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All Advent long, observant Catholics and other Christians hold the line against premature Christmas, holding off on decking the halls and singing Christmas carols during what is meant to be a time of preparation. Now, as the world is busily dismantling what’s left of its Christmas trappings, it’s time for Christians to double down on the continued celebration of the Christmas season.
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Here’s my 30-second take on
War Horse.
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Here’s my 30-second take on
The Adventures of Tintin.
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Here’s my 30-second take on
The Artist.
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Here’s my 30-second take on
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
In
War Horse Spielberg harkens back to an earlier cinematic age, creating something more like a Golden Age Hollywood epic than any film I’ve seen in years, the one other notable example being Baz Luhrmann’s
Australia.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0-1|
Kids & Up*
Tintin in the comics was the perpetual small-town boy next door. Tintin in the movie is like the boy next door who’s been watching “Mantracker,” “Man vs. Wild” and “Mythbusters” for so long that he’s completely jaded to reality.
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I usually stay far away from trailers. I like to experience movies as cold as possible. But this is Peter Jackson’s
The Hobbit, and my fine principles have failed me. The film itself is still a year off … and I can’t wait that long to satisfy my curiosity.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Brad Bird’s
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is so preposterously entertaining that it makes watching other recent Hollywood action spectacles feel like work. What in the last few years even compares to it?
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Here’s my 30-second take on
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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Here’s my 30-second take on Martin Scorsese’s
Hugo.
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Here’s my 30-second take on Aardman Animation’s
Arthur Christmas.
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It’s hard to believe that many American children venturing into the theaters to see
Happy Feet Two will have their first experience of Sylvester and Tweety Bird on the big screen in a new computer-animated short, “I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat.” Hard to believe, first, that Sylvester and Tweety are back on the big screen—and, second, that these iconic animated characters that defined Saturday morning for decades and were beloved big-screen icons before that have become pretty much strangers to many of the current generation of kids. How did
that happen?
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Last week’s “Reel Faith” season finale is now online at the
show’s website. This is the end of regular “Reel Faith” programming until next year’s summer season, although we may come back for one-off episodes a couple of times in the interim, and we’ll continue to produce 30-second reviews.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
This is quite deliberately
not a reboot or reimagining or any such thing. Perhaps we can call it a revisiting. Like this summer’s charming
Winnie the Pooh (also from Disney),
The Muppets is a happy throwback, very much of a piece with material that my generation grew up with, eclipsing the lameness of recent direct-to-video efforts. Who would have thought two classic family franchises that have lain fallow for so long would be reborn in the same year?
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D+ |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Little ones are “tougher than we think,” a penguin remarks in
Happy Feet Two, and you can tell director George Miller believes it. The animated sequel pulls few punches: It’s overshadowed by more darkness, menace, heartache and anxiety than any talking-animal picture I can think of since, well, Miller’s last family-film sequel, the execrable
Babe: Pig in the City. Neither the classic
Babe nor the original
Happy Feet contained any hint of the darkness of the sequels. Apparently Miller’s strategy is to soften kids up first, then drop the bomb.
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Disney’s
Tangled in 30 seconds — in rhyming verse.
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Here’s my 30-second rhyming review of
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.
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Don’t give them any more of your time.
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This Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, I’ll be on the first hour of “Catholic Answers Live!” with Patrick Coffin. We’ll be discussing
The Muppets,
Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1,
Happy Feet Two,
Arthur Christmas,
J. Edgar,
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,
Tower Heist,
In Time and more.
Listen live!
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Tonight’s episode of “Reel Faith,” is the season finale, and partly for that reason this week I attended an almost unprecedented four screenings: the latest
Twilight,
Happy Feet Two,
Arthur Christmas and
The Muppets. Another reason for the heavy screenings was for the sake of my Friday morning radio shows (since of course I’ll be off next week.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
The life and work of J. Edgar Hoover offers grist for a dozen different movies or more, and Clint Eastwood’s
J. Edgar wants to be all of them at once. It’s the sort of staidly respectable, competently directed biopic that gives a bad name to competently directed biopics, and possibly to respectability.
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Here’s my 30-second take on
Tower Heist.
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Here’s
in Time in 30 seconds from my “Reel Faith” co-host David DiCerto. For a second opinion, see my associated review.
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Dear readers: I just discovered a large number of reader emails incorrectly flagged as spam by my email client’s spam filter. If you wrote to me in October and I haven’t written back, that may be the reason why. If you wrote to me before October and I haven’t written back, I’m afraid your email may have been automatically deleted. I apologize for this and will be more vigilant about watching the spam filter in the future. I hope you’ll write again.
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B+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Kids & Up*
Banderas’s swashbuckling Puss in Boots first appeared in
Shrek 2, quickly establishing himself as one of the most popular supporting characters in the franchise. Now in a starring role in this spinoff, Puss spins the story in a direction strikingly different from the Shrek films.
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I think it was six years ago, coming home from a screening of
Zathura, that I started seriously wrestling with the problem of what I’ve come to call the Broken Family Film.
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Like Dorothy’s house, uprooted in fairy-tale response to her running away, physical domiciles in one family film after another are displaced, torn asunder, and undergo fantastic, traumatic crises and transformations in visionary mirroring of the upheaval in the characters’ lives. Among the more striking examples of this poetic linking of house and household are Jon Favreau’s intriguing 2005 fantasy
Zathura, Gil Kenan’s 2006 Halloween tale
Monster House, Mark Waters’s smart, scary 2008 thriller
The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Pete Docter’s 2009 Pixar fantasy
Up.
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B- |
**½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
The movie is full of Catholic iconography that Catholic viewers and fans of Golden Age Hollywood Catholicism will appreciate. Statues of Jesus, Mary and the saints are everywhere. I compared the movie’s Catholic milieu to a Bing Crosby film, but a Crosby film would actually have edgier personalities and more conflict.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Adults
There is a moment in
The Mill & the Cross in which the power of art, in particular sacred art, to capture the eternal in the hugger-mugger of ordinary life — even in the most horrific and seemingly meaningless events — is revealed with stunning clarity. André Bazin, the great Catholic film critic and theorist, wrote about the mission of art to rescue the world from transience and corruption, to capture moments and events in time and space before they slip into the irretrievable past, and so bear witness to the hand of God in creation. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this idea more resoundingly affirmed than in
The Mill & the Cross.
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