Tag Archives: Brie Larson

Aug 11

“The Glass Castle”: Best Selling Book to Film

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 A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads with a mother who’s an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children’s imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty. IMDB description of The Glass Castle

Home goes wherever we go. Tagline to The Glass Castle

Long-term best seller The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls, now has an eagerly awaited movie version.

THE BOOK

Book critic Francine Prose, New York Times, stated about it that “…what’s best is the deceptive ease with which she makes us see just how she and her siblings were convinced that their turbulent life was a glorious adventure.”

More book details from Publishers Weekly:

…Walls’s parents—just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book—were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn’t conventionalize either of them. Her father was a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who could stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had ‘a little bit of a drinking situation,’as her mother put it. With a fantastic storytelling knack, Walls describes her artist mom’s great gift for rationalizing…The Walls children learned to support themselves, eating out of trashcans at school or painting their skin so the holes in their pants didn’t show.

Kirkus Reviews: “The author’s tell-it-like-it-was memoir is moving because it’s unsentimental; she neither demonizes nor idealizes her parents, and there remains an admirable libertarian quality about them, though it justifiably elicits the children’s exasperation and disgust. Walls’s journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect.”

THE MOVIE ADAPTATION

“‘The Glass Castle,’ states Peter Debruge, Variety, “catches up with Walls at the moment in her life when she finally came to terms with her father (which has taken a bit of creative fictionalization, but remains remarkably true to the book).”

Debruge further introduces Destin Daniel Cretton‘s film, which features the highly regarded Brie Larson as the lead:

…She’s engaged to a successful investment banker (Max Greenfield) and looks like a character out of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities,’ with her fancy high-society hairdo, pearl necklace and stiff-shouldered blouse. No one would guess that this charming, seemingly cultured woman once ate a stick of butter and sugar because there had been nothing else in the house — a house without running water or electricity.

The trailer:

 

Critics are divided over whether the movie does the book justice. Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter, believes, on the one hand, that The Glass Castle “successfully captures the essence of the memoir, with exceptionally potent work by Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as the spirited, self-involved and willfully impoverished bohemians who subjected their four kids to a peripatetic, hardscrabble life but also, in the process, taught them to fend for themselves.”

Claudia Puig, The Wrap, concludes, though, that it’s “a far better book than movie” and “feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged.”

Oct 23

“Room”: The Film to…Well, Make Some Room For

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The most terrifying movie of the season does not involve aliens, ghouls or men in hooded masks. Regina Weinreich, Huffington Post, about Room

Because of the subject matter, a movie like Lenny Abrahamson‘s Room, adapted from Emma Donoghue‘s bestselling 2010 novel by the author herself, will not be readily received by everyone. But many critics want us to try.

“Too grim and heartbreaking for some viewers, Room is nevertheless an extraordinary film so powerful and unforgettable that it must be seen,” says Rex Reed, New York Observer.

Others are largely in agreement, not only about the high quality of the film itself but also about the powerful performances.

The gist: Jack (Jacob Tremblay), now five years old, has always lived in a small garden shed, imprisoned, with his Ma (Brie Larson).

As Chris Nashawaty, EW.com, elaborates, “Their jailor is a brutal sadist named Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), who grants and withholds privileges depending on his whims. How long have they been in this room? What cruel fate put them here? The movie doles out these answers slowly, making us feel as disoriented as these doomed souls in confinement.”

Although some, including Nashawaty, indicate that further info about the plot constitutes spoilers, others recognize that many viewers will already have accessed certain info from the trailer and/or press and/or reading the book. But if none of the above applies, the following may not be for you.

Basically, the first “act” is their Room experience, the second their escape toward Joy’s (Ma’s) parents (Joan Allen, William H. Macy).

The First Act

Amy Nicholson, Village Voice:

To keep Jack calm, his mom convinces him that the world on TV is make-believe. All dogs are fake, the ocean is fake, the other people are just ‘made of colors.’ Their room — or, as he calls it, ‘Room,’ the same way we say ‘America’ or ‘Earth’ — is the only reality.

The twist is, to Jack it’s not that bad…

Susan Wloszczyna, rogerebert.com:

As for Ma, her whole focus is on Jack’s well-being and rarely her own. She ignores a painful rotting tooth in her mouth until it falls out and it immediately becomes one of her son’s most prized possessions. She is endlessly resourceful, turning cardboard toilet paper rolls and egg shells connected by string into playthings. For her, Jack is her anchor and her reason to carry on.

The Second Act

Justin Chang, Variety:

…Abrahamson and Donoghue invite and achieve an uncommon level of audience identification as they give due weight to their characters’ post-traumatic stress disorder. Their story implores us to consider the normal or expected passages to adulthood — the gradual separation from one’s parents, the growing sense of self-sufficiency, the ability to put away childish things, the understanding that what we are losing is (hopefully) being matched by what we are gaining — and to realize the impossible situation that now confronts Jack. Yet a subtle, provocative question also rises to the surface, slyly articulated in a scene where his mother wistfully scans the photos of her former classmates in a high-school yearbook: With their comparably blessed, sheltered, mundane lives, were they really that much better off?

Susan Wloszczyna, rogerebert.com:

Jack especially thrives in the company of his grandmother (Joan Allen, whose smile alone gives a boost to the film’s last third). She got divorced in the wake of her daughter’s disappearance and has a new man in her life, the good-natured Leo (Tom McCamus) who patiently guides and encourages Jack. If there is a weak link in ‘Room,’ it is William H. Macy, who is too predictably cast as Joy’s father, ill-equipped to handle her reappearance, let alone the news that he now has a grandson.

The Trailer

Selected Reviews and Take-Aways

Chris Nashawaty, EW.com: “Room is the kind of spare and lean film that lives or dies depending on its performances. Fortunately, Larson and Tremblay are remarkable…Room may not be a pleasant place to spend two hours, but it’s an unsettling experience you won’t forget.”

Dana Stevens, Slate: “Though it goes to places as dark as any you could imagine, Room carries at its heart a message of hope: Two people in four walls can create a world worth surviving for, if they love each other enough.”

Susan Wloszczyna, rogerebert.com: “’Room’ is a soul-searing celebration of the impenetrable bond that endures even under the most unbearable of circumstances between a parent and a child.”

Aug 29

“Short Term 12”: Realistic Portrayal of Facility for Troubled Teens

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A new award-winning indie film called Short Term 12 (that expands on writer/director Destin Cretton‘s 2008 short film of the same name) is reaping much critical praise.

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News, sets up Short Term 12:

Grace (Brie Larson) is a supervisor at the title facility, handling youngsters whose home lives endanger them or whose suicidal behavior landed them there. Her small staff includes her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), whom she lives with, and shy newcomer Nate (Rami Malek). They’re not social workers or psychologists, but they help the teens work out their emotions..

Early on we learn Grace is pregnant, but she hasn’t told Mason yet. The knowledge of that, and the question of how to handle it, echoes through Grace’s experiences with Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), a recent arrival at the group home. Among the other kids is the troubled Marcus (Keith Stanfield), who frets about his approaching 18th birthday because it means he’ll soon be on his own after three years at Short Term 12. There’s also the younger prankster Luis (Kevin Hernandez) and bipolar Sammy (Alex Calloway).

…Cretton treats all of them with respect, and we slowly see why the counselors choose to be there.

Below see the trailer:

THE REALISM

Notably, Cretton bases this movie on his own employment experience in a similar facility.

GRACE AND MASON

Their adolescent charges don’t know that Grace and Mason are romantically involved.

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: “Given equal weight with what happens between the staff and these kids is what happens between Grace and Mason, a nuanced relationship that gets increasingly complex as different, unexpected aspects of their backgrounds get revealed.”

THE ROLE OF THERAPY/THERAPISTS IN SHORT TERM 12

Peter Debruge, Variety: “Although the facility’s care involves dedicated sessions with trained therapists (left almost entirely offscreen), the doctors don’t spend nearly as much time with the kids as the other staffers do, and tensions frequently arise when suggested treatments don’t align with what the on-the-ground counselors observe on a daily basis.”

THE SETTING

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: “…might better be called ‘Indeterminate Term 12.’ It’s a foster-care facility where troubled teens are kept in a safe environment until the county figures out what to do with them—a process that can take weeks, months or as much as a year. They get sporadic psychotherapy, the quality of which is undetermined; we’re never privy to any sessions. What we do see is a 20-something supervisor, Grace, trying to help her volatile kids as best she can, even though she isn’t a trained therapist, isn’t much older than some of her charges and is far from untroubled in her own life.”

R. Kurt Osenlund, Slant: “As the film boldly underlines, office-dwelling supervisors like Jack (Frantz Turner) may be bureaucratic and out of touch, but those in the proverbial trenches…know precisely where the kids in their care are coming from, specifically because they both have similar roots and (sometimes literally) similar scars.”

JAYDEN AND GRACE

Kenneth Turan,  Los Angeles Times: “Smart, bored, entitled though she is, Jayden touches something in Grace. Though no one knows better than Grace the support staff mantra that ‘you’re not their family, you’re not their therapist, you’re there to create a safe environment,’ she cannot help but want to get involved.”

A CONCLUDING REVIEW OF SHORT TERM 12

Andrew O’Hehir, Salon: “It’s both a compelling group melodrama built around an appealing young cast and an immersive introduction into a social reality many of us haven’t thought about, that being the question of what happens to young people who have been abandoned, abused or damaged to such a degree that they no longer have anything close to a stable family or home life.”