Star Trek

The buzz was up about STAR TREK 2009. Good for kids, good story, very moving. My kids are now 12 and nearly 10, and maybe because they're a bit older now, tweens in fact, I talked them into going. My husband read me the review from Kids-in-Mind, but no red flags. Violence and gore got a 6 rating from them—compare to the 7 rating given PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, which my kids saw over a year ago.

Besides, a younger friend of theirs had gone, and people were saying it's fine for kids.

Whoa, was I mistaken. Neither one of them liked the violence, the volume, the velocity—the three off-putting Vs of PG13dom. I don't know how Kids-in-Mind decided to rate the violence at 6. How could a man bound to a table to be tortured, a large insect forced down his throat, rate a 6? What kind of torture gets a 10? It feels like the world is getting less sensitive, but I'm becoming more grateful for my children's sensitivity.

My son is a particular fan of the MPAA ratings system—he even has it tacked to his bedroom wall. Because of him I've adjusted my attitude toward ratings. When I was single and living in New York, I once interviewed the director Abel Ferrara and recall his outrage that his teenage son might be prohibited from seeing whatever movie he liked. From his point-of-view it was a self-expression issue, and I agreed.

For my son, it's a self-protection issue. He values the ratings system because he's not ready for sexual themes, he doesn't like seeing cruelty, especially if it's aimed at animals, and Hollywood movies tend to overwhelm him with their explosions, constant orchestral climaxing, and endless chase sequences. He's the one sitting through the previews with his fingers in his ears.

Another reason my kids didn't go in for STAR TREK is that they lack the allegiance, formed over decades, to the series that my husband and I have. While we are not Trekkers, I for one spent a good deal of my youth with the crew of the Enterprise. Naturally I paid close attention to the women, the few there were: Nurse Christine Chapel, Yeoman Janice Rand, and the biggie: Lt. Uhura.

Uhura and the actor who played her, Nichelle Nichols, carry a lot of cultural heft. Nichols was one of the first Black women on a TV series not to play a domestic worker (Diahann Carol in the 1968 Julia was another trailblazer I watched without quite understanding, but maybe intuiting, the import—I was seven that year). An episode in which she kissed William Shatner broke a barrier. After the first season, she thought of quitting, but Martin Luther King, Jr. persuaded her to stay on, citing the impact she was having.

Her character never rose to the prominence many viewers would have liked, and struggled in relative obscurity even when STAR TREK crossed into feature film territory.

But it still shocked me, though maybe it shouldn't have, to see how little the capable Zoe Saldana has to work with in the new STAR TREK. While her brethren are given emotionally rich origin stories to add depth to their relationships, she is left with a gag about her first name and a running sex joke about her professional field of linguistics. It's implied that she wants to serve on the Enterprise in order to be near her boyfriend, Spock. Gone is the dignity of the TV version of Uhura, who once came upon a shipmate and began speaking Swahili with him (too bad he turned out to be a monster in disguise). I will never forget sitting in my suburban living room listening to Swahili and thinking it the most beautiful language I'd ever heard.

Preview + Review of Long-Awaited CORALINE

CORALINE is scheduled for release to theaters on February 6, 2009.

My son Ray has been making movies since he was six: stop motion animation, live action, and lately, CGI parodies of Star Wars. He reads film production books and bios of animators like Chuck Jones, and loves ‘making-of’ bonus features and little biopics about revered figures like Ray Harryhausen. One of his ‘mentors’ is Henry Selick, who has just completed his adaptation (for 3D stop-motion animation) of Neil Gaiman’s novel, Coraline.

It was our enormous good fortune—mine, my son’s, my daughter’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s—to visit the set of Coraline a couple of years ago, and a real treat to see a preview screening of the finished work the other night in Manhattan, with Henry Selick on hand to answer audience questions.

My son wasn't sure he wanted to see a "horror" movie. 
So we headed into NYC with the plan that he would shut his eyes, pull his jacket up over his face, and hold his hands to his ears if it all got to be too much. He was willing to endure, if only for the Q&A portion of the evening.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry too much. He only shut his eyes once, and not for long. While the idea of Coraline is truly terrifying—a girl is left alone to rescue her supernaturally abducted parents—its creators have allowed the idea to carry most of the weight of emotion, as with the best fairy tales, and haven’t piled onto it with 3D shock effects or long, anxiety-provoking suspense sequences. The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its cast of characters in varying states of decomposition, is more horrific—at least to me, and I think my son, who got to an age where he felt too uneasy to watch it, and wouldn’t go near the undead-dominated Corpse Bride, would agree.

Henry Selick has done a beautiful job of reconceptualizing the novel for the screen and for stop motion. From the first moments, when metal hands sew up a doll-sized version of the title character and cast her into a void, it feels like this is a movie partly about the animator and the animator’s art. These are the hands of the evil Other Mother, creator and destroyer of the Other World, but here they are, bare of fleshly trappings, primordial armature. We come to find that the energy of children is what makes the Other Mother’s material other world, and it is their life force that makes it beautiful, whimsical, and inviting.

If you have watched any of the featurettes about Coraline, you have seen artist after artist toiling and tinkering away, as artists always do on these projects, though now, with the Internet, in less obscurity. They can even blog about their work for Laika Studios. It’s hard to watch that image of armature hands making the Coraline doll and not think of all the human hands that have gone into the making of this supremely hand-made movie, and seeing in these moments a tribute to them all (certainly they deserve a tribute, including those several dozen Laika workers, I was sorry to read, who were recently laid off).

OtherMotherWorld is especially fanciful and so packed with detail it's hard to imagine not seeing the movie many times to try to take it all in. Henry S. has ensured that the Other Mother’s overture to Coraline is suitably seductive. She—and we—are truly tempted to stay and sample more delights from the animators’ cabinet of wonders. (And the wonders really are wonderful; we laughed throughout the early other world scenes.)

Henry Selick’s Other Mother is a kind of ‘50s fantasy mom—she cooks brilliantly in heels, perfect make-up, and manicure and wears a stainless, starched apron. Other Father is affable, doting, and fun (aside from the saucy, riotous French and Saunders as the Misses Spink and Forcible, my favorite vocal performance is John Hodgman's as the Fathers Real and Other).

Coraline's real world parents, by contrast, are familiar to us as contemporary, overworked telecommuters (fortunate in that sense, they write at home on gardening) who share the work of their life equally, don’t exactly excel in the kitchen, and don’t have much time for their daughter.

That Coraline's creativity will rival the Other Mother's is intimated by a lovely scene that is not in Neil Gaiman’s book. Having returned from an early foray into the other world, Coraline finds her apartment empty; her parents have not come home from work and grocery shopping. Newly arrived in a strange place, friendless and now abandoned by her parents, she goes to bed alone, making pillow-people versions of her mom and dad to comfort herself—the Other Mother isn't the only one who can conjure power from a doll. I think Coraline's realization that they're not coming back is the scariest moment in the story (though Gaiman's protagonist is pretty brave at this point, as I recall). Henry S. wisely lingers long enough for us to feel her loneliness and her sadness.

A resourceful adventurer who is, like too few movie protagonists—even at the dawn of the 21st century—a girl, Coraline would be perfect if not for Henry S.’s addition of a boy to come to her aid in her time of need. Or so I thought when I heard about him. But Wybie (nicknamed "Why Be Born" by Coraline—I guess Henry S. knew some of us would resist), who gives Coraline someone other than a (really cool) cat to dialog with, adds a melancholy element to the other world, where he is more expressive for his muteness.

When my son and I came back up the Hudson River the day after the screening, and made our report to his sister, she said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I do want to see Coraline.” I look forward to seeing it again with her.

We were too shy to ask for a shot of Henry S. with Ray, but here he is after the Q&A. Be sure to view through your 3D glasses.

I'll be blogging more thoughts on Coraline on my other blog, Oswegatchie. Look for the Coraline tag.

Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman)

1997, color feature, 88 minutes
Directed and written by Majid Majidi
Producer, Amir Esfandiari, Mohammad Esfandiari
In Persian with subtitles
All ages

This Iranian film centers on a brother and sister forced to share a pair of sneakers when the boy Ali (played beautifully by Amir Farrokh Hashemian) loses his sister Zahra's newly-repaired shoes. A meditation on Iranian daily life (including scenes at a mosque), scarcity vs. plenty, and family bonds, Children of Heaven is also a suspenseful yarn. Its PG rating, as near as I can figure, has to do with Ali's father yelling "shit!" when his bicycle breaks stop working and he and his son are about to crash. Also, he is verbally harsh with his family, particularly at the beginning, but it quickly becomes clear that he is honest and loving, if overworked. Engaging, stunning to look at, a glimpse at Iranian culture that has a realistic feel. I'm giving this the "girl power" label because Ali's sister Zahra, played by Bahare Seddiqi, washes the dishes, tends the baby, cleans the house, and gets her homework done—one could imagine such a girl growing up to be a world leader.

Cyrano de Bergerac

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1990
137 minutes, color feature, subtitles
Ages 8 & up (battle scene at end with explosions and some blood)

With musketeers, witty word play, a confederacy of poets, and a story about who and why we love, the story of Cyrano de Bergerac is great for kids. This production features a spirited, soulful performance by Gerard Depardieu. Another great actor, José Ferrer, made a version in 1950 and there are numerous other versions. My 8-year-old had a little trouble keeping up with the subtitles, but there is plenty of action to keep a non-reading viewer interested, and those who don't follow the subtitles can still listen to the music of the rhyming couplets in French. Girl power alert: Roxanne, love object to two men, has little to do but in Act IV does dress up as a man during a fight with Spanish soldiers and sneak food to the French cadets.

Whale Rider (in Maori: Te kaieke tohora)

Niki Caro, 2003
color feature, 101 minutes
Rated PG-13
Could be ok for ages 5 & up but prescreen it and judge for yourself!

I had to wait a few years to show my 7-year-old daughter this amazing tale of a girl who turns life around for everyone in her New Zealand Maori village, because the conflict that drives the story—her grandfather's rejection of her leadership because she is a girl—is so unsettling and sexism is a complex topic. Keisha Castle-Hughes is perfect as Paikea, a girl born into a long line of male chiefs in a society drifting away from its roots. The PG-13 rating seems to come from fly-by uses of d*** and b******, but the real caution is the harshness of grandfather, played beautifully by Rawiri Paratene, who requires a miracle to convince him of the rightness in his family line. This is a story of love among family, community, ancestors and planet that defies gender expectations all around.

A Wrinkle in Time

John Kent Harrison, 2003
color feature, 128 minutes
This Canadian adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's classic would surely not have been as compelling had it been made in the States, where one never finds this much feminism packed into two-hour movies, particularly for children. We have a teenage girl protagonist/hero, three cosmic beings led by Alfre Woodard as Mrs. Whatsit representing Divine Love, a worm-like being with a masculine face representing God-the-Authoritarian-Father, and a very human father too injured to be the one to rescue his young son. Kate Nelligan as Mrs. Which and Alison Elliott as Mrs. Who, a family in which both parents are Ph.D.'s, Aunt Beast (yes! even a Wookie-like monster is female!—this one with magical healing powers) round out this experience of non-stop woman power. Brava! Every kid should see this; my kids have rented it twice; recommended for 7 or 8 and up.
Hollywood please take a lesson from our neighbors to the north.

The Bicycle Thief

Vittorio de Sica, 1948
93 minutes, black & white
Italian with English subtitles
Ages 6 or so and up

My 9-year-old was rapt watching the elegant, simple story of a man on a mission to find a stolen bike without which he can't work or feed his family. The life of the young son, so different from ours, was a good starting point for a discussion of postwar life, poverty, urban hardship...depressing, but it worked for us, and it's an accessible cinematic classic.
Good go-with: Marcovaldo, short stories by Italo Calvino, set during the same period and later, can definitely be enjoyed by children.

The Point

1971, Dir. Fred Wolf
74 min., color animation
Music by Harry Nilsson
Ages 5 and up

My generation saw it broadcast on TV; young ones now can rent it, and the message of accepting difference stays relevant. Most important, the music by Harry Nilsson will always be groovy. With voice performances by Ringo Starr as the father and Mike Lookinland (Bobby from The Brady Bunch) as the sweet wayfarer Oblio.

The Dark Crystal

1982, Dir. Jim Henson, Frank Oz
color, 93 minutes
Ages 6 or so and up

Henson and Oz pushed their muppetry to its mythic potential in this story of a world split into good and evil on the eve of its reintegration. The Dark Crystal gets extra credit points for two strong female characters, one an eccentric astronomer who can remove an eyeball and pop it back in again and the other a gifted animal communicator who (unlike her male counterpart) can unfold her wings and soar; also note the gender-neutral skeksis, creatures reminiscent of vultures. Inventive sets and lyrical interludes make this well worth watching even for any age. The skeksis can be frightening and there are some scenes my children find so suspenseful that they turn their heads away, but in general, they love this one. Bonus features include extensive interviews with the artists about the making of the sets and creatures. A must see for any child into the plastic arts, puppetry or fantasy stories.

Alice in Wonderland

1999, Dir. Nick Willing
150 min., live action (made for TV)

This is not the version of Alice in Wonderland I'd most like to recommend, but it's the only one I've seen recently, and my eight-year-old son insists I include it here. I could say 'get your own blog' but this activity is bad for posture and eyesight, I only do it as a public service. Favorite elements for my kids are Whoopi Goldberg's Cheshire Cat, Martin Short as the Mad Hatter and Robert Tygner as the March Hare.

Other versions worth checking out are stop-motion master Jan Svankmajer's (though I remember it as too disturbing for young children) and the puppet version directed by Lou Bunin (1951, 80 min.), and I'm sure there are plenty of worthy live-action versions, too.

Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast

1946, Dir. Jean Cocteau
93 minutes, black and white

There is no reason to show your children any other version of Beauty and the Beast but this one, unless your idea of "cultural literacy" means "fluency in the full catalogue of the Disney Studio."

Cocteau's exquisite mystery spellbinds. This is a fairy tale in which the transforming power of love performs the magic, and if Belle is not a bookworm, she is a grown woman ready to separate from her family and make a garden flourish in the woods. The beast's living house will spark a child's imagination.

Suspenseful situations and, of course, a beast. Ages 5 or 6 and up.

The Magic Flute

1975 / Dir. Ingmar Bergman
135 minutes, color live action
In Swedish with English subtitles

Introduce your child(ren) to Bergman and Mozart at the same time with The Magic Flute! The winsome birdcatcher Papageno, fantastic sets and Bergman's daughter as a member of the audience will draw children into this fairy tale in which a young couple's love matures as it is tested. Could be enjoyed by children as young as four, maybe younger.