Tags: Broken Family Films
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Kids & Up
At its best,
Epic produces images of poetic power, even grandeur … The catch is that the world the filmmakers create is far more interesting than the story they tell in it or the characters they put in it.
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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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Teens & Up
Zookeeper is offensive to women, men, children, parents, WASPs, Asians, African-Americans, animals and zookeepers. Also Nick Nolte fans may not be too happy. Have I overstated things? Possibly, but how will we ever know? It is a movie with no conceivable audience. Somewhere in Hollywood are producers who entrusted money and equipment to people who put talking zoo animals in the same movie as Kevin James inadvertently flashing Rosario Dawson and Leslie Bibb with his off-camera member. “Oh! That’s going to be hard to unsee,” Dawson exclaims in dismay. Parents: Think long and hard about those words.
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Kids & Up*
While the Atwaters’ book is not exactly a classic, it’s beloved by generations of readers — but not by the people who have brought you this big-screen adaptation starring Jim Carrey. The makers of this film do not love
Mr. Popper’s Penguins. At all. It’s hard to believe that this junk was directed by Mark Waters, who presided over the big-screen adaptation of
The Spiderwick Chronicles, a smart, scary adaptation of a children’s book series that honors its source material almost as much as
Mr. Popper’s Penguins doesn’t.
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Kids & Up*
The Things are potent symbols that refuse to yield to a single interpretation. Carol blends Max’s angry, destructive impulses and anxieties with Max’s mother’s concern and, dimly, the reassuring voice of the father who isn’t there. It’s not hard to see where Carol and KW’s quarrels come from, and KW’s absences are the flip side of Carol’s surrogate fatherhood, but Max’s sister is also in KW, off cavorting with her new friends and leaving Carol, and thus Max, in the lurch.
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Kids & Up
Over and over the movie drives home one conclusion: Larry was born to wear the uniform of a museum night guard. The inventions, the managerial decisions, the corny televised banter with cameo-role celebrities … that’s not the
real Larry. The real Larry, much like an artifact in an Indiana Jones movie, belongs in a museum.
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Kids & Up
The Spiderwick Chronicles is a smart, scary fantasy family thriller that offers depth and meaning in a genre littered with mere competent entertainment. Where films like
Zathura and
Night at the Museum offer roller-coaster excitement but little more,
The Spiderwick Chronicles is actually
about something.
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Kids & Up*
(Written by Suzanne E. Greydanus) Where is the real man here? Giselle’s rapport with Morgan and sweet naiveté are endearing; are we supposed to find Edward’s incompetence and arrogance equally so? Do our female hearts swoon when he checks his teeth in his sword, or boorishly flails it about at everything that moves? Why can’t the prince be an idealized example of chivalry, bravery, strength and honor, as Giselle is of sweetness and goodness?
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Teens & Up
Light on plot and story logic but strong on narrative thrust and fantastic imagery, it’s the most effective of the three films… Alas,
Zathura is also a family film
of the contemporary family as well as
for it.
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Kids & Up*
Benji Off the Leash is undoubtedly the first dog movie ever made that thinks that a happy ending for a boy and his dog is not for the boy to get to keep the dog, but for the dog to go off to Hollywood to make a motion picture.
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Kids & Up*
No, no, not that true spirit of Christmas. This is a
Disney movie, after all. The most we can hope for is another
serving of Dickensian "Christmas Carol spirit" — brotherhood, family, generosity, that sort of thing.
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Kids & Up*
Based on the children’s book
Freak The
Mighty, Peter Chelsom’s less oddly named
The Mighty
tells the story of a remarkable friendship between two young
boys, both outcasts. Max (Elden Ratliff) is dull-witted but
intimidating; Kevin (Kieran Culkin) is bright but crippled by
Morquio’s Syndrome.
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Kids & Up
Everyone knows going in that Hathaway’s frizzy hair,
horn-rimmed glasses, pratfalls, slouch, and puckered expressions
aren’t going to hold her back for long. (Indeed, it takes a
formidable effort to suspend one’s disbelief and accept that they
hold her back at all. Hathaway manages to be suitably awkward in
the medium shots, but every closeup blows the girl’s cover by
revealing her cover-girl beauty. Casting the gorgeous 20-year-old
"Get Real" actress as an 15-year-old ugly duckling is about as
plausible as Jennifer Lopez playing a wedding planner who can’t
get a date or Drew Barrymore playing a late bloomer who’s Never
Been Kissed.)
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Kids & Up*
“The story of a boy and his dog,” writes one critic. “
Close Encounters for kids,” writes another. Still others focus on the Christological resonances, particularly in connection with another messianic sci‑fi film,
The Day the Earth Stood Still, with its peaceful visitor from the heavens who dies and rises again.
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