DreamWorks

How to Train Your Dragon

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

As a feminist mother of a young daughter, I am always on the lookout for movies with a positive message. As a mom who is a geek, I'm always looking for sci-fi and fantasy movies that are kid-appropriate. As an intelligent woman, I'm always looking for entertainment that has good storytelling. Luckily for everyone like me, How to Train Your Dragon fits all three categories.

First of all, the movie is great storytelling, with fantastic visuals (especially in 3-D) that will keep everyone from a three-year-old to an adult interested and engaged throughout the whole film. The pacing is excellent, without any dragging moments or exposition that will bore young kids, and with enough depth that parents won't get bored either.

But much more importantly, the story gives a great message for kids of any age. For those who don't want to have the movie spoiled for them, here's the basic rundown: strong female characters (women & girls), great attitudes towards disability, support for flexible gender roles, good messages about accepting people as they are, underlying message about understanding, and peaceful solutions as opposed to conflict. Now, on to the details...

The story revolves around a teenager, Hiccup, who lives in a Nordic village that is defined primarily by its ongoing battle against hordes of raiding dragons. Both women and men fight, and teens help as well, but Hiccup is awkward and physically weak, and is not allowed to help. The teenager who is best at dragon fighting is a girl named Astrid, whom Hiccup likes. Hiccup's father is chief of the village, and does not value Hiccup's other talents. Hiccup creates a machine to help him capture a dragon, so that he can prove his worth to the village.

The machine works, Hiccup attempts to kill the captured dragon, but cannot bring himself to do so; instead he sets it free. The dragon, injured by the machine, cannot fly anymore. Over time, Hiccup befriends it, names it Toothless, and creates a prosthetic device that will help the dragon fly again, but only with the help of a human rider. Meanwhile, Hiccup is learning about dragon behavior, and uses that information to become the best teenaged dragon fighter, all without killing a single dragon. Hiccup's success frustrates Astrid, because she has been training all her life to be a dragon fighter, and was the best until Hiccup's changed behavior. Astrid discovers Hiccup and Toothless, but has her mind changed after spending time with them. Hiccup and Astrid discover the dragons' nest, and realize that the dragons raid the village in order to feed a giant dragon who will eat them otherwise.

When Hiccup is chosen as the best dragon fighter, he must kill a dragon in front of the village, but he refuses. His father agitates the dragon into attacking, and Toothless arrives to save Hiccup, but is captured and imprisoned. The villagers use Toothless to lead them to the dragons' nest, but the giant dragon attacks them and the teenagers, all on dragons, rescue the adults, each using her or his own abilities and skills in a group effort. Hiccup and Toothless defeat the giant dragon, but Hiccup loses a leg as a result. The village accepts the dragons and lives in harmony with them from then on.

Do I think this movie was helped by the fact that a) it's based on a book written by a woman and b) three of the five producers are female? Yes, I do. And this is exactly why we need more women in Hollywood. I love having a movie that I can show my daughter over and over again, and not worry about the underlying messages she might be getting from it. Instead, I can show her How to Train Your Dragon as much as she wants, knowing that she's getting a message of inclusion and acceptance.

Cross-posted from California NOW

Written by: Elena Perez, April 22nd 2010

I Love You, Man / Duplicity

admin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:03:00 +0000

Directed by John Hamburg, Tony Gilroy

DreamWorks, Universal Pictures

I can’t remember the last time that I went to the theater and saw two movies in one day. For that matter, I can’t remember the last time that I was even able to afford that; I live in Manhattan, land of the thirteen dollar movie ticket. However, there were two recently released flicks that I was absolutely dying to see. I also have two dramatically different friends with dramatically different tastes who wanted me to accompany them to two dramatically different movies.

I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segal, is a hilariously raunchy portrait of a passionate “bromance.” I found this movie to be a surprisingly intelligent take on how difficult it is for some men to form intimate same-sex friendships in modern America. Written and directed by John Hamburg, I Love You, Man presents the audience with a straight male protagonist who makes no bones about not adhering to traditional masculinity.

For anyone who was comatose during the late 1990’s, Paul Rudd played Alicia Silverstone’s socially conscious stepbrother/love interest in the blockbuster teen flick, Clueless. Rudd makes somewhat of a reprise of that iconic role, showing us what a thirty-something year-old Josh would be like if he’d scrapped his plans for law school and started selling houses.

Peter Klaven (Rudd) is a repressed real estate agent who becomes engaged to Zooey (Rashida Jones). After realizing that he has always been a “girlfriend guy,” Peter sets out on a series of disastrous “man-dates”. (Reno 911! alums Joe Lo Truglio and Thomas Lennon offer scene-stealing performances as two of Peter’s rejects.) He eventually meets Sydney (Segal) at an open house. Sydney, a shaggy beach bum who has lost his buddies to marriage, children, and maturity, is also looking for another man to hang out with. Sparks fly between the two men and they quickly become inseparable.

This causes a wrinkle in his relationship with Zooey. While Zooey is initially thrilled that Peter is branching out socially, she begins to resent the amount of time the two men spend together. This culminates in an argument that nearly derails the engagement.

A movie like this could have gone horribly wrong if it had been placed in the wrong hands. However, Peter’s painfully dorky malapropisms, Segel’s off-beat charm and excellent comic timing, and more or less believable storyline rescue what could have been nothing more than a series of obligatory gross-out jokes. Projectile vomit, dog poop, and masturbation have never been funnier.

A superb supporting cast only strengthens the movie. J.K. Simmons, Jane Curtin, and an unusually restrained Andy Samberg have some of the best lines as Peter’s lovably quirky family. Jaime Pressly and a nearly unrecognizable Jon Favreau get in on the act as the perpetually bickering married couple. Carla Gallo is a little one-note as the desperate single friend, but even she gets in a few zingers.

I Love You, Man wasn’t a perfect movie, but it defied all of my expectations and put a smile on my face. Don’t wait for the DVD, kids.

I watched Duplicity with a second friend who turned up her nose at I Love You, Man. Duplicity , starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, was funny in a radically different way. Instead of crude sexual humor, Duplicity's comedy rests on the witty repartee between its leads.

Ray Koval (Owen), an MI6 agent, aggressively hits on cool-as-a-cucumber Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) at a Fourth of July party in Dubai. They hook up and Claire, an agent for the CIA, steals a file from Ray after drugging him. Haunted by the mistake, Ray confronts Claire in Rome two years later. The two hook up again, this time spending three days together in a hotel room. After a squabble in which Claire accuses Ray of making her miss an important flight on purpose, the two come up with an overly clever scheme to pull off a huge scam so that they can leave the spy game for good.

The two “go private”, landing jobs in the corporate espionage business. Roberts works as a mole, spying for Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti channeling Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton from Private Parts) while feigning loyalty to Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson). The two men hate each other, doing just about anything to screw each other over. That explains Dick Garsik’s decision to hire Ray to find out about a new top-secret project that Tully’s company is developing. Meanwhile, Ray and Claire play their employers in the hopes of determining what the product is so that they can intercept it and sell it off to yet another competitor. However, the two don’t trust each other. After all, the relationship (if you want to call it that) started off with a betrayal and the two are absolute masters at keeping secrets.

The double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses soon become tedious. As Roger Ebert put it, “Duplicity is entertaining, but the complexities of its plot keep it from being really involving: When nothing is as it seems, why care?" I agree with him wholeheartedly on that, though I disagree with his claim that the two leads generate “fierce electricity.” Although Owen and Roberts are both highly skilled actors, their chemistry was off. I had a hard time believing that their characters felt any type of attraction to each other. Roberts was miscast. The casting director should have gone with someone who could convey a cold calculating inscrutability, bankability be damned. (Catherine Zeta-Jones did a remarkable job of that in the vastly underrated

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, March 21st 2009

Revolutionary Road

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:42:00 +0000

Directed by Sam Mendes

DreamWorks

In 1997 Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio made cinematic history by starring in the highest grossing film of all time, Titanic. Despite its expensively hokey exterior, Titanic demonstrated that DiCaprio and Winslet have talent to burn and mutually possess an intimate, intense chemistry that keeps audiences coming back for more. Following the success of the picture, both actors skyrocketed to superstar level fame, but neither one of them succumbed to the pressure and rarely appear in mediocre work. Instead, each continues to flourish as an artist by choosing material wisely and challenging themselves to perform difficult characters.

Needless to say, their time apart from one another has been fruitful; both actors have earned critical success as well as multiple Oscar nominations since their initial pairing. The parts they’ve played over the past eleven years have ultimately helped to prepare them for the two most demanding characters of their careers thus far: Frank and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road.

Revolutionary Road is based on the highly acclaimed novel of the same name by Richard Yates. Though the movie is somewhat plotless, it revolves around Frank and April: a pair of nobodies who think they‘re somebodies living the same 1950s suburban lie as everyone else around them. By meandering through their life decisions, the now thirty-something couple find themselves settled down with two kids in a house with a white picket fence on the prestigiously middle class Revolutionary Road. We get glimpses of who they once were: April studied to be an actress and Frank lived the charismatic life of Riley. They were once happy together.

Seven years later, Frank and April now battle their individual demons by making each other miserable. April is dealing with unhappy housewife syndrome (which would later be coined the feminine mystique by Betty Friedan), while Frank grapples with the loss of masculinity in the mindless workaday business world. They constantly bicker, moan, and full-out fight, but neither genuinely attempt to make their lives or relationship better. Eventually, this lack of communication and understanding collides with the film’s looming pessimism and disastrous consequences.

In this reunion film, Winslet and DiCaprio are full-blown adults struggling to find the beauty within themselves, their marriage, and the seemingly stagnant society surrounding them. A filmed adaptation of the book has been in the coming-and-going stage of creation since the rights were first bought in the 1960s. If you ask me, they should have let it stew a bit more on the page before bringing it to cinematic life.

Sam Mendes, the Oscar winning director of such films as American Beauty and Road to Perdition, was the wrong director at the helm of this project. Revolutionary Road suffers from the same bombastic arrogance that plagues the small-town America depicted in American Beauty. Both films are about contemplation and maturity, but there’s no sense of that within the film’s visual or thematic subtext.

Each character is constantly spouting exactly what they’re thinking, without really thinking about what they‘re saying or feeling. Frank and April feel good about themselves because they understand the societal trap they’re inside, but feel powerless to do anything about it. The film itself is afraid to take flight and actually make a clear statement about the society in which April and Frank live in.

That is not to say that the film doesn’t raise any potent issues and questions. Though presented like quarrels between children playing house, Frank and April’s tit-for-tat arguments with each other do address the surface level problems in the era’s middle class lifestyle. Gender roles, abortion, infidelity, and martyrdom are all nicely compressed into the story, but even those facets are too watered down to make a significant impact. Ultimately, it’s not the melodramatic potboilers that make Revolutionary Road compelling to watch; it’s the fear that every single character possesses that maintains the viewer's attention.

An “Oscar” film contender at its core, Revolutionary Road doesn’t succeed in influencing our cultural understanding of 1950s Americana. We’ve seen it all before and in much better place (Peyton Place, Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows, The Best of Everything, The Fifties: A Woman’s Oral History). What you will get out of Revolutionary Road is the pleasure of seeing three absolutely terrific performances by Kate Winslet (who was robbed of her nomination), Leonardo DiCaprio, and relative newcomer Michael Shannon, who steals the show in his limited time on screen. Coupled with Roger Deakins’ masterful cinematography, the performances are what make Revolutionary Road worth watching.

Written by: Sara Freeman, February 8th 2009