Review: "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"

The Nutcracker is a timeless tale interrupted by a whole lot of unfortunate dancing. Purists may be offended by the radical rejiggering Disney has given the story in “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms,” but I found it to be a colorful, amusing cinematic fairy tale that will entertain young and old.

For the record: there is still some ballet, but it’s mercifully limited to just a couple of key scenes, plus some more modern dance variations over the closing credits.

This version bears only a passing resemblance to either the original short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann or the Nutcracker Ballet scored by Tchaikovsky. There’s still a magical realm with a mouse king, toy soldiers who come to life and a brave nutcracker captain. Beyond that, it’s essentially a new creation that uses the Nutcracker story as a mere jumping off point.

Mackenzie Foy plays Clara, daughter of a well-to-do family in 1890s London. Her mother has just died, and her father (Matthew Macfadyen) is shell-shocked and rigid. His wife left each of the three children a Christmas gift, and Clara’s is a beautiful silver egg. Unfortunately, it’s locked and there’s no key.

In this retelling, London is wonderfully multicultural and Clara is a brainy science girl instead of a silly thing obsessed with dresses and boys. She seeks out the help of her kindly godfather (Morgan Freeman), an inventor who raised her mother, who herself became a great scientist. This leads to the kingdom of the four realms, a place of magic and wondrous color.

Clara’s mother created this place when she was a little girl, and became its queen. With her absence the kingdom has fallen into disarray. The realms of flowers, ice and fairies are at war with the fourth realm, which used to have a name of its own but has gotten the Voldemort treatment since things went south.

Clara wanders into the forbidden fourth realm, a place of creepy overgrown forests and hooting owls, and finds the key only to have it stolen by a nasty little mouse. She enlists the aid of the Nutcracker Captain (Jayden Fowora-Knight), a fetching lad who appears to be wearing more makeup than Clara, or anyone else in the movie.

Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren) runs the fourth realm, and has a face that’s literally cracked by time or some other more nefarious cause. Eugenio Derbez plays the flower realm leader, Richard E. Grant is the frozen one, and Keira Knightley is the Sugar Plum Fairy. I wasn’t actually sure it was Knightley until well into the movie; her normally resonant voice is pitched up into a cutesy screech and her face heavily slathered with paint (though still not as much as the Nutcracker).

Directed by Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston from a script by Ashleigh Powell and Tom McCarthy, “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is pitched very much in the fairy tale mold, with broad characters and knowing looks exchanged. The outcome is never really in doubt, but there are some good twists and amusing bits along the way.

The army of tin soldiers raised to fight Mother Ginger is clanking and scary. I should note my 8-year-old was skeptical going in but enjoyed the movie thoroughly, while my 5-year-old found some sequences a bit too intense.

This film is like an enchanting bauble you hang on a Christmas tree. It’s nice to look at and makes you smile, though it’s more for what it reminds you of than anything it actually does.

Video review: "The Conjuring"

It’s been a down year for animation but a hot time for horror, with “The Conjuring” one of the latest movie to scare up a lot of cash at the box office.

This summer hit stars Vera Farmiga as a demonologist who’s a clairvoyant to boot. Lorraine Warren and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson) were normal, everyday people who investigate hauntings and participate in exorcisms as a vocation. In 1971 they encountered one of their worst cases ever, which formed the basis for this rollicking “true life” tale.

A couple moves into a lonely farmhouse with their five daughters and things start going bump in the night. All the clocks stop at the same time in the middle of the night, and a secret lair in the basement produces strange sounds and drafts. Eventually evil forces start threatening the children, so the Warrens have to team up to cast them out.

(Strangely, the film received an “R” rating from the MPAA, despite having no cursing and little gore.)
The strong part of the film is its focus on the exorcism duo as protagonists equal to the haunted couple. By depicting the Warrens as grounded folks who just happen to have made their careers in the occult, it makes the proceedings feel more plausible.

Directed by James Wan (“Saw”), “The Conjuring” starts out rather slowly, but when things get into full brimstone-and-holy-water mode, it’s a heckuva thrill ride.

Extras are just so-so. The DVD comes with a single featurette, “Scaring the ‘@$*%’ Out of You.’ Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo, and you add two more features: “The Conjuring: Face-to Face with Terror,” a making-of documentary, and “A Life in Demonology,” a look at the real-life Warrens.

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Review: "The Conjuring"

"The Conjuring" dredges up nearly every trope of the exorcism subgenre of horror, and faithfully puts its characters and the audience through the paces. It doesn't do much of anything that we haven't seen before, but what it does it does mostly well.

Director James Wan gained notoriety with "Saw," kicking off the (thankfully) now-waning "torture porn" fad. Here he turns to more cerebral frights, based on building a sense of dread mixed with sudden scares. The first half really drags, but once they get to the hard stuff of demonic possessions and thrashing exorcisms, it's a genuine thrill.

(I should point out that the R rating from the MPAA seems hard to justify. There is no cursing, sex or drugs, and though there is a constant threat of violence, very little of it actually occurs. "Overly forbidding" wouldn't seem to be part of the association's charter, but there you have it.)

Usually with these sorts of movies, the focus is on the family plagued with an ominous spirit, and the paranormal experts show up about halfway through. Here, the demonologists are just as much a part of the story as the haunted.

Like many movies of this ilk, we're assured that the events we're seeing are based on a true story. Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) were real-life occult investigators, who tried for decades to get a movie made about themselves. The idea is that although they have a really strange job, the Warrens are perfectly normal folks with a strong marriage, Christian values and a loving daughter.

We get to see them presenting film and audiotapes of their disturbing cases on college campuses, and it's pretty eye-opening stuff. One possessed man has bloody tears and speaks Latin, despite having only a third-grade education. Of course, what they encounter in the movie is far worse than anything they've seen before.

Parallel to the Warrens' story is the Perrons, Carolyn and Roger (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston). It's 1971 and they have just bought an old farmhouse cheap at auction to live with their five daughters, ranging in age from cute little pixie to surly teen. The house seems like a dream come true until, as they say, strange things star to happen.

Things go bump without explanation, clocks stop at precisely 3:07 a.m. every night, and the younger girls start to see things looming in dark spaces. They bust through a boarded-up stairwell and find a basement loaded with all sorts of cool stuff that just screams, "Evil spirits residing here!"

The strength of the film is depicting the Warrens as careful, rational people with lives outside their demon-hunting. For instance, Lorraine is a clairvoyant, meaning she can get a sense of the spiritual aura of things and people just by being near them. But their ghostly encounters each cost her a little piece of her own emotional stability.

Farmiga brings a matter-of-fact calm to her role, an unflashy sort of competence and groundedness that offsets nicely with her character's supernatural talents. The kid actors all acquit themselves nicely, particularly Joey King as the initial target of the spirit's ire.

I respected the craft with which "The Conjuring" was made, and its attempt to insert a little sober rationality into a familiar ghost story. It won't haunt your dreams, but this film will creep you out sufficiently for a couple of hours.