d be routing for as Moretz’ Oscar clip if we didn’t already have Kick-Ass and the upcoming Let Me In to work from, she outlines pretty much the whole moral of the movie… which Greg promptly ignores.

“This place is an intellectual wasteland,” she begins, and literally lays out on a platter to Greg the secret to surviving middle school. She’s a girl we could all have used as our guide in school. But like most of us at that age, he won’t be told, and must find out for himself.

Greg’s a flawed character who’s likely to simply annoy viewers who don’t see the reason why such a hero is the best place to view such a story from. His attitude from the outset is summed up by an early line: “Thank god there are few normal people, or this place would be like a freak show.” He literally thinks himself too cool for school, which might be true but isn’t going to help him survive it. He gets jealous of his chubby friend Rowley because while he misdirects his energy and fails, Rowley seems to obtain success after success – first winning rank in the school’s hall monitor program, and then by penning a winning comic strip for the school newspaper (one of the few areas where Greg seems to have real ambition) almost effortlessly.

Cool comes from unexpected places, the movie constantly asserts. Rowley continues to score cool points by doing things that in Greg’s mind are the most uncool things around: doing a choreographed dance at a mother-son dance, for example – while Greg constantly tries to anticipate cool-dom… “if I do this one thing I think is cool, then I’ll be cool…” etc. Even when he finally gets this, and delivers almost the same monologue as Moretz gave him at the start, he kinda thinks he’s going to win over the school. It’s only when they respond like the mindless mass they are that he realises where he belongs. Moretz again shoots off the movie’s message in a nutshell to the school’s resident prissy princess…

“One day middle school will end and become highschool, and after that it just becomes life and all those things you think are important now… won’t be anymore.”

It’s all been done before, of course, most recently I think in Mean Girls … but it’s always worth refreshing, and in this case in particular, it’s interesting that the children are not only younger, but male.

Something occurred to me when I first watched this movie and I found myself thinking about it even more as I watched a second time for this review. We’re at a point where Disney has felt the need to retitle its next Animated Classic “Rapunzel” as Tangled because The Princess and the Frog didn’t appeal to boys. It’s 7 years since School of Rock and Bad Santa (one of those I mentioned earlier that couldn’t officially be seen by kids) presented kids of the male persuasion as truly autonomous beings – seriously, outside Harry Potter where the kids just keep getting older, I can’t think of any movie in the interim that really fits the bill. It’s not something I’d normally think about but a movie like this comes along and I can’t help but be shocked. While male actors clearly still dominate as leads in “grownups” cinema, there seems to me to be an even harsher imbalance when it comes to young boy vs young girl characters, so for me this movie deserves immediate props for not only putting boys front and center but also just slightly messing with gender stereotypes in its own way.

These aren’t cool kids (and how many of us ever were?), nor are they likely to even grow into shining examples of stereotypical manhood. When Greg finally finds out he’s actually good at something – singing – it turns out his voice is too high for any role in the school play (The Wizard of Oz) except the lead, Dorothy. The school’s diva naturally objects immediately, but not because he’s a boy: because of his prior misdeeds. It’s little things like this that set the film apart from anything in recent memory. The movie simply makes it look cool to be yourself and just a waste of time to be anything otherwise – from Chloe Moretz’ monologue at the top on down.

In short it’s a great movie with a great message for young boys in particular; but it’s a message just as likely to be appreciated by all children worried about or struggling with “big school”, and even those of us decades out of the awful place too. The last word goes to Moretz, who had already wowed me in Kick-Ass but here quite simply blew the Fannings out of my ears and shows her ability to do natural. There’s an aura about Moretz here that recalls Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal in the mid-seventies. She’s super natural and steals every little scene she’s in. But like I said at the start, though I came to it specifically for her, she really only makes a great movie even better.

Bedtime Stories Bedtime Stories 4 star

May 21st, 2010 by surlaroute

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I was worried to say the least about using this to kickstart what will hopefully be a movie-watching habit as frequent as I used to have… though I’ve loved Adam Sandler on and off in the past, it’s a very up and down affair, and when it comes to this kind of Adam Sandler movie, at least how it looked from the trailer, I was pretty sure it’d be far too samey, toned down (it’s a Disney “family movie“…) and forgettable. On top of this, I didn’t quite see how the story was supposed to work. Being from Disney, too, and following so soon after Enchanted as it does, I feared that however they dealt with the nature of kids’ bedtime stories, they’d somehow manage to sully basic tenets of innocence as they did in that 2007 movie.

For at least the movie’s entire first act, I remained horribly skeptical. This movie takes a bizarre amount of time to set itself up, and even once the strange/not-so-strange-afterall things start happening to Sandler in the real world, it takes a long time for the movie to really explain itself. Example: the gumball rain you see in the trailer. It’s a great moment that seems to be the first absolute reveal that “omg what happens in the bedtime stories happens in real life” … and all the choices made in this scene, the camera, editing, music, make it feel like a big moment – they practically do the Shawshank thing, for heaven’s sake – but then we see that it’s merely a gumball truck crashed on an overpass above Sandler’s car. The movie is kind of filled with such semi-anti-climaxes. I guess this is simply my fault for expecting something more magical from the trailer etc. Make no mistake, there’s no magic in this story, just coincidence that may or may not occur as a result of belief in magic. I can’t argue that this, however, is in its way almost more fulfilling.

What I eventually remembered here, too, was that I’ve actually really loved some of those samey old Adam Sandler movies more than I expected, and though this movie is certainly kid-_safe_ (whether they’re kid-_friendly_ I’ll say something about in a moment…) it is really in the end absolutely a member of that sub-genre Sandler has become known for. There’s a scene at the end here when his character has to deliver a presentation to his boss following a spectacular song-and-dance number by Guy Pearce, the villain, and his team. It’s to be the big summing up of the story, Sandler’s big moment, but just prior to the scene he has his tongue stung by a bee, so he’s talking gibberish (like the alien in the kids’ story that was told just the night before). His friend, played by Russell Brand, translates. It’s one of those classic Sandler scenes, like the final speech in Mr. Deeds or Billy Madison, as silly and hilarious as it is, if it catches you in the right mood, actually also just a little touching.

If there’s something wrong with the movie, it could be just that. For sure, you can feel safe enough showing your kids this movie or even letting them watch it alone, there’s nothing per se that’s inappropriate for the under 12s… but it is very much the kind of “family movie” where the “bits for kids” and “bits for adults” are well delineated and this could alienate younger viewers. This is perfectly illustrated early on when Sandler’s character tells the kids the first bedtime story, and he gives the character in the story that represents him the name “Mr. Underappreciated”, until one of the kids says, “what’s underdemeciated?” forcing him to rename the character, “Sir Fix-a-lot”. (Oh-ho-ho. Kids are dumb, right?)

I don’t like such condescending attitudes to children at all, even in small and subtle doses, especially in a movie with Walt Disney’s name on it, a man who always said you should speak to children no differently than you speak to adults* – and it doesn’t end there with this movie. Just in case they get bored at any point (like during the aforementioned quite excruciating set-up act), there’s always the enormous-eyed guinea pig, at complete odds with the otherwise “the magic’s all in your head” stance of the story, on hand to entertain. I think the movie could’ve been that bit better if they had just run with the idea that Sandler’s belief that the stories really affect reality is just a misunderstanding – like the felix felicis that helps Ron succeed at Quidditch in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, for example, even though he never took it… it’s the belief that these things are possible that makes them happen, not any real supernatural force. In short, a little confidence.

That small issue aside, it’s still not enough to ruin the overall joy I got from this movie. Once it got going I barely stopped laughing, often very out loud. It’s a typical Disney good-triumphs-over-evil story and, despite the “family-friendly” moniker, an Adam Sandler movie all the way (just in case that’s important to you). I frankly adored it in the end, and will watch it again for sure.

* “I don’t believe in talking down to children. I don’t believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience.” – Walt Disney

Hans Christian Andersen Hans Christian Andersen 3 star

March 10th, 2009 by surlaroute

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I like how the first IMDb review listed as I visited this movie’s page contains the phrase, “it might be fabricated but …” The thing is, here is one “biography” movie that says it right up front in plain text: “this is not his life story but a fairytale about the making of the fairytales”. Can’t argue with that.

With movies like this I never quite know what I’m gonna get. When it comes to old movies I think I’m more likely to warm to musicals than any other genre but when it comes to musicals I’m particularly picky. If it’s all about the songs and the songs are nothing but “entertaining” I quickly lose interest. Lucky for this one it gets right to the heart of the matter in its first scene, an altercation between the true educators of Andersen’s little village and Andersen himself as he speaks of different ways children can be taught.

Some of the more extended music sequences I could do without – I really should’ve liked The Little Mermaid ballet sequence but it immediately lost me … The Red Shoes kinda leaves any movies with a dance sequence of such length with a lot to live up to. But the songs are wonderful, and Danny Kaye has a timeless naturalism to him even while singing that kinda blows my mind. I would never have guessed the movie was made as early as 1952. Of its time it’s easily up with the best.

Island of the Damned aka Who Can Kill a Child? Island of the Damned aka Who Can Kill a Child? 4 star

March 5th, 2009 by surlaroute

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… aka Trapped, etc etc …

Well, I’m a big fan of evil movie children, so this was immediately right up my alley, hehe. This is one of those movies that gets around the “shoulda been under 90 minutes” problem I usually have with anything so genre as it is that runs over that magic figure by using its extra 30 minutes up front to introduce its main characters. For where the movie goes in the end, the opening is fiendishly slow but it makes the real bulk of the movie, from 30 minutes in when they leave the mainland, all the more gripping than it’d likely be without the set-up.

Will He, Won't He?

The thing I find most noteworthy about this is how genuinely on edge it put me. If I’d read a review of this that drew out how scary some of the smiling children are here I wouldn’t have believed it. But there’s something about some of those smiles, let’s call it the Hannibal Lector effect – remembering that moment when Clarice Starling first happened upon the genius cannibal, that simple smile with no real explanation behind it. Even on the most beautiful adolescent girl, the first of the island’s residents that we see, even as she seems to all intents and purposes to be perfectly harmless, it’s almost downright terrifying.

The second thing that makes this movie a cut above most of the genre is that it really goes all the way. I don’t know how to elaborate on that without spoiling it, but hey it’s been out for over 30 years so consider yourself warned, lol. There’s a moment at the end here where I really didn’t know where the movie was going to turn. I didn’t know where I wanted it to turn, even. But once the moment passed, I knew that I would’ve felt betrayed if it’d gone the other way. That didn’t stop the feeling of, “OMG he did it!” in my stomach though.

It borrows from plenty of movies – of course the title itself (the one I’ll always refer to it as, at least) recalls Children and Village of the Damned – and there are just a couple of scenes towards the end that attempt to explain away the childrens’ condition in a manner akin to those older movies, when really it works better when there’s no explanation. And if you’re coming here for gory visuals you might be disappointed by how fake they are. But this has bold intentions and takes no prisoners. I found myself right on the fence between seeing it as almost black comedy and a genuinely scary social commentary and I can imagine repeat viewings taking me to either extreme entirely. Definitely worth seeking out if you’re a fan of the genre, and worth taking time out for even if you’re not.

Eden Lake Eden Lake 3 star

December 23rd, 2008 by surlaroute

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What to say of this one. As with Burn After Reading we have as many plus points as there are negatives. On the one hand this is an incredibly well made movie, I’m most inclined to compare it with Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes or even his This is England which shared young Thomas Turgoose here. The overall impact of the movie is incredibly harrowing and bleak.

On the other hand, if you break your concentration for a second here, it’s really quite abysmally transparent. First off, no matter how limited an opportunity visiting this “flooded quarry” is for the ill-fated couple here, it’s kind of dumb to compare it in the script to the girl’s best friend’s alternate romantic weekend Paris. The place just ain’t the City of Lights, lol. Second, it takes a monumental leap of faith here at the start to believe first that these guys would confront the 4:1 outnumbering gang of hoodies (plus rabid dog) in the first place; and then to believe that after said gang deliberately slashes their tyres, that they would simply go to breakfast, and then go straight back to the point of first contact to stay the night. This is all not before trespassing in one of the hoodies’ houses in a seriously dodgy lookin’ neighbourhood. The Sat Nav at the start wittily warns them, “At your first opportunity, turn around,” – but by the time our heroine tells the not particularly bold hero, “It’s not worth it,” I’d kind of given up caring.

If you’re able to overlook all these nitpicks, however, it does have more of its share of effective moments than most movies of its kind in recent memory. What it wants to say is true, the worst of truths, hell being other people, the Daily Mail mindset, all that – I’m just not convinced it entirely succeeds.

Phoebe in Wonderland Phoebe in Wonderland 5 star

October 25th, 2008 by surlaroute

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“I don’t wanna do those things, or say those things … but I have to. Except here. Everywhere else, I feel ugly.”
“I’m gonna tell you something which might not make any sense, but I should say it, so that one day you might remember it and maybe it will make you feel better. At a certain point in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are … especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals … and you will say to yourself, ‘but I am this person.’ And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love.”
“I’m so scared.”
“We all are.”

lol this review might just end up being all quotes so I think I better just accept that and get on with it …

“I can see myself wrecking and ruining, but I can’t stop.”

There was a point almost 5 minutes into this that I suddenly realised how much I wanted, no, needed to love this movie, and how shattered I’d be if it let me down at all. I don’t know if it was the obvious Alice in Wonderland connection that makes me want to love any related movie so; or the cast list in the opening credits that just makes it progressively more tantalising; maybe just the fact that we’re in mid-October and I’d yet to see a movie that really touched me personally (the “Slipping Through My Fingers” scene in Mamma Mia notwithstanding) and this seemed to so perfectly fit the bill despite my really not knowing anything about it beyond the title and the basic set-up of Elle Fanning’s character Phoebe wanting to be Alice in the school play.

“If I had a dress like that I’d never take it off.”
“You’d have to … to wash it.”
“No … cos maybe if I wore it long enough, I’d become that person.”
“You’d have to pick your part carefully.”
“Oh … I would.”

The first surprise is Patricia Clarkson’s character – I loved Carol Kane’s quirky drama teacher in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen – I love all such characters, great teachers going against the grain and waking young minds is one of the great movie things to me – but this is something else. If you don’t perk up exactly the way Fanning does here when she burst into the classroom and recites the opening line of The Jabberwocky, this may not be the movie for you. Clarkson is better than ever in this role to the point I almost leave the movie more in love with her than Fanning, lol.

It’s hard to describe in a nutshell the rich tapestry of things this movie is “about”. On the one hand there’s a kind of Donnie Darko aspect to it, the possibility that what is happening to Fanning’s character is a little supernatural or plainly the product of a child’s imagination; on the other, it’s a very considered study of a girl with a particular form of Tourette’s. None of it is easily pinned down and that’s where the wonder of the story comes from. Through Fanning’s parents we encounter an open-mindedness that addresses the quickness of society to label problem children and quite probably on a number of occasions mis-diagnose and medicate willy-nilly (”“When I was a kid I counted telephone poles from the car. If I missed one we’d crash. Nobody labelled me …”) … Phoebe’s mother here is terrified of her daughter’s wild mind being “numbed” the way she’s seen countless other minds go. She tells a psychiatrist who she ultimately fires, “Your profession just doesn’t like kids to be kids,” and there’s a shocking ring of truth in these moments even as we slowly realise that, actually, this particular kid does have something wrong with her – even in the end when there is no doubt as to her condition, there’s the important suggestion that such a thing needn’t be as big a problem as people tend to make it. The movie points the finger at the failings of modern teaching, the risk averse society; Campbell Scott’s hilarious principal almost causing more danger by his fearful reaction to drama class “trust falls” than the perceived threat he’s preempting. It’s really one of those movies that to me is about everything in the end – there’s just so many of the things I’ve been thinking about lately that it addresses to perfection.

Son of Rambow Son of Rambow 3 star

October 6th, 2008 by surlaroute

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From what I’d heard about this I’ve gotta admit I expected to like it a lot more than I ultimately did. It could be that I watched it in the past couple of weeks and my attention really hasn’t been good for movies (hence the hiatus from writing about them) and I’d certainly give it another chance some time, because there’s nothing particularly wrong with it … but I watched it pretty close to Be Kind, Rewind and I found it really just trod the same ground and, like BKRW, I would much rather to have been watching Bowfinger or Ed Wood again, or, if it were endearing British brats I wanted, then something like Millions. This just really did nothing for me in the end, the kind of movie made for those who like to praise just one movie a year for not being “all effects and explosions”, “at last!”, as if no other good movies ever get made thanks to evil, evil Hollywood. To make such a movie does not automatically make it better, and even on my best days I doubt I’d call this anything better than average.

The Orphanage aka El Orfanato The Orphanage aka El Orfanato 5 star

May 15th, 2008 by surlaroute

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Throw The Innocents, Sixth Sense and Hook into a blender and you might come close to The Orphanage. It’s hard to describe it any other way and it’ll take at least another viewing for me to feel like I know what I’m even talking about while talking about it, except without any doubt to say that I found it just as good as people have been saying for the past year.

I think Mark Kermode said he counted 4 separate scares in the movie – I have to say only one really lifted me out of my seat and I’m pretty sure it must be the one he talked about that the stranger grabbed his arm over. For me, it’s the emotional content of it all that affected me most. There’s just a constant terror in the very atmosphere of the movie as a result of the mystery that builds around a young boy and his games, his imaginary friends and his mother’s attempts to understand. To even try to attempt a plot summary beyond that after a single viewing would be crazy – all I can say is, it’s beautiful. Sorry, review brain’s just not been up to the task lately, lol, you’ll just have to see for yourself.