Movie review: The Way

Estevez & Dad

take a hike

worth seeing

What can you say about a movie that pretty much plods along – and you’re sorry that its journey ends so soon.

“The Way” – produced, directed and written for the screen by Emilio Estevez, and starring his father Martin Sheen – is a wonderfully intelligent tale of a fictional father rediscovering a lost son and finding himself in a pilgrimage on foot of some 500 miles across the Pyrenees.

Sheen portrays Tom, a California ophthalmologist who had been unable to dissuade his 40-year-old son and lone child Daniel from a life of wandering the world. Then, interrupting a golf outing with a trio of medical pals, Tom receives a call from a French police official with news that Daniel had died in a mountain storm.

Tom cancels his appointments and travels to the town of St. Jean Pied de Port, intending to retrieve his son’s body. But when he learns that his son had died early in a pilgrimage known as Camino de Santiago – the Way of St. James – Tom decides on a whim to complete the journey himself, using his son’s gear and taking his ashes to place along the route.

Tom’s encounters on The Way add traveling companions, each with an avowed mission. But really, like Tom, they all are in need of discovering themselves. The cast includes Emilio Estevez as the son, mostly appearing to his father apparitionally.

Filmed along the actual route of the historic religious pilgrimage, from the French border town to the Cathedral de Santiago in Spain, “The Way” is a visual delight at every turn, and a reminder of the need to turn off the main road now and then and experience life more spontaneously.

There is no sex, no nudity, no violence, no car chase. The fastest moment is a foot chase.

So rate this film PG-35.

Alas, no one under 35 is likely to love it as much as I did.

(Author’s note: I have a 40-year-old child, but am not at all religious.)

Movie Review: Super 8

Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney, working on a film within the film in a scene from 'Super 8' -- which opens June 10.

Spielberg

produces

a new E.T.

Awesome homage

to horror, SF films...

even some of his own

What will you be doing this summer? Chances are, you will be seeing the movie “Super 8” – a Steven Spielberg production whose young characters embark on their summer vacation set on making their own movie.

Not hard to guess, from the teaser ads that have begun airing on television, things go horribly haywire, and a tad less than two hours later you’ll have been exposed to Spielberg spins and homage on a wide range of science fiction, horror and coming-of-age flicks, and even his own classics “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.”

And it works, almost totally.

Almost? Well, take a cast dominated by a bunch of barely-teens and some of it is bound to be a bit over the top. But hey, they’re kids, and I’ll even forgive director J.J. Abrams for the one with the tendency toward projectile vomiting in particularly frightful moments.

The plot opens with the aftermath of a funeral for the mother of young Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), crushed in a tragic steel mill accident – which only interrupts the planning of his boy pals on putting together a Super 8 zombie movie.

A TV newscast gives away the time frame, with the 1979 near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. But nukes, otherwise, have nothing on this unfolding tale.

Here, in the fictional small town of Lillian, Ohio, the boys – with a winsome, slightly more mature Alice (Elle Fanning) surprising them by agreeing to play a role – head out late at night to shoot a scene at the local rail station. Their little drama, in which Alice stuns the boys with her acting ability, is overtaken by a much larger event as an Air Force secret cargo train smashes into a pickup truck driven onto the tracks by their school’s science teacher, and derails and explodes.

The camera, dropped as they flee in terror, keeps on recording and – this is, after all, 1979 – the film comes back from the processing lab a few days later with an image that helps unravel some of the ensuing bizarre deaths, disappearances and disruptions to the normal course of events.

There are predictable elements, like conflict between the single fathers of Joe and Alice – the former being the town’s deputy sheriff, the latter a mill worker with a drinking problem whose shift was being worked by the mother when she was killed. But a bigger conflict develops between Deputy Dad and an Air Force colonel caught up in a whole lot of Area 51, space alien autopsy stuff.

Enter the monster, stage left... right... up... down. Sort of a cross between the insect-like critter in “Alien” and a “Transformers” construct, it has the eyeball appeal of E.T. And really, he, she or it just wants to go home.

Getting it there, well, that was a lot of fun.

The stand-in for fictional Lillian, Ohio, was filming site Weirton, W. Va., which is now on my future travel itinerary. Be nice to see what’s left of the place after all those explosions, not including the lone f-bomb that, along with plenty of action, may account for the movie’s PG-13 rating.

Movie review: 'Sing Your Song'

Harry Belafonte, with historian Taylor Branch, enjoy Q&A session after screening of documentary film Sing Your Song. (Photo by Alison Harbaugh, courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival)

Belafonte, movingly,

tallies life’s bananas

Documentary film on legendary performer

brings lyrical ending to Md. Film Festival

On the screen, Nelson Mandela is stepping off a plane in his first visit to the United States when he recognizes a face in the crowd on the tarmac below. He walks over and embraces the man, who recalls Mandela’s greeting: “Hey, Harry boy.”

In the front row of Baltimore’s Charles Theater Sunday night, Harry Belafonte was smiling at his own recollection – and remembering.

It was magic, courtesy of the 2011 Maryland Film Festival and Belafonte himself in bringing the stunning new documentary on his life to Baltimore as this year’s closing event. And in lining up early for the sold-out show (my wife Bonnie’s insistence), we found seats one row behind and four seats away from him.

It was difficult at times to turn my eyes toward the screen when I could see the reflection of its light in Belafonte’s right eye, the occasional smile, or look of intensity at the passing of his 84 years – from his birth in New York, abandonment by his father and being sent by his mother to be raised by relatives in Jamaica, to a life in the forefront of America’s civil and human rights movements.

I knew little of his life story, yet Belafonte has always been part of my own life. Growing up in the 1950s, his was perhaps the first real black face I can remember from television. And there he was again, up on the big theater screen – singing on the Ed Sullivan Show, and in a prime-time Revlon-sponsored special.

His music is part of this nation’s collective memory, like the “Banana Boat Song” (all right, call it “Day-O”). But what was not part of my memory was the uproar over his 1960s TV appearance with British singer Petula Clark, because she was touching his arm. Or his touring the country, including the South, in a show with the popular white dancers Marge and Gower Champion and enduring the frequent humiliations bestowed on traveling African-Americans at hotels, restaurants and restrooms.

The focus of “Sing Your Song” is far less on Belafonte the performer, as on his use of the forum provided by his celebrity to address social ills here and across the world – work he is continuing through outreach to young people today.

Interviewed after the screening by Baltimore historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, Belafonte said he “grieved” for others whose celebrity led to tragic downfalls, and that having to choose between time spent with family and being away for art and activism was “not an easy road to walk.”

Sometimes, the road meant inspiring civil rights marchers in Alabama or Mississippi. Later, it was protesting war or Apartheid, or seeking ways to address famine killing uncountable thousands in Ethiopia (think the song “We Are the World”).

There are moments in which he is questioning the civil rights views of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, trying to influence the racial awareness of Bobby Kennedy, and of helping and befriending Martin Luther King Jr. And, curiously, there was his role in Barack Obama becoming... anything. Belafonte was among a group of celebrities whose support helped fund scholarships for Kenyan students to come study in America... one of them the young Barack Obama who fathered our current president.

Not that Belafonte is expressing satisfaction these days with the younger Obama who, he said Sunday night, he hopes will find his moral center. “I am waiting for Barack Obama’s moral sense to be awakened.”

Still, Belafonte saw a parallel between the spark of hope ignited in young people by Obama’s campaign theme of “Yes, We Can,” and that of the spirit underlying the civil rights movement’s “We Shall Overcome” some two generations ago.

He prefers taking an optimistic view of the slow march of time, with a patient observation that “history moves at its own pace.... In that measure, there are ebbs and tides, highs and lows.”

“I think,” he said, “I still live in a time of hope and progress.”

Taking a few questions from the audience, Belafonte was asked whether there was anything in his life that he would change.

“Yes, I would rather have been a Rockefeller.”

After the laughter and his admission of being facetious, Belafonte had a better answer: “You cannot look at the whole journey as anything but a blessing.”

He added, “I would not change anything. Changing anything would mean I would not meet some of the people I have met.”

He saw the experiences of his life as a chain of moments of circumstance, and its course as set by his decisions responding to them. “It has been a remarkable journey, and I am so blessed that it came my way.”

The film -- produced by a team including younger daughter Gina Belafonte, and directed by Susanne Rostock – has been purchased by HBO. Film festival director Jed Dietz said the cable giant’s plans complicated efforts to bring “Sing Your Song” to Baltimore, but any problems were overcome through the local connection of historian Branch and cooperative push by Belafonte himself.

He said he had initial misgivings about the film project, “concerned that my fame would get in the way of the message.” But he was assured otherwise by his daughter – and the film that resulted is enthralling.

Belafonte noted that the documentary footage was culled from some 800 hours of film, and said he hopes that talks with HBO may lead to more exploration of that “treasure trove” for a series giving wider berth to some of the rich story lines.

He left by a back alley door, accompanied by a small group including his wife Pamela, Branch and festival director Jed Dietz – but Bonnie and I managed to talk our way through the same exit route. And it gave me a chance to ask Belafonte a question I had been pondering in the flicker from the screen and its reflection in his eye: “They say that people, in dying, see their life flash before their eyes, but what is it like to watch your life flash by for two hours on a movie screen?”

“It helps me remember,” he said.

And was he watching from a first-person point of view, or third-person as does the audience?

“I watch from many points of view,” he said.

Not least of them, judging from his remarks in the theater, was the philosophical point of view of a man who seems to have learned from and grown with every moment of his 84 years.

Movie Reviews: ‘Easy A’ and ‘Secretariat’

Teen sex flick
proves all talk
… and lots of laughs

Meanwhile, Disney goes to the races

Took in a Maryland Film Festival members’ screening last night of “Easy A” – a sort-of high school sex comedy.

When wife Bonnie alerted me to the emailed invitation and told me the title, I figured the “A” was for “Ass.”

But it could be “Adultery,” or simply a grade – like the one I would give this genuinely funny movie, except I’d have to call it “Easy A-Plus.”

The plot features the consequences of 10th-grader Olive (Emma Stone) Penderghast’s lavatory admission, under badgering duress by her best friend (I think they’re called BFF’s these days), to having had first-time sex with a community college guy. Except the guy didn’t exist, the weekend tryst never happened, and the false confession is overheard by a couple of not-friend catty gals.

Inevitably, the news spreads instantly in the communications-heavy teen world of cell phones, iPhones, email and old-fashioned whispers – and adorable extra-virgin Olive, who has never gotten into any kind of trouble, much less notoriety, in her upscale, small-town California world, gets caught up in a comic firestorm of controversy.

For a cute, smart kid who seems to have reached 10th grade almost unnoticed, the attention proves a little puzzling and pleasurable at first, but it grows uncomfortably large after Olive agrees to a favor for a homosexual friend – pretending, in a locked bedroom at a huge party, to have sex with him so the guys tormenting him will think he’s normal.

The complications deepen, even turn a bit sinister, as Olive begins taking gift-card payoffs from other gay guys so they can claim to have had sex with her, or at least to having reached second base. Meanwhile, the Christian student prayer circle takes on the cause of getting Olive cast out of the school – and she takes to wearing a bold cut-out fabric scarlet ‘A’ to accessorize her intentionally-slutty outfits.

And yes, her English class is pretending to read Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” (They don’t even bother with the ‘Cliff Notes’ version when there’s the Demi Moore flick rendition available.)

Amazingly, there’s not a lick of real sex – but just enough profanity to keep “Easy A” almost real, except for the broadly stereotypical characters, Olive’s too-perfect-to-be-true parents and little black adopted brother, and the fact that all these high school teens look a tad too old for the roles.

But they were so good.

The screening audience was almost entirely old enough to be Olive’s parents or grandparents. And they laughed, a lot.

I suspect teens will, too.

This is going to be a smash hit – and, I predict, it will rank up there with “Ferris Bueller” and “Clueless” as iconic teen cinema. It opens nationwide Sept. 17.

Check out the Web site at: http://www.letsnotandsaywedid.com/

Horse tale

While I’m on the subject of movies without sex acts, Disney has a good one opening next month: “Secretariat.”

Based on the William Nack book, “Secretariat: The Making of a Champion,” the film focuses on the real-life tale of Colorado housewife Penny Chenery Tweedy, who takes charge of her dying father’s financially troubled Virginia horse farm and the fortunes of its prized colt – a son of Bold Ruler.

“Secretariat” in 1973 became the first winner in a quarter-century of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, and while leaving out a bit of the Chenery/Tweedy story, Disney’s version of the tale is dramatically interesting (Diane Lane being intensely believable as Chenery) and visually enthralling.

I did not notice the uttering of a single profanity, which seems more than odd given the race track conflicts, and the lone bedroom scene features a hospital bed and the dying father. But then again, the story is so focused on Penny and her horse – it works, magically.

Given that I prefer riding elephants, I’m a sucker for a horse story. After all, I grew up reading every “Black Stallion” novel the local library had to offer. “Secretariat” visually made me feel I was up there in the saddle. The races are riveting.

But the best little moment comes quietly, as the great horse matches stride for stride with Sham in the Belmont Stakes, then opens up a widening lead… five lengths, six lengths, seven lengths, the announcer calls to the pounding hoofbeats around the dirt track.

Then silence, a view from ground-level at the turn into the stretch, and you know what’s coming. You wait, fists clenched like a tight grip on leather reins, and then the horse appears above you, running… pounding... flying… one hoof at a time hitting the dirt… then every hoof in the air… and Secretariat wins the race by 31 lengths.

Backing Lane in the cast are John Malkovich as colorful trainer Lucien Laurin; never-heard-of-before-actor Otto Thorwarth as jockey Ron Turcotte; and the eerily familiar Nelsan Ellis as the devoted -- and rather two-dimensionally-depicted African-American groom Eddie Sweat. (Ellis is featured more flamboyantly in the HBO series “True Blood” as the gay cook and occasional drug dealer Lafayette, in scripts that take better advantage of his acting ability.)

Movie Review: ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’

Indie film takes on
fly-by-night world
of the street artist

So ask yourself:

What is art anyway?

In the world of graffiti, when does vandalism become art?
For that matter, what is art?

These difficult questions are among the unanswerables explored with considerable irreverence in “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” an indie movie opening today in Baltimore and over the next few weeks at a modest number of theaters across the country – and which deserves more than it likely will get.

From its reported acclaim in a Sundance premiere to its almost underground marketing scheme, “Gift Shop” should be getting lots of buzz in coming weeks and much will be made of the questions it raises – even whether its documentary story line is true or invented, a mockumentary.

The story lines are a bit muddled, starting out with Los Angeles fashion entrepreneur and Frenchman Thierry Guetta’s fascination with video – and how he seemed to record every mundane act of urban living within his family and neighborhood.

Eventually, through a street artist cousin known as Space Invader, Guetta expands to recording the fly-by-night world of graffiti artists. A growing connection with the likes of street artist Shepard Fairey (creator of the iconic Obama poster) brings an introduction to the mysterious and reclusive British artist Banksy, and Guetta becomes a co-conspirator in taping him at work.

As his own fame leads to big money in the art world, Banksy asks to see the movie he believes Guetta is creating – and then is shocked, incredulous, at the mess of it all.

And so the tale turns around, as Banksy encourages Guetta to put down the video camera and try his hand at art – and the undisciplined filmmaker himself again becomes the focus of the tale as an untrained artist who at least knows how to think big. Very big. Very bad. Well, some of it, anyway.

Because what is art really is defined by what people believe it to be.

Like art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Guetta calls his resulting show “Life is Beautiful” – and whether or not you think it is art, he’s got that absolutely right.

The film was screened on the eve of its Baltimore opening for an invited audience including Maryland Film Festival members, with an appearance by locally-raised film agent Bart Walker, a partner in Cinetic Media and part of a group formed to market “Exit.” He said they are relying on the audiences of such preview screenings to spread the buzz.

Here’s mine: It’s a hoot and a half. Check it out. But go easy on the spray paint – not everyone has the talent.

Movie review: Julie & Julia

Adams, Streep
and plenty of butter

combine in recipe

for charming film

For the second time in less than a year, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams are together again on the big screen – sort of.

The movie this time around, “Julie & Julia,” combines food, relationships and writing, all of which are close to my heart (and tummy). That, along with the appealing co-stars and an overdose of charm, accounts for why I so enjoyed it during a preview screening Thursday night courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival.

You’d also think it makes for a perfect chick flick, but wife Bonnie Schupp wasn’t as enamored and gave “J&J” a pair of downer digits. Her main complaint: Insufficient conflict.

Well, we managed to disagree with each other on the ride home – but with even less actual conflict than contained in the plot. She also felt it dragged a bit.

But since this is my blog (and I do most of the cooking in our kitchen), I get an extra vote. That’s only fair.

In parallel story lines half a century apart, Streep playfully depicts the mid-life period in which Child takes her first cooking lessons and embarks with two friends on the book project that would help make her famous, while Adams takes on the role of wannabe writer Julie Powell, who at the suggestion of her husband begins blogging on a subject near to her heart: Cooking.

And it’s not just any kind of cooking, but taking on all 524 recipes in Child and friends’ famed “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in 365 days.

Predictably, the blog gets some notice and by the end of the story, Julie seems to be on her way toward a book deal, and Julia is last seen as a copy of her own just-published book arrives in the mail. Two women – both writers and cooks -- some 50 years apart, one channeling the other.

A few quibbles: What served for conflict between Julie and her husband seemed contrived, and the setting of the last meal from the book – on a rooftop with a magical million-dollar New York view – came a little out of nowhere, given their bland 900-square-foot apartment on the floor above a working-class neighborhood pizzaria.

Streep and Adams were last paired as nuns in the harder-hitting drama “Doubt,” focusing on suspected priestly sexual abuse of a young Catholic boy. Bonnie and I also disagreed on that film – she liked it a lot, and I was ambivalent. It was hardly a chick flick.

In their new film, written for the screen and directed by Nora Ephron, Streep was amazingly believable as Julia, and Adams an appealing and alluring 30-year-old Julie. I would have been thrilled to sit down at the dinner table with either of them, but I’ll settle for the movie. It was just charming, and the world needs a little more of that these days.

Julie & Julia opens nationwide Aug. 7. I can only hope your theater offers up some French pastries instead of the usual popcorn and butter-flavored oil that doubtless would make both characters ill.

For more about the film, check out its Web site at http://www.julieandjulia.com/.

Speaking of food blogs

My old pal Cheryl Tan, who formerly wrote at The Baltimore Sun and Wall Street Journal among other accomplishments, has a deal on writing a book and been blogging on food since April, so she can’t be accused of playing copycat here.

And her blog is a terrific read. Check it out at http://www.atigerinthekitchen.com/.

It usually makes me hungry, but then some of the food she discovers also makes me cringe… and laugh at the same time.

Blogging vacation

I am amazed that dozens of people have visited The Real Muck each day, even though I’d taken a break through largely unintended summer laziness since my last posting on June 11 – on the Holocaust museum shooting.

Since then, the world has rolled on quite nicely – well, with a few newsy bumps in the road. Pop star Michael Jackson and football quarterback Steve McNair went belly-up, each in bizarre fashion, and there’s been unrest in Iran, American refocusing of war efforts back in the country where it first belonged, and my favorite baseball team lingers in last-place despite many new and promising players. At least in baseball, I look forward to next year with a little more optimism.

Among the subjects covered earlier by The Real Muck, a few need updates… like the last man out at The Baltimore Sun in the wake of the newsroom personnel massacre, and the season-ender for the Baltimore Burn women’s tackle football team.

At The Sun, talented reporter Gadi Dechter took a voluntary layoff last month, collecting a few weeks’ pay and saving a job slot for some other colleague at the downsizing Tribune Co.-owned newspaper. Dechter first made a name for himself locally at the weekly City Paper, where he reported on local media including The Sun – which then brought him aboard and gave him the beat on higher education, and subsequently the State House.

Unlike most others leaving the newspaper recently, Dechter had a new job already lined up – at Bloomberg News Service. He bid farewell in a heartfelt note telling of his fears of being inexperienced and inadequate when he joined The Sun, and thanking colleagues for giving him support and encouragement. He was, and remains, a class act – and from the day he arrived on the staff had far more talent than he gave himself credit for.

On the gridiron, the Burn ladies finished with a 5-3 record, according to Women’s Football Alliance league statistics -- a hair short of the playoffs as a divisional runner-up. The last game on the schedule didn’t happen as the New Jersey Titans bused in to Baltimore, where a pre-game rain had left a few muddy pools in an otherwise mowed-and-fit City College field, and refused to play. Oddly, the league Web site lists the game as a 6-0 win by the Titans. Go figure.

The Burn lost twice during the season to the undefeated Philadelphia Liberty Belles – the first time on a lopsided score of 43-8, but the second much closer at 13-10 after a late-game heart-breaker Burn fumble near the Belles’ goal line. The difference in the scoring showed just how much the Burn had improved over the course of the season.

The Burn Web site (http://www.baltimoreburnfootball.com/) reports that the first tryouts for the 2010 season will take place at noon on Saturday, August 8, at Herring Run Park. If you check out the Web site’s Picture Gallery, you’ll find many of the 2009 game and team photos were taken by Bonnie, whose free efforts won her the designation “team photographer.” There’s links at the site to Bonnie’s football game photos at SmugMug, where devoted Burn fans (and staffers, players and their friends and relatives) can order prints at nominal prices.

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Daily number: 140

Movie review: Sin Nombre

Indie film weaves tales
of migrants, killers
on compelling journeys

It’s easy to imagine a porous Mexico-U.S. border, with immigrants flooding across in such numbers that only a relative few can be caught and sent back.

Harder to imagine are the scenes depicted in the new Indie film “Sin Nombre,” with migrants and ruthless gang thugs riding through Mexico atop northbound freight trains on a journey that few seem to complete.

This darkly compelling film brings together the life journeys of Sayra, bound from Honduras to New Jersey if she can somehow reach and cross the border with her father and uncle, and young Mexican gang member Willy, whose life is in turmoil after the killing of his girlfriend by his gang’s leader.

Their lives intersect atop the train, where acts of violence and redemption play out in a storm, and the journeys of the pair of not-quite-lovers become one in the direction of pre-ordained fates.

Actions beget consequences – from the tutoring of a younger-looking 12-year-old in gang ethics and murder to Sayra’s decision to leave the bond of family for the companionship of the fleeing Willy. Along the way, we witness grim acts of inhumanity (in one instance, the killing of a supposed rival who, it is suggested, is shot and then cut up and fed to the gang’s dogs); compassion and intolerance (bystanders who throw fruit to or rocks at the traintop passengers); and self-serving ambivalence.

Most disturbing are the dehumanizing indoctrination of the young boy into gang culture, and the uncompromising savagery of gang mentality. Fiction? Given the proliferation of gang culture in America, and the crimes linked to them in federal investigations in recent years, you have to wonder how close to reality the film hits.

For all the darkness of the tale, you can’t help but feel pushed into your seat and held captive emotionally by the plights of the characters who, for all their faults, are trying to flee unpleasant circumstances and hoping for better lives north of the border. You root for them to somehow escape.

The dialogue is sparse and quick, and with no more than a few years of high school Spanish nearly half a century ago to help, I had to rely on the film’s subtitles – much as I did a few years ago in seeing a film with a somewhat similar feel, “Maria Full of Grace,” in which a pregnant Colombian teenager becomes a drug mule.

More recently, the illegal immigrant theme was played out powerfully in “The Visitor” – a terrific film that had passion without violence (or, for the most part, subtitles).

What ties them all together, for me, is the message borne by the Statue of Liberty – that stuff about “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….”

It’s a beautiful ideal, still. It is why I root for the underdog – for the Sayras and Marias and Tareks, as personified in these three very different films.

It’s a shame our world is not so simple and welcoming a place.



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Daily number: 502

Movie review: Disney’s ‘earth’

Disneynature Earth Day release
is a sight to behold, but has
a badly over-written script
and droning narration

Cue the violins: It’s dinnertime

The movie is being hyped as the epic journeys of three families across the planet, but Disneynature’s “earth” – timed for theatrical release on Earth Day -- is really an update of the stuff that old Walt himself was pushing back in the 1950s when color television was being introduced as the latest in technology.

Inspiring, well-filmed stories of wild animals, with a droning narrator. Time-lapse photography of flowers blooming. We’ve seen that before, although I readily acknowledge the old Wonderful World of Disney productions are rudimentary stuff when compared to “earth.”

Trouble is, the new film for all its terrific spectacle has been weighed down with not only the droning narration of those TV days of yesteryear but an over-written script and jumbled story lines that the voice of James Earl Jones cannot save from mediocrity. (James Earl Jones? Very suave, very mellow, but he’s even disappeared from the Verizon ads!)

Now I have nothing against cute baby polar bears climbing out of their ice-hole den as spring comes to the Arctic, and playfully exploring the white wilderness while their mother tries to shepherd them toward the sea. So very, very cute, and so wonderfully filmed.

Meanwhile, daddy polar bear has gone far ahead in a desperate trek to find food as his world shrinks to global warming. By the time he finds something to eat, it’s a baby walrus whose colony keeps the big white predator at bay on an ice shelf. Poor papa polar bear is too weak to go on, and so the movie crew leaves him – returning us to the growing, thriving cubs who, we are assured, will carry on with his spirit in their hearts.

Yup. James Earl Jones really tells us that.

You’d like to think the photo crew up in the helicopter could have thrown a few fish to Papa Bear before leaving.

The other main story lines feature a herd of African elephants in their trek across a barren Kalahari Desert to reach the lush delta where water and food will be found, and mother-and-child humpback whales swimming thousands of miles to their Southern Ocean summer feeding waters.

But that wasn’t enough. As we are shuttled back and forth between the animal families to check on their progress, it seems there was some footage of enormously entertaining monkeys fording a river, so that gets thrown in, along with various other creatures. (I’ll allow, however, the giant shark rising out of the ocean devouring a whole seal in its horrifying maw.)

We also get to see in breathtaking time-lapse imagery entire forests change in color with the seasons. There are some terrific sunsets, too.

But the violins in the orchestral accompaniment are as unrelenting as the voice of Mr. Jones, and a solomn strings theme warns us when it appears an animal being chased down as prey is about to be killed and eaten by critters higher up the food chain. A pack of lions chases and jumps, biting, onto the back of an elephant fleeing in the near-darkness. (So that jungle cat-and-elephant circus act really is natural behavior!)

Cue the violins. Time for the Darwin theme. Elephant sushi is on the menu. The lions eat tonight.

I hate to criticize a movie that probably was conceived as well-meaning.

I cannot praise the photography enough. It is cutting-edge amazing. I kept wondering how the incredible scenes in “earth” could have been captured.

Patience was rewarded. Scenes showing how share the screen as the credits are rolling.

So don’t get up and leave too soon. You might miss some of the best moments that “earth” has to offer. You can also check them out at greater length online at http://disney.go.com/disneynature/earth, including the weeks of determined labor to capture with a high-speed camera that giant shark breaching the water with a seal in its teeth.

The photographers get four stars, and all the thumbs-up I can muster. It’s such a shame that the script and editing let them down.

Movie reviews: Buddy flicks worth seeing

Adult comedy wins without
skin; indie documentary
plays to the heart

We’re back in gear with the movies again – two free screenings in less than a week, of “buddy” films that could not have been more different.

Wednesday night's screening was a Maryland Film Festival-sponsored peek at “I Love You, Man,” which I was fully prepared to dislike as a trite buddy comedy.

I was right about one thing: It is a buddy comedy. But it was very, very funny – better than the sense of it I got from the excerpts aired on late-night TV talk shows in recent weeks as its stars made the rounds promoting the film.

Basic plot is a guy on the rebound thinks he’s fallen in love, proposes marriage, then figures out to his dismay that while his prospective bride has lots of girlfriends to gab with (usually about him), he doesn’t have a real friend to be his best man and sets out, at first with hookups engineered by his gay brother, to find one.

Now a little about this “buddy” thing in movies: Usually they seem to be made for guys. Action and stuff, bullets flying even when it’s a comedy. Buddy films that are serious, too, and yeah, with bullets flying.

This is a chick-flick-for-guys buddy film, which is to say it’s really oriented for guys but women will likely love it as much, or more. And there’s not a single gun drawn or bullet fired, just great dialogue shooting back and forth across the male-female and male-male divide.

If the standard of recent comedy in film is “Wedding Crashers,” this is a little less outrageous and a bit more subtly intelligent. And there’s no nudity! That’s shocking!

Paul Rudd as the restrained buddy-seeking groom and Jason Segal as the outrageous and unlikely friend he finds are brilliant in their performances. Both can be found cast together in recent comedies, including Segal’s star-turning effort as lead actor in and writer of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

As for all the other silly details about director and other actors (hey – Jane Curtin’s back!), and ratings and running time, you can find that stuff elsewhere. From me, you just get this: See it. It’s a hoot!

Saturday night, Bonnie and I checked out a free screening of the other buddy movie, “Darius Goes West.”

The star and center of attention is a then 15-year-old Darius Weems of Athens, Ga., who we know will die just as his older brother did from Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).
At a special camp program for the disabled, Darius was befriended by staff member Logan Smalley, who had worked with and become close to the boy’s late brother.

Darius had never been away from home, but a plot of sorts was hatched around the idea of a road trip to California to get the “Pimp My Ride” show on MTV to “pimp” his wheelchair. And around that trip in a large motor home, with Darius supported and carried and rolled by a crew of 11 young men including Logan, they filmed this amazing documentary.

Not everything that was planned or hoped for happens, but Darius experiences more living and love on the three-week journey than many people without disabilities will know in a lifetime.

A prize-winner at a variety of film festivals over the past two years, “Darius Goes West” has generated a new kind of road tour through public screenings and sales of the DVD at a modest $20 to raise money for the Darius Goes West Foundation aimed at finding a way to prevent the deadly genetic disease and to develop treatments for its victims. (From each sale, they say, $17 goes to the foundation and the rest toward making more DVDs.)

Darius and most of the crew, including Smalley, the film’s producer-director, attended the Baltimore screening at the quirky-artsy new bar called The Windup Space at 12 W. North Ave. (http://www.thewindupspace.com/), fielded questions for half an hour, and sold dozens of copies of the DVD.

Their goal is a million sold by Darius’ 20th birthday in September. (That’s longer than his brother lived.) Nearly every dollar raised through the DVD sales goes to the foundation.

Interesting: They say the film was produced at a cost of just $70,000. To date, it has generated some $1.5 million for the cause.

To further another purpose, of educating children about muscular dystrophy and disability, the DVD has been sent to about 50,000 high schools and middle schools across the country, Smalley said.

Check out the Web site at http://www.dariusgoeswest.org/foundation.

Even better, make a donation or order the DVD. Just watching it will make you feel good about a bunch of kids from Georgia, and that maybe there’s hope for America as a place where people care about being their brother’s keeper.

Who's that leprechaun?

Check out Bonnie's blog at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/ for a view of Lucy's pub in downtown Baltimore on St. Patrick's Day. I could play the "Where's Waldo?" game and challenge you to find me. But I'll make it easy: Click on the photo to enlarge it, and you'll find me in a light sportcoat and greenish shamrock tie in the right corner of the right window. Nice bar, nice crowd, nice music, and the tender corned beef sliders were a bargain.