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.

Review: "A Dog's Purpose"

“A Dog’s Purpose” is an unrepentant tearjerker, as movies about dogs often are.

There’s just an indescribable purity about a dog. Treat it well, and it will return that to you in the form of boundless love. A dog will wait hours in your office while you do stuff they consider dreadfully boring (like writing a movie review), hoping for a chance at five minutes of playtime.

They may not be great for the pocketbook -- how much for flea medicine again?? -- but when it comes to spiritual replenishment, the ROI on dogs cannot be beaten.

Director Lasse Hallström, who made the seminal “My Life As a Dog” 30-odd years ago, gives us a fanciful tale of a super canine, a red retriever named Bailey who lives out several lives during the course of the movie, always being resurrected as a puppy with a new chance at finding its reason for existing.

Josh Gad, with that incredibly flexible voice of his, narrates Bailey as he morphs into Ellie, a German Shepherd police dog, a Corgi named Tito with a tremendous appetite, and a big hound named Buddy. He retains his memories as Bailey, and strives to do good by the humans in his life, despite some of them not being very caring owners.

The strongest relationship is with Ethan, a boy growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. He’s played by Bryce Gheisar as a kid and K.J. Apa as a teen. They’re inseparable buds, even when Ethan becomes the star quarterback on the high school football team and starts dating Hannah (Britt Robertson), who’s clearly The One.

But dark stuff in Ethan’s family and circumstances push things in a darker direction, with Bailey trying to make sense of it all from his perspective underneath the kitchen table. In his simplistic paradigm where sniffing, eating, playing and licking are the sum total secrets to happiness, humans are a tremendous conundrum.

Let’s talk about controversy. Or rather, nontroversy. There’s a video floating around of one of the dog actors for the film being pushed into water by its trainer during production. It got scared but was not hurt or ever in any danger. Some activist types are pushing a boycott of the movie as a result. Please. People who call that animal abuse have obviously never seen real animal abuse. I did worse than that to my pooch last weekend when she stole a piece of pizza.

It does appear to have had an effect, which it is my duty to report. For starters, the movie is a lot shorter than the 120-minute running time that’s been published. It appears something like 20 minutes have been hastily cut out. The credits also list a bunch more people as screenwriters besides Cathryn Michon, who adapted the novel by W. Bruce Cameron. And the Hollywood premier was scrapped.

OK? Got all that? Let’s get back to reviewing the movie.

This is not an especially clever or sophisticated film. Dogs do things to make us happy, dogs do things to make us sad. Life (or rather, lives) unfold with the requisite mix of joy, betrayal, tragedy and pathos.

I’m not giving anything away in saying that the story eventually returns to Ethan and Hannah, a half-century later, now played by Dennis Quaid and Peggy Lipton. We know what’s going to happen, the dog knows what’s going to happen, and it’s just a matter of waiting until the people catch up.

But doggarnit, if you don’t shed a few tears and crack a few smiles during “A Dog’s Purpose,” then there’s no hope for you.

Review: "Safe Haven"

It's hard to believe that just a few years ago the phrase "based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks" would've produced only shrugs from most moviegoers. But then "The Notebook" blew up in 2004, making of stars out of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and creating a burning desire in Hollywood to adapt other books from Sparks' Southern-fried romantic/drama oeuvre.

But here's the thing: there hasn't really been a good movie based on his material since. "Nights in Rodanthe" disappeared without a trace. "Dear John" was a dirge-like bummer, and "The Last Song" and "The Lucky One" were ill-fated coming-of-age projects for tween stars Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron.

Critics hated them, but they had respectable box office tallies for low-budget films, so along comes "Safe Haven" as the next in the Sparks line.

Like "Dear John" it was directed by Lasse Hallström, thrice an Oscar nominee and the rare European filmmaker who seems to embrace the more saccharine aspects of Hollywood moviemaking, at his own peril.

The result is a great-looking, sun-dappled story about life on the North Carolina coast that's also devoid of much dramatic or emotional heft.

It's about a woman on the run, hiding out from the law after being accused of a brutal, bloody murder. Needless to say, she falls in love with a local dreamboat, starts putting down roots and feeling secure before her haunted past shows up on her adopted doorstep.

A big part of the movie's problem is Julianne Hough in the lead role. The "Dancing with the Stars" star has mostly done song-and-dance pictures like "Footloose" and "Rock of Ages," and simply doesn't possess the sort of dramatic acting tools for a part like this.

We know from the get-go that Katie was an abused woman who went on the lam after stabbing her attacker, so the screenplay (by Leslie Bohem and Dana Stevens) requires her to go through some pretty major transformations -- from self-doubting victim to new gal in town coming out of her shell to strong, resourceful woman ready to take the next steps in life.

But Hough's placid exterior is more shy cheerleader than woman rising up.

Josh Duhamel is better as Alex, who runs Ryan's Port Market in Southport, N.C. He's a young single dad raising two moppets after cancer took his wife. He's been keeping his head down, he says, just trying to make a life for his kids, and when he falls for Katie it's like lifting his head up again for the first time.

Noah Lomax plays Josh, who's on the cusp of adolescence and testing his dad, the self-appointed protector of his mother's memory. Mimi Kirkland as Lexie reaches a level of adorableness heretofore unseen in cinematic children.

Katie gets a waitressing job at Ivan's, the local seafood shack, and begins a tenuous friendship with her neighbor Jo (Cobie Smulders). When Alex, noticing that Katie trudges daily from her remote cottage to the shoreline every day, gives her an old bicycle, it's Jo who instructs her that refusing gifts south of the Mason-Dixon line is a no-no -- particularly not from wounded widowers who somehow find the time to keep their abs sculpted.

The story keeps shifting back to Tierney (a creepily effective David Lyons), the Boston detective who treats tracking down Katie as much more than a standard domestic murder case. "Nobody is innocent," he insists. "We bring 'em in, and the other guy sorts 'em out."

Things lead to a fairly predictable place, and an outcome that is never truly in doubt. Naysayers may dismiss Sparks' books as pap for undiscriminating mass consumption, but I think there's the bones of a good story in "Safe Haven." It just needed a different cast and crew to find it.

2 stars out of four

Bonus video review: "Hachi: A Dog's Tale"

"Hachi: A Dog's Tale" is something of a cautionary tale. Not the movie itself, which is a capable tear-jerker, but how the film's release was handled.

The drama starring Richard Gere, Joan Allen and Jason Alexander made the circuit of the film festivals, including headlining the Heartland Film Festival here in Indianapolis last fall. It had a name director, Lasse Hallström, and seemed to have all the tools for a decent mid-level theatrical run.

But the film never got a theater run. Dates in December were pushed back to January, and the next thing I heard it was scheduled for video release on March 9.

It's strange, and depressing, how worthy movies with name stars and filmmakers can get shunted aside to video, while a whole lot of drek makes it to theaters.

"Hachi" is an Americanized version of a Japanese story about an Akita dog who shows the greatest loyalty imaginable. After Parker (Gere), a middle-aged music professor, stumbles across the tiny pup lost at his train station, he takes him home for safekeeping and -- of course -- ends up bonding with him.

Parker's reluctant wife, wonderfully played by the great Joan Allen, eventually succumbs to the dog's charms.

But this is but the beginning of the story. Parker dies suddenly, and Hachi, who had been making the daily trek to meet his master at the train station where they met, keeps doing so. The years roll by, and every day the faithful canine goes to meet the human he loves, who will never come.

It's a touching, true story based on a dog in Tokyo in the 1920s, where a statue was eventually erected to celebrate the bond between man and dog.

Hallström constructs an unabashed tear-jerker, but the film is skillful enough in playing with our emotions that we begin to forget about the manipulation.

Perhaps reflecting the film's underwhelming arrival, video extras are exceedingly thin. They're limited to a single item: An 18-minute making-of documentary that tends to fall into the familiar pattern where everyone involved with the project talks about how great everyone else is.

Once, just once, I'd like to see cast and crew talk honestly about the unavoidable conflicts and flare-ups that occur in any collaborative creative process.

Movie: 3 stars
Extras: 1.5 stars

Review: "Dear John"

Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum make for a cute couple in "Dear John," a romantic drama about a soldier separated by war from the girl he loves. But I never quite bought them as a real, passionate pair of star-crossed lovers as in "The Notebook," which like this movie was adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks.

OK, let's be frank here: Ryan Gosling of "Notebook" is one of the finest actors of his generation, with an Oscar nomination for "Half Nelson" and edgy performances in movies like "Lars and the Real Girl." Tatum starred in the dancing movie "Step Up" and its sequel, the street boxing movie "Fighting" and that execrable "G.I. Joe" flick.

So although we may believe Tatum as a big, tough Army Special Forces warrior, he's less convincing when he's making goo-goo eyes at Seyfried.

He plays John Tyree, who catches the eye of Savannah Curtis when he dives off a beach pier to rescue her fallen handbag. She invites him back to her place for a party, and pretty much overnight they're an item.

There are hurdles. Savannah's preppy friends don't care for the working-class soldier, and there's some indication that John's past is marred by troubles with his temper. Also, John's father (Richard Jenkins) is a virtual recluse who spends all day puttering around with his coin collection, barely speaking to his son or anyone else.

Savannah thinks John's dad has a mild form of autism, with which she is familiar because her next-door neighbor (Henry Thomas) has a young son with it. Her attempt to break through dad's shell creates friction between the young couple.

Being a soldier, John soon hears the call of duty that takes him far away. I don't think I'm treading into spoiler territory by revealing that she eventually dumps him via a letter. The movie's title, after all, is synonymous with such wartime separations.

Since this happens a little more than halfway through, it obviously isn't the end of their story together. But more than that, you'll have to discover for yourself.

Director Lasse Hallström ("Chocolat") and screenwriter Jamie Linden avoid the worst pitfalls of the romantic genre, with a story about a group of people that feels untidy but authentic. The romance between John and Savannah is the center of this little world, of course, but it's hardly the only thing going on.

Unfortunately, the stuff in the background is more interesting than the main action. Seyfried has a nice, slightly goofy charm. Tatum is certainly movie-star handsome, but doesn't project much of an emotional center.

(A quibble: I found it odd that the movie is explicitly set in Charleston, but only one character is ever heard with a Southern twang. Carolina accents are not exactly easy to miss.)

I just didn't have any strong reaction to "Dear John." I give it points for avoiding predictability. But it's never a good sign when the best way to describe how you feel about a movie is indifference.

2 stars