It’s funny how the beloved movies of one’s less politically-correct adolescent past turn out to have a lot more edge to them once you show them to your own kids. “Back to the Future” has more sexuality than you remember, and little blasts of profanity. “Adventures in Babysitting,” “Bad News Bears” and “Goonies,” even more.
“Fun Size” is in that tradition — at least in terms of the naughty stuff tweens and teens will snicker over.
Pity it isn’t as much fun as its title implies.
J
ulie and Jason are a couple contemplating “cheating.”
OK, they aren’t really a couple. They’re New York neighbors, best friends since college. So the cheating isn’t what you think either. Julie (Jennifer Westerfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are both in their 30s and both want kids.
It’s just that they want them without what what they see are the pitfalls that face all their “Friends With Kids.” Marriages strained to the breaking point, the loss of romance and freedom, the seismic shift in priorities.
They want to cheat, to beat system that beats loving couples into exhausted, testy, myopic parents. They figure the ideal relationship will be with someone who’s already been through the rough years with children. So they’ll have a baby, share raising it, and continue to date until they stumble into Mr. or Ms. Right.
What can go wrong with that?
It had been 18 years since Martin Landau worked for Tim Burton. But when the director who gave Landau his Oscar-winning role (in “Ed Wood”) wrote him with another offer, Landau didn’t hesitate.
“He sent me a letter, a little picture of the character, a script, and I was on the phone in an instant. ‘Let’s GO.’ Within a week we were in a recording studio, working out this guy.”
“Frankenweenie” is darned near an instant classic. Tim Burton has taken the animated short that launched his career and expanded it into a vivid and moving essay on science and love — the love a budding middle school scientist, Victor Frankenstein, has for his dog Sparky.
That was the kernel of the original 1984 “Frankenweenie,” back at the beginning of Burton’s career. Burton gives that genius concept full voice in a rich, delicately-textured, 3D jewel in the stop-motion animation style.
“For a Good Time, Call…” is a romantic comedy masquerading as a sex farce — a bad BAD girl sex farce, full of naughty talk and boys calling girls to hear that filthy language over the phone.
And if that’s not titillating enough, it’s a love story between two consenting, nubile females.
Hot and bothered, yet?
The Rape of Nanking, the 1937 rape and murder rampage by Japanese troops, comes so vividly to life in “The Flowers of War” that you wish the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou had a better movie to put in front of it. Japan, both officially and informally, has spent the intervening 74 years ignominiously denying this mass slaughter of women and children ever happened. A great historical film using it as a backdrop is overdue.
But while the filmmaker who gave us “Ju Dou” and “Raise the Red Lantern” presents an epic of a city reduced to black rubble and grey ash, the cliche-riddled story of a cynical American (Christian Bale) ennobled by the task of rescuing helpless convent school girls is an epic eye-roller.
The family-friendliest movie comedy this holiday season is also the sappiest and schmaltziest.
And thanks to Billy Crystal, the shtickiest.
Growing up in Germany, actress Diane Kruger learned the same things about Marie Antoinette that most people did — that she was hated, that the French called her “The Ice Queen,” that when told the French peasants couldn’t afford the bread they needed to survive, that Antoinette quipped, “Let them eat cake.”
Then she was handed the script to “Farewell, My Queen,” and the “Troy/Inglourious Basterds” star did her homework. And the caricature faded away. The real Marie was not the dizzy blonde that history, and the movies paint her as.
“You read in Stefan Zwieg’s biography (Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman) that the minute she heard aboutt the Bastille, it dawned on her that this was the end of the life they had known,” Kruger says. “She realized this sooner than the king, faster than many of those at court. And she took more seriously her responsibilities as from that point, too late, as it turned out. She had a moment when she ‘manned up’ and became a real queen.”
That’s the take Kruger went with for “Farewell, My Queen,” which observes Marie Antoinette through the eyes of a favorite servant, a woman who worships her and yet sees that the queen favors another.
“I had heard about Gabrielle de Polignac, her closest friend,” Kruger says. “I read that there were rumors that they might have been lovers. What isn’t a rumor was that Marie got Gabrielle out just in time to save her from the guillotine. She had to worry about her own safety and her family’s safety, but all she seemed to care about was saving her friend or her love.”
The former Diane Heidkruger, 36, is a model-turned-actress who works more frequently in Europe than in Hollywood, with the occasional “National Treasure” movie winning the attention of audiences here.
Actresses have to be gifted mimics, so she has spent the summer mastering a Kentucky accent in preparation for playing Abraham Lincoln’s step-mother in a film for producer Terrence Malick which she’ll shoot this fall. Kruger lives part-time in France, makes French films and was once married to a French actor (Guillaume Canet of “Joyeaux Noel”). She is fluent in French, but the language of the 18th century French court was more challenging, even, than the daily grind of corset-costumes/wig and makeup that she endured playing the queen.
“You worry, in something like this, that the costumes will be so imposing to act in,” she says. “I’ve never really done a film wih such big costumes…I couldn’t even lace my own shoes, because of the corsets. Every day, I started with being dependent on other people, just as Marie was, with my most private time invaded, just as hers was. That was very helpful for getting into character each day.”
Marie Antoinette earns a big-screen makeover in “Farewell, My Queen,” a lavish French period piece based an inspired fictional fancy based on real history.
Scholarship, my favorite grad school professor preached, is “like building a wall. You do it brick by brick.”
In “Footnote,” Eliezer Shkolnik has spent his entire life with those bricks. You’d think this Talmudic philologist would have a wall all his own, by now.
But no. The bulk of his research was one-upped by a colleague, and now the Israeli scholar’s greatest claim to fame is a single footnote in the definitive book on the subject, one written by his late mentor.
A bitter, bookish old man, Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba), he spends his days in the library stacks, poring over copies of the Hebrew bible, looking for inconsistencies between drafts, and quietly fuming over the great scholarly “Israel Prize,” given out by the state academy, that has eluded him for decades. There are hints of blackballing, of Eliezer’s status as an ostracized outsider.
Adding insult to that, he has to pretend to be thrilled at each new laurel tossed at his son’s feet. Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is the TV and guest-lecture friendly scholar, the wit, beloved by students, peers and TV interviewers, a wag who tells anecdotes about the “cultural fortress” his meticulous, no-nonsense dad built in their home.
Then, everything changes. Dad gets the call. He’s won! His wife whispers that he’s “like an anorexic who suddenly begins to eat.” Eliezer almost breaks into a smile. His bricks are being acknowledged.
Pity about the mix-up with the prize, the academic cover-up and all the soul-searching that follows.
Joseph Cedar’s slow, dry tragi-comedy is about academic infighting, fathers and sons and that moment in old age when you take stock and wonder what it is you’ve accomplished. Cedar rather needlessly breaks the film into titled chapters — “The Most Difficult Day in the Life of Professor Shklonick,” “The Revenge of Professor Shkolnick.” They promise a rather more lively movie than this quiet, thoughtful and occasionally comical Israeli film (in Hebrew with English subtitles).
