Family-friendly movie reviews - 'Sorcerer's Apprentice,' 'Toy Story 3,' Eclipse

Ingenious and funny, yet slightly melancholy with a harrowing climax, "Toy Story 3" will enthrall kids 7 and older, and grown-ups, too. The age recommendation reflects the poignancy of the theme about kids setting aside toys as they grow up.

And the scariness of the finale. Cowboy Woody, spaceman Buzz Lightyear and the other toys face a bittersweet life change, because Andy, their owner, is going to college.

Only Woody will be going away with Andy. The other toys hope they'll be put in the attic, but they are mistakenly donated to a day-care center.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The climax becomes very frightening. The humor kicks back in, but it is a grim interlude. Earlier in the film, the desolate atmosphere at the day-care center echoes classic prison films. There is mildly homophobic humor directed at Barbie's Ken and some toilet humor.

10 and older

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE (PG). This live-action update, while not wildly inspired or precedent-setting, is imaginative and fun and likely to engage kids 10 and older. It takes into account the original fairy tale/poem by Goethe, the music it inspired by Paul Dukas and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" section of Disney's "Fantasia." What the movie adds is a modern, sometimes cliched edge, electrically charged special effects and a charming performance by Jay Baruchel as a physics nerd and reluctant wizard, who becomes an apprentice to the oddball Balthazar, played by Nicolas Cage.

THE BOTTOM LINE: There is much kinetic mayhem. Threats by the evil Horvath and his minions would be chilling for kids younger than 10. A dragon in a parade comes to life and breathes fire. There is toilet humor.

DESPICABLE ME (PG). It took a while for this animated feature to win over the Family Filmgoer. At first, it seemed unfunny, grim and mean-spirited. But "Despicable Me" soon evolves into an inventive tale of a villain whose heart melts because of three little girls. Kids younger than 10 may be unsettled by the threatening tone in the film's early scenes. Gru is a baddie who's upset that someone else just stole the pyramids, because he wants that kind of glory. He vows to steal the moon. Gru adopts three little girls to use them to get into his competitor's lair. But a funny thing happens after the orphans come to live in Gru's mansion: Gru becomes a good guy.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Little kids might find Gru scary and his minions creepy, though they turn out to be very funny. There are childhood flashbacks showing Gru's mother belittling him. There is toilet humor.

THE LAST AIRBENDER (PG). Ponderous, blandly acted and an awkward mix of modernisms and borrowed bits of the Buddha legend, this movie could seem profound to many kids 10 and older. They'll enjoy the fantasy world. The Fire Nation has conquered and colonized other nations. A boy airbender known as the Avatar could commune with the spirit world and help stop the Fire Nation, but he has been missing for a century. A young waterbender, Katara, and her brother Sokka find the missing Avatar.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The bloodless battles feature fancy digital effects. There are skeletons of murdered monks. Evil Prince Zuko has a scarred face -- a burn we're told was inflicted by his father. It's interesting that the young Aang tried to avoid fulfilling his destiny as the Avatar. Kids may be fascinated by a calling.

PG- 13

INCEPTION. "Inception" exhibits both genius and tedium, but thankfully far more of the former than the latter. Teens into the most complex video and computer games and any sci-fi mind-control tales will jump into all 2 1/2 hours of Christopher Nolan's film with both feet. The tortuous storyline spins itself into quite a knot, but the plot details become less important than the film's overall concept and fabulously surreal visuals. What more can teen cinema buffs ask for than a movie about dreaming that uses the impossible physics inherent in that idea? Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom, who helps people safeguard secret information in their minds against idea thieves. He and his team are hired to plant a new idea into the mind of someone. The team's new dreamscape "architect" suspects that Dom has issues within his own subconscious involving his wife that could affect the whole project.

THE BOTTOM LINE: There is considerable gun play, and we see life-threatening injuries and a little blood. There are ongoing themes involving grief and suicide, occasional mild profanity and mild sexual innuendo. Intellectually, this film will probably do better with high-schoolers.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE. The emotional and sexual tug-of-war escalates and evolves between high-school seniors Bella Swan, her vampire love, Edward Cullen, and her werewolf friend, Jacob. One could wish this teen-angsty film took itself less seriously. Still, "Eclipse" fills a need for teen audiences with its mix of fantasy, "real life" and artistic pretensions. Edward wants Bella to marry him. Jacob tries to make Bella realize she loves him, too. Edward's vampire clan and Jacob's werewolf pack form an uneasy alliance to fight a rogue army of new vampires.

THE BOTTOM LINE: "Eclipse" is okay for high-schoolers and some middle-schoolers. The sexual tension is heightened, though still innocent. The prologue shows a man attacked by a vampire. The climactic battle is mostly special effects with no blood. The werewolves are the scariest element for younger kids. There is rare mild profanity.

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Movie review - The Kids Are All Right

Witty, urbane and thoroughly entertaining, "The Kids Are All Right" is an ode to the virtues of family, in this case a surprisingly conventional one even with its two moms, two kids and one sperm donor. Whatever your politics, between peerless performances, lyrical direction and an adventurous script, this is the sort of pleasingly grown-up fare all too rare in the mainstream daze of this very dry summer.

Before delving into the layered perfection of Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, let's start by getting past any hesitations or reservations about the lesbian household premise on which "The Kids Are All Right" is based.

The issue of gay marriage is not what's on the table here. At its heart, this is a movie about how families, whatever their composition, stay together, love each other through difficult times, and weather the particularly storm-tossed seas that come when the kids hit their teenage years. (Why the 2s are considered terrible instead of the teens, I'll never understand).

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg have put the politics aside for now and created an easy interplay of comedy and drama spawned by typical family pressures — the thank you notes that haven't been sent, the sketchy best friend the parents don't approve of, the house rules made to be broken. It helps that the characters are eminently relatable at the same time intriguingly iconoclastic, no small feat. For those who are wondering, there is some sheet tangling, sweaty sex, but it's mostly of the hetero variety courtesy of the very appealing Ruffalo.The laughter and the tears are set in motion when 15-year-old Laser ( Josh Hutcherson) presses his 18-year-old sister Joni (an excellent Mia Wasikowska) to use her new legal standing to find out who their bio-dad is. While curiosity does not quite kill the cat, it definitely upends this seemingly settled family headed by Bening's Nic, a doctor and by-the-book breadwinner and Moore's Jules, the easy-going stay-at-home half. As for the kids, Joni's an honors student headed to college in the fall and Laser's the star athlete trying to figure out his emerging self, so definitely they're all right, but change is in the air.

Enter Ruffalo's Paul, a PC-liberal dreamboat of a donor dad, who spends his days tending the organic vegetable garden that supplies his hipster-chic restaurant at night. He also comes with a self-deprecatingly smug charm about his college dropout success, farm-to-table lifestyle and unencumbered bachelorhood. By the time Nic finally breaks in the face of all that eco-goodness dissolving into an anti-composting rant, it's hard to suppress the desire to cheer.

With all the players in place, the filmmakers set about deconstructing life as the family knows it, with Paul their weapon of mass deconstruction. Everything about him is seductive, with the kids falling hard for their newly acquired father-figure, followed in short order by Jules and even a very resistant Nic. But then, the lovable incorrigible is Ruffalo's sweet spot and his performance here, if possible, is even more refined than his breakout in another intimate family drama, "You Can Count on Me."

At first Paul represents endless possibility: the cool parent whom kids fantasize about, the unexpected lover who believes in you and your dreams, the latecomer who turns out to be the life of the party even as his very presence is redefining the family. But in filmmaker Cholodenko's increasingly sure hands, life is neither easy, nor neat and tidy. As she has done in her previous work, "High Art" and the incisive "Laurel Canyon," she cuts to the bone of human emotions, with the humans themselves fraying around the edges.

In "The Kids Are All Right" it's hard to tell who is fraying faster, Nic or Jules. They are a typical long-coupled couple, focused on the routine of daily life and forgetful of the romance that brought them together. At home, as well as at work, Bening's Nic is scalpel sharp. Tension radiates around her like an energy field with Bening using it against her fear of the unknown and then the greater fear of the known.

As the serious one with a domineering streak, Bening has the harder task unearthing her character's humanity without any of the cuddle factor that everyone else has been given. But as she did in "American Beauty," she makes the unlikable understandable, forgivable. In "Kids" she manages to be funny in ways so subtle you might miss them if they weren't so perfectly played in the cock of her head, the roll of an eye. And when the deep wounds come, and they do, you're allowed tears even if Nic isn't.

Where Nic is brittle, Jules is the bough that breaks and in taking her there Moore is fearless. There are countless moments when the actress strips bare before the camera — sometimes literally, sometimes emotionally, but always with an abandon that exposes all of the character's complicated layers. Jules is an existential bundle of unrealized need and midlife uncertainty, and Moore plays every note perfectly.

The kids, who really serve as a counterweight for the craziness brought about by bio-dad's desire to have a place in their lives, are refreshingly real. Wasikowska, in particular, is exceptional — disappointment lingering in her eyes, face quivering on the edge of tears as one after another of her parents lets her down, as parents inevitably do. While she may be best known for her delightful Alice in Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," it is the mix of vulnerability and steel she brings to HBO's "In Treatment," as one of Gabriel Byrne's troubled clients, that most informs Joni.

Before they've finished wringing everything out of their actors, the filmmakers dredge through the issues — age old and thoroughly modern — that come along to threaten that most basic of bonds. Fierce, funny, smart and overflowing with love, this unconventionally conventional film sits squarely in the family values camp, which is exactly where it belongs.

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Toy Story 3 movie review: personification, and then some

The whiz kids at Pixar Studios continue a stellar strike record (13 good titles, no bad) with Toy Story 3, the third and final instalment in a trilogy of films that take the concept of personification to delightfully literal extremes, capturing the life, personalities and even politics of toys that come alive when humans aren’t watching.

By now general audiences are familiar with Sheriff “reach for the sky” Woody and Buzz “to infinity and beyond” Lightyear, the two favourite toys of a young boy named Andy, but what they aren’t likely to see coming is a third cinematic outing that not only expands the stories of the two personable playthings and their pals but does so – strange though this may sound – in the context of a prison escape drama.

Woody, Buzz and their motley gang of tender-hearted thingamajigs find themselves relocated to the Sundale Daycare Centre, a place that seems at first like a toy utopia of smiles, rainbows and cuddles but turns out to be a hellish haven for rambunctious little shits. Instead of being tenderly lulled into playtime retirement the toys discover Sundale is their Guantanamo Bay equivalent – a place of unspeakable horrors; a goo ga gulag.

And so the breakout begins. Having separated himself from the group in an act of pigheaded loyalty for Andy, Woody is cast as the lead character in The Great Escape meets, well, Toy Story, aka the Sundale Daycare Redemption.

In a narrative sense Toy Story 3 is the most innovative of the trilogy: there are flashbacks, flash forwards, psychic Mrs. Potatohead visions, parallels to other films genres and a high octane, dazzlingly anachronistic opening scene featuring a steam engine train, a spaceship, cowboys, force fields, trolls, barrels of monkeys and more. The Toy Story movies are sprayed with pop culture detritus, and director Lee Unkich delights in the task of repackaging old things with new life, in turn creating a sense that this film – like its two predecessors – is tapping into a collective childhood.

Time and change are reoccurring themes in the Toy Story movies; arguably no more so than in the third instalment. The story begins in Andy’s childhood but fast forwards: he is now preparing to leave home for college. The toys have long been relegated to a trunk in Andy’s bedroom and are desperate to be held. Buster the dog is old, fat and tired. In the first instalment Woody was an old toy scared that Andy’s new whiz bang acquisiton (Buzz Lightyear) might replace him but now everybody is a relic, a has-been, a tired old play thing, their hopes now pinned on the poignant dream that one day Andy will have his own child who will want to play with them.

While childhood may in some mystical sense be considered never-ending, viewers understand that material objects break down (’specially crappy goods made in China) and that all toys have a use by date. Puff the Magic Dragon will inevitably slink back into his cave, fire breath extinguished, magic exhausted, tail between his legs, to grudgingly embrace a lonely death, his vacant mind warmed only by memories of the good old days. Toy Story 3 is about toys sensing that dark horizon and fighting to delay the inevitable, in a similar way people aspire to avoid the twin inevitabilities of human existence: death and taxes.

It’s no coincidence that Toy Story 3 inspires such readings. See the film and it is hard, if not impossible, to write it off as another ordinary trip to the movies or – worse – simply another well-funded cash cow for multiplex audiences to seek the teat of. It has reportedly reduced grown men to blubbery messes, and it isn’t difficult to believe the veracity of such stories.

These days audiences have come to expect eye boggling animation, our aesthetic standards raised to the point at which it has become almost redundant for a film reviewer to point out that Toy Story 3 looks, well, great. But we’ve never come to expect such a rich emotional core from mainstream animation or mainstream movies in general, and this is where Unkich and his crew spectacularly deliver. The fact that the faces at the fore of Toy Story 3, the salespeople, if you like, flogging such profound storytelling gravity are toys, makes the experience that much more memorable. Make no mistake: this is personification, and then some.

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Whiz Kids Movie Review

“Whiz Kids” traces the events leading up to the most prestigious science competition in the USA. The Science Talent Search began in 1942 and currently is sponsored by Intel, the processor chip giant. The filmmakers scoured the high schools of the country looking for 16-17 year old budding scientists.

To their surprise, they found that some of the STS candidates were already working in government labs, sometime under the supervision of Nobel Prize winning scientists. Others were working in that masterpiece of American ingenuity, the basement lab. Here they toiled away, driven by curiosity and fueled by the energy of youth.

The group was winnowed down to three competitors who were chosen to tell their stories in “Whiz Kids.” Keledra Welcker’s research centered on pollution dumped into the Ohio River by her hometown in West Virginia. The pollutant is a byproduct of the Teflon manufacturing process and the corporations who make Teflon are very big and very powerful.

It is commendable that the filmmakers chose to focus on students who were not only science nerds but who were aware enough to tackle potentially dangerous political problems as well. The chief perp amongst the polluters was a firm her father worked for---a firm that was paying his pension.

Ana Cisneros Cisneros is a first generation Ecuadorian-American living with her family in Long Island, outside of New York City. Ana embodies a fierce competitive spirit. Her high school is 90% black and Latino---ethnic groups with low representation in Ivy League schools. The science competition offers her a chance at a life that is only a dream for most in her neighborhood. It offers her a chance not only for a college education but to be a leader---the chance to inspire others in addition to making a living.

Harmain Khan’s family immigrated to New York City from Pakistan and survived for a time by collected recyclable aluminum cans. He knows poverty first hand and was determined to show he could be a winner.

The film starts by introducing the STS, putting a much-needed spotlight on a part of Americana that fails in the glitz and glamour department. Once the technology capital of the world, the US is now well down the list in standardized test achievement. We fall below countries that were considered “third world” a few decades ago. Now kids from those countries are coming here and taking the place of 5th to 10th generation Americans in our most prestigious colleges and universities.

There is an entire film to be made about that issue alone; a film that investigates when and how children make the decision to pursue careers other than science and engineering. Money is certainly an issue. Business careers offer higher pay and easier college classes. Although an Ivy League business degree is a guarantee of huge paychecks for even the most unproductive business contributions, even those with lesser degrees can find their way into Wall Street and allied high paying positions.

As America defends its position as the entertainment epicenter of the world many kids chose the glamour that industry and hope the dollars will follow. For some it does but for the majority who are stuck in the minimum wage parts of entertainment they have lost the youthful edge it takes to come up the steep end of the science learning curve.

The prevalent “talent” of the three competitors seems to be driving curiosity. At a visceral level, they need to know how things work. These same students would probably make great police detectives (or great criminals). Luckily, the working tools of science are available for those who want them. It is easier to build a garage lab than to track down terrorists.

As the STS continues there is a priceless and heartbreaking sequence as the STS receiving center closes down at the submission deadline. One boy calls on the phone panicked and says he is on the way to the center. As the minutes, then seconds, tick away the boy fails to cover the last yards in his car. He is past the deadline and will not be allowed to submit. Deadlines are a part of the real world and some of these high schools students learned that lesson the hard way.

In the end, some win and some lose, but that is not the end of the story. Even those who do not win the competition end up much better off than if they had never competed. This is a sweet film that both prepares kids for the STS and motivates them. A must see for the family of the science whiz kid.

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The Last Airbender: Another bend in Shyamalan’s career

After his breakthrough with The Sixth Sense in 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s career has been painful to contemplate. Hailed as the new Spielberg.

He has made five movies, ranging from the awkward but promising (Signs) to the ridiculous (Lady in the Water). Never content to be a conventional hack.

Shyamalan shows auteurist ambitions in his films, with themes of grief and loss of faith, when supernatural agencies intrude in ordinary lives.

The Last Airbender has been touted as a change of direction. With a hefty $150-million (U.S.) budget, it is offered as the first film in a blockbuster trilogy. The movie is adapted from Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s well-regarded Nickelodeon animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which draws inspiration from various Asian cultures and takes place in a world with four nations named after the elements of earth, water, air and fire.

Each nation produces a few special individuals who can “bend” their elements telekinetically – throwing fire, causing whirlwinds, moulding rocks or turning water into waves. But only one individual, a reincarnated Dalai Lama-like Avatar, can manipulate all the elements to maintain peace.

As we start the story (shot initially on the snowy landscape of Greenland), an adolescent girl, Katara (Nicola Peltz), and her teenaged brother, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), are out hunting seal when they find a glowing globe under the ice. Inside it are a giant flying bison and a 12-year-old boy in what appear to be Tibetan monk robes. The boy (Noah Ringer) introduces himself as Aang and eventually as the legendary Avatar, who has been missing for the past century after running away from his monastic school. In his absence, the elements have gone out of balance, as the Fire Nation has launched a war against the other tribes. Now, the children must unite to save the world and put the elements back in harmony. Shyamalan ran into his first controversy while the film was still in production by using Caucasian actors to play most of the characters, who were, in the original, apparently either cartoon Asians or Inuit. Actors of other ethnicities play background roles. The exception is the war-like Fire Nation, which is populated by people played by darker-skinned actors, including Cliff Curtis (Maori), Shaun Toub (Iranian) and two actors of Indian origin, Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) and a miscast Aasif Mandvi (from Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show) as a seething Fire Nation general.

The puzzle of Shyamalan’s racial casting soon becomes secondary to a much more pressing concern – trying to follow the cluttered story. Like Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender was upgraded to 3-D to cash in on the post-Avatar trend, and it offers some visual pleasures: The Fire Nation’s gnarly war ships suggest giant witches’ shoes, and the way the water particles shimmer and congeal is, the first half-dozen times, lovely.

The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes. Characters have little chance to develop between the clots of exposition, and Shyamalan’s mediocre action sequences don’t add much to the emotional engagement. Repeatedly, characters perform slow-motion tai chi moves, before hurling balls of fire, walls of earth and waves of water at each other, like some overblown game of rock, paper, scissors. The young actors are often forced to stand delivering long strings of exposition, as we learn more information about the spirit world that lies beneath this one, about Aang’s background, about trouble at the Fire Nation court.

Aang is kidnapped, initially, by Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), the estranged prince of the Fire Nation, who wants to impress his father and win back his place as future leader. His ally is the sympathetic uncle, General Iroh (Toub). After that, Katara and Sokka assist Aang and take a crash course of element-bending with the world’s top experts. Along the way, Sokka falls in love with Northern Water People Princess Yue (Seychelle Gabriel), who has her own backstory about the Moon Spirit and her special relationship to spiritual carp she keeps in a cavern pool. While meditating in the cavern, Aang visits a baritone-voiced spirit dragon who advises him that he must deal with his grief issues and let his “emotions flow like water.”

This is a familiar problem with Shyamalan. When he attempts to dive deep philosophically, he comes back with a pearl of triteness. Though his pop-therapy messages have worked spectacularly at the box office in the past, at this point, The Last Airbender looks less like a career change than another bead in the director’s chain of odd disappointments.

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