Movie Monday: Early Man

This is a fun movie, an epic story made in the stop-motion production style.

It opens with dinosaurs in the English countryside.  Then the dinosaurs are obliterated by an asteroid, which also creates a lovely valley where plants and rabbit-hunting cavemen thrive.  Then that idyllic life is interrupted by Bronze Age villains who rather resemble the Normans, who conquered England a millennium or so later.  Then comes an epic soccer match.

None of this has anything to do with real history, but so what?  It's very English in its humor, which even Americans can appreciate now that we all know that "football" means "soccer" across the pond.  It's also a product of the Nick Park Aardman team that gave us the Wallace and Gromit shorts and the "Chicken Run" movie.  

The movie's main character is Dug (Eddie Redmayne), who finds himself transported to the Bronze fortress whose overlord is the greedy, henpecked Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston).  Dug manages to get home after promising to return with a caveman football team to play against the Bronze all-stars. 

Turns out the cave people have some soccer history of their own, but their big break comes when Goona (Maisie Williams), rejected by the Bronze team because she's a girl, agrees to train Dug and the gang.  The ensuing match is most enjoyable. 

 As is usual in dramatic comedy, the good-guy characters here are not as interesting as the villains.  Nooth makes a fool of himself several times, including in his primitive text messaging -- via bird -- with his haughty wife. The Bronze football team are a pack of prima donnas  (primi uomini in Italiano) while the team-oriented cavemen are steadfast but less memorable as individuals.  

All appropriate for a nice outing of adults and younger people.


Notes

In a cinematic world of computer-generated imagery, the stop-motion filming of a movie like this is almost primitive.  (In film terms it IS primitive; the original King Kong was a stop-motion creation of 1933.)  The technique requires repositioning plasticene characters, shot frame by frame, to assemble the action.  Even with CGI background elements and a very large production team, "Early Man" was made in daily increments of only 30 or 40 seconds each.  

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Happily, Wallace and Gromit have joined the classics of childhood cinematic literature.  I had an enjoyable conversation over dinner recently with two youngsters who were familiar with W&G and also Road Runner, Bugs Bunny and other characters in the Looney Tunes archive.  One scene that we all remembered fondly was the W&G battle with Feathers McGraw from "The Wrong Trousers," which won the Animated Short Oscar in 1994.

Michael, Nikolas and Other Lost Children

Michael

Sometime in my child's third year, he began spending three mornings a week at a daycare center.  It was a nice place, and he was happy there.

Several months after he started, a new child joined the group.  I'll call him Michael.  

Michael had a very young single mother who was overwhelmed.  She dropped him off first thing in the morning and picked him up just as the daycare workers were turning off the lights at the end of the day.

Michael was only two years old, but he unsettled the whole place.  He spat and cursed at the other children.  He grabbed their toys and threw them away.  He hit children and the very nice daycare workers.

After these incidents, his designated daycare mother would pick Michael up, wrap him in her arms and sit with him in a rocking chair for a long while.  Sometimes she would do this early in the morning after he arrived.  She met his aggression and anger with love.

It had no effect.
  
Michael didn't teach himself to swear or spit or attack other children.  He didn't see other children doing those things at the daycare center.  He learned this at home.   He was not yet three years old, and his own mother was avoiding him.  He was incapable of trusting even a generous, loving adult.  

My child began to dread the daycare center.  "No Michael!" he'd yell from the back seat as we drove there in the mornings.  After a while, we transferred him to a preschool that didn't have a Michael enrolled.  

I don't know what happened to Michael, but my guess is that other children avoided him all the way through high school.  It would not surprise me to learn that Michael is in prison today.  


Nikolas 

Like Michael, Nikolas was born to a single mother.  Two years later, she had a second son with a different father.  Two months after the second child was born, both boys were adopted by a married couple in their 40s.

It is fair to conclude that motherhood hadn't gone well for Nikolas' birth mother or her son in his first two years of life.  Certainly his father wasn't a steadying influence. 

It is a truism that adopted children have a more difficult time in childhood.  A second truism is that children adopted shortly after they are born do better than children adopted later.  

Nikolas had his adopted father for only three years; the man died of a heart attack in 2004.  

After a middle school career marked by 25 disciplinary referrals, Nikolas was transferred to a small, very structured program designed for students with emotional and behavioral issues like his -- which in his case also included diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and autism.  

Then he was pulled out of the one-on-one program and dumped into a 3,000-student high school -- when "he was not ready," according to a special education teacher in the district.  Not surprisingly, he reverted to his former behavior and ultimately was expelled.  

Then, several months ago, Nikolas' adoptive mother died of flu complications.

More from the special education teacher:  "We failed him, and now we have dead children because of a system that didn't work." 

Nikolas is Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who shot and killed 17 students and teachers at the high school in Florida.  

Virtually everyone who dealt with him said he was difficult, withdrawn, strange and angry.  That he cut himself when frustrated.  That on a good day he was ignored by his classmates. That on bad days he was belittled and bullied constantly. 

We can guess that his early childhood, like Michael's, had something to do with this.  We can wonder whether even the best school could have turned Nikolas' life around instead of making him just a bit less miserable.

A neighbor of Nikolas' family said these things about him to a local newspaper reporter.

“He was ostracized his whole life.”

“He would bang his head with his hands, and often lose control 

over minor things, like loud sounds.”

“His mother made a major push to have him lead a normal life.  

But toward the end of her life, she really had given up.’’

The Big Point

We must reserve our greatest sympathy for the 17 dead at the high school in Florida.  

We also must hold Nikolas to account for what he has done.

BUT.  It is time to acknowledge that we have a lot of children facing unusual stress now.  While 91 percent of children lived with their married parents in 1960, only between 50 and 60 percent do so today.  The number of ADHD diagnoses increased more than 50 percent between 2003 and 2015.  Our public schools are fine if you can afford a house in the right neighborhood and mediocre-to-poor if you have less money.  Church participation -- which is associated with better health and civic engagement -- has been dropping at an accelerated pace since the millennial generation, a concern no matter what you think of organized religion.  


For some young men, the idea of shooting up a school has become the only imaginable path to glory, and in some of those cases, parents have stupidly bought guns for their maladjusted children.  

Worse, murder has for years been the leading cause of death for young African American men.

All my friends can name young people who have failed to launch, who have traded their futures for the comfort of opiates and who have have killed themselves deliberately.  Anyone who lives in a city has seen able-bodied young men "choosing" to live aimless lives on the streets.

In short, the traditional guard rails are gone.  We bring this up mostly after school shootings, but there are many other warning signs and we never seem to connect the dots. 

Ours is by many measures the most successful country in world history.  But you wouldn't know it if you looked only at what is going on with our children.  


Update 

A 2019 interview with the father of one of the dead Florida students assigns 50 percent of the blame to school and police systems.  He makes some good points.

MovieMonday: Black Panther

I'm only going to say a few things about this movie because just about everybody has seen it already.

It's very, very good.  The source material is a comic book series from the 1970s, when comic book creators were trying to make their work more relevant to actual human realities.

Chadwick Boseman plays T'Challa, who assumes the kingship (and Black Panther mantle) of Wakanda upon the death of his father.  Wakanda is a remote and unassuming African country that just happens to sit on a big stash of vibranium, the source of its high-tech superiority and BP's super powers.

During the movie, the new king learns something disturbing about his father and meets a cousin, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who was raised in the US.  Killmonger has set out to usurp the throne and use vibranium for his larger plan to influence world events. 

Black Panther must come to terms with his own plans and, of course, must battle to hold onto his throne.  He is honest and careful and measured and true, the sort of superhero people would like their children to imitate. 

The movie hits all the right notes with strong female characters, beautiful cinematography, fine acting and a musical score organized by Kendrick Lamar that has been turned into an album or compendium or whatever a collection of music is called these days.

I was interested in the movie because of its director, Ryan Coogler, whose Creed impressed me two years ago.

Disney's promotional team ginned up genuine excitement for this film in venues from sports events to fashion shows, and the effort has paid off.  What was first estimated to be a very big $150 million opening weekend domestically (US and Canada) now is looking more like $225 million.


The Big Question

Why did it take so long for this picture to be made?  Film studios have been releasing superhero movies since 2008, including some with increasingly labored concepts --  "Captain America: Civil War," "Batman V. Superman," "Deadpool," "The Lego Batman Movie", etc.  The first female superhero film, "Wonder Woman," only came out last year.

If the concern was that audiences wouldn't want to see a movie with an almost entirely black cast, that seems silly. 

"Lion King," the theatrical musical based on another Disney property, has an all-black cast (except for the bad guys) and has been playing on Broadway for more than 20 years and in London's West End for almost as long.  

Another Disney affiliate, Pixar Animation, most recently released "Coco," a story set in Mexico and with Mexican characters and customs.  It has been an international success, selling more tickets in China than in the US.

In 2016, Disney's "Moana," a story about native islanders in the South Pacific, also was very popular.

It's a big world, and people are interested in stories from more than their own little corners. Time for the superhero studios to pull their heads out of distant galaxies and pay attention. 


February 20 Note

I actually underestimated the domestic weekend sales.  The total was $235 million.


Update

Number has been revised upward: $241.5 million. 

MovieMonday: The Female Brain

It's not unusual for nonfiction stories to be turned into movies.  Think "Black Hawk Down" or "The Perfect Storm."

What is unusual about this film is that it is a movie version of a pop-psychology book.

The source material is "The Female Brain," a 2007 best seller by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine.  Naturally she published a follow-on title, "The Male Brain," three years later that sold well but to the less introspective masculine audience. 

I didn't read those books, but their themes seem to be that general -- not individual -- differences between women and men can be ascribed to differences in their brain chemistry.  This idea is interesting but not new to people who have been paying attention for the last century or so.

The theme is introduced early in the movie by a female neuroscientist, also named Brizendine (Whitney Cummings, who wrote and directed), who has been burned by love and reacted by turning herself into a professional automaton.  For this she is needled by her assistant (Beanie Feldstein) a younger, more practical woman who also scarfs mood meds from Adderall to Xanax.

We see the MRI of a man as he looks at pictures of a cute kitten and then a beautiful baby -- and has no female brain activation at all, which makes the researcher happy.

"Life is so much easier now that I have a machine that lets me see inside people's minds," she says.

Then we watch three married couples tussle over their relationships.  As each woman makes her point, the camera zooms in with an MRI of her brain, pointing out which hormone is driving her reaction or behavior:  dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, cortisol, the usual stuff.  

In one, a recently married woman keeps trying to "fix" her husband.  In the second, an  advertising executive hates her job but doesn't want to be financially dependent on her husband, a professional basketball player (played nicely by NBA forward Blake Griffin).   In the third, a years-married woman and mother mourns the lost thrills of the early years of her marriage. 

The husbands are bewildered.  They want to be helpful, and they want their wives to be happy.  They mostly don't want a lot of friction around the house.  

This movie drives some critics crazy.  They see it as a catalog of female pathology, all predetermined by brain chemistry.  To me, this is a serious misreading of the plot.   

For one thing, the film title isn't "The Male Brain." It's about how women's brains work, which implies some analysis of female behavior, not men's.

More to the point, the movie's theme is that women, presumably like men, are not hostages to their hormones.  They have choices.  They can negotiate.  They can change. 

Even the buttoned-up neuroscientist can change.

This is a small indie film. It's light and inoffensive, perhaps not unlike the book for which it is named.  It might appeal to groups of women or to couples who could discuss it afterward over dinner.  

"The Female Brain" will never play in as many theaters as this week's big release, "Fifty Shades," a fantasy story about a poor girl who is inexplicably attracted to a sexual deviant guy who coincidentally just happens to be a billionaire.  That movie will make a lot of money, but its popularity should lead us to wonder whether our entire culture could benefit from an MRI scan of its own.

MovieMonday: Paddington 2

In a season when serious films are vying for audiences and Academy Awards, this family movie is quietly racking up some pretty impressive ticket sales.  It is a nice alternative. 

The story here involves a small animatronic bear who acts like a human and wears a floppy red hat.  He lives in Windsor Court, London, with the Brown family and is surrounded by lovely neighbors, except for the grouchy, anti-bear neighborhood watch captain.

Paddington lives by two rules, both of which he learned from his Aunt Lucy:

     1.  So long as you are kind and polite, the world will be all right.

     2.  There is no problem that cannot be solved by orange marmalade, and particularly 
          by a marmalade sandwich on crustless bread.

Paddington's goal is to get a birthday gift for his Aunt Lucy, who is still in the old country.  He locates the perfect present -- a one-of-a-kind pop-up book of famous London sites -- in a local antique shop.  

(Aunt Lucy, we learn, has dreamed of visiting London, and Paddington imagines the two of them into the pages of the book, a nice piece of filmcraft early in the movie.)

While Paddington is earning money to pay for the book -- occasioning a series of amusing  vignettes -- a narcissistic actor named Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant) comes onto the scene.  Buchanan's career has hit a low point, and he is reduced to doing dog food commercials on the telly.  When he learns of the pop-up book, the dastard breaks into the antique shop and steals the volume as part of his grand plan to mount a sure-to-succeed one-man show.  

The book becomes the MacGuffin (like the letters of transit in "Casablanca" or the briefcase in "Pulp Fiction") that drives the film.

Along the way, poor Paddington is sent to prison, where at first he annoys and then charms his fellow inmates who then join forces to help him achieve his goal.  

Meanwhile, Mary and Henry Brown (Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville) and their children and housekeeper are getting the goods on bad-guy Buchanan.  As the action builds, there is of course a scene in London Paddington Station.

The early part of the story is stocked with numerous planted bits that yield payoffs as the adventure is resolved and tied up in a happy bow.  This can be seen as really good plotting or just a little too neat.  Just saying.

Still, "Paddington 2" is sincere, funny and fun to watch. It has no sly pop references and none of the heaviosity that infects the cinema of the moment. If you are fortunate enough to have children over the age of four in your life, round them up and go see it.