Tags: Fatherhood
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Teens & Up
Here is a film that will break your heart, fill it with hope and challenge you to say Yes to God and to your neighbor, all at once.
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Finding Nemo in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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**** |
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Kids & Up*
(New review for 3-D rerelease) Andrew Stanton’s
Finding Nemo is the best father-son story in all of Hollywood animation, and maybe animation generally. It’s also a stunningly gorgeous film that exploits the potential of computer animation like no film before it and few films after it.
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Teens & Up
Is there grace for such pilgrims as these? Perhaps, but it may not take the form they seem to be seeking. At the end of the road, some viewers might feel let down at what has not changed for the main characters, but perhaps this is to miss the change that matters most. Emilio has said that the film is “pro-people, pro-life.” So it is, in more ways than one.
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Hollywood’s ambivalence about fatherhood is deeply entrenched. Ambivalence, though, is not mere hostility; often it is rooted in a real awareness of the irreplaceable importance of fatherhood, and in melancholy or anger over paternal failure in a fallen, broken world.
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In theaters right now are two charming and visually engaging animated films at opposite ends of the budget spectrum, different in many respects but with some interesting overlap as well. One is
How to Train Your Dragon, DreamWorks’ big-budget CGI adaptation of a popular children’s book. The other is
The Secret of Kells, an Oscar-nominated Irish animated indie made on a comparative shoestring budget, now in limited release.
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Adults
Though not always faithful in small things,
Things We Lost is faithful in much. The individual moments are sometimes off, but the large emotional resonances are right.
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**** |
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Kids & Up*
How can I describe the inexplicable power of
My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki’s timeless, ageless family film? It is like how childhood memories feel, if you had a happy childhood — wide-eyed and blissful, matter-of-factly magical and entrancingly prosaic, a world with discovery lurking around every corner and an inexhaustible universe in one’s backyard.
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*** |
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Kids & Up
The film simplifies the original story in many ways, reducing
the book’s four sons to three and the half-dozen or so homesteads
and plantations the Robinsons build to the one famous treehouse.
Wyss’s fantastical menagerie, which included penguins, kangaroos,
flamingos, lions, and boa constrictors living side by side, is
only slightly restrained by a century and a half of scientific
advancement, and the book’s strong element of religious devotion
and moral discipline is largely reduced in the film to a moment
of silent prayer on the beach.
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**** |
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Kids & Up*
The Incredibles is exhilarating
entertainment with unexpected depths. It’s a bold, bright, funny
and furious superhero cartoon that dares to take sly jabs at the
culture of entitlement, from the shallow doctrine of self-esteem
that affirms everybody, encouraging mediocrity and penalizing
excellence, to the litigation culture that demands recompense for
everyone if anything ever happens, to the detriment of the
genuinely needy.
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***½ |
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Teens & Up*
But then Braddock cracks a grin and admits, “I won,” and Mae rushes into his arms, and we realize the real significance of Jimmy’s sad-sack look and Mae’s silence. No typical sports-movie marriage, this. For Braddock, a devoted husband and father and an all-around righteous guy, there’s never any doubt that family is his first and last priority; boxing is merely a means of putting bread on the table.
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It’s not just a buzzword, either. There’s a special hand
gesture that goes along with it. First you hold your hands up,
palms outward, fingers spread apart. This where we are: no
synergy. Then you clasp your hands into fists with the tips
of the fingers of each hand inside the fist of the other hand, so
that your hands make a sort of "S" shape. This is where we need
to get to: synergy. Get it? (If you think this kind of
thing doesn’t really pass for deep thought in corporate
convention halls and conference rooms, you don’t know corporate
America.)
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**** |
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Kids & Up*
“No one is born to be a failure. No one is poor who has friends.” These platitudes, plastered across the packaging of home-video editions of Frank Capra’s evergreen Christmas classic
It’s a Wonderful Life, exemplify the film’s popular but misleading image as sentimental, schmaltzy “Capra-corn.” Yet the film itself is leavened by darker themes and more rigorous morals about self-sacrifice, disappointment, and the fragility of happiness and the American dream.
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Kids & Up*
The press kit calls it "James Bond for kids," but this
over-the-top fantasy romp might be more accurately described as a
family-friendly
True Lies: The Next Generation, or even a
married-with-children
Austin Powers — all with
Willy
Wonka-style wonkiness and inspired set design straight out of
Dr. Seuss.
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