Review: "I Still Believe"

“I Still Believe” is a good old-fashioned three-hanky romantic tearjerker. Boy meets girl, girl runs from boy, boy chases and catches, girl gets sick, and the tears start flowing. It’s been a familiar formula with minor variations since “Love Story” 50 years ago.

It’s a heartfelt, engaging movie bristling with music, light, joy and sadness.

You could actually enjoy this picture beginning to end without realizing it’s part of the faith-based film pipeline. There’s no overt proselytizing and it has recognizable actors like Britt Robertson, K.J. Apa, Shania Twain and Gary Sinise.

If this biographic of musician Jeremy Camp weren’t set at a Christian college and feature songs with lyrics about faith and forgiveness, it would be pretty indistinguishable from any other flick at your local cinema.

I say that not as praise or disapproval, but simply observing how you can measure the success of outlier movements by when they join the mainstream.

I can’t say as I’m a big fan of Christian pop music or Camp’s songs in particular. To my ears there’s a generic sameness to them, starting with plaintive, plucked guitar strings and inevitably building to soaring crescendos for pronouncements of faith and glory. It’s a white-people aural pudding.

(Speaking of, good luck finding many POC in the movie.)

Apa plays Jeremy, an impressionable kid from Lafayette, Ind., who moves out to California to attend bible college circa 1999. There he meets Melissa (Robertson), who seems a little older and wiser, and immediately is struck by the strong pull they have. Jeremy has a gift as a singer/songwriter, and dreams of following in the footsteps of Jean-Luc (Nathan Parsons), an alumnus who broke out big.

Apa brings a lovable decency to the role. With his dark, lanky good looks and breezy charisma, his Jeremy sort of reminds me of Jim Halpert from “The Office,” minus the snark. Jeremy’s parents (Sinise and Twain) are struggling financially and have a younger special needs son, but there’s love and support all around.

I really like Robertson as a performer. She hasn’t broken through in any big movies, with “Tomorrowland” and “The Space Between Us” both missing and starring roles in several short-lived TV/streaming shows. There’s a probing intelligence behind her eyes, and she takes what could have been a very reactive role and really becomes the engine that drives this movie’s emotional momentum.

We see her fear at falling for someone so quickly – especially, as we soon learn, because Jean-Luc has feelings for her. Melissa asks Jeremy to keep their (chaste, of course) romance a secret.

But then she falls ill with stomach cancer, just as Jeremy’s music career is taking off. He sings to the audience of his love for God and his fiancé, and begs their prayers to heal her. For a while it seems like a miracle is in the offing.

No, this isn’t a particularly subtle or sophisticated movie. But it’s a well-told one, by directing team the Erwin Brothers, Jon and Andrew, with Jon also supplying the screenplay with Jon Gunn. They’re all veterans of the Christian film school and seem to know its rhythms well.

Young love is powerful, transformational… and sometimes tragic. “I Still Believe” gives us the highs and the lows, and what comes after.

Video review: "The Space Between Us"

Part science fiction, part road movie, a whole lot angst-y teenage romance, “The Space Between Us” shows the limits of what you can do with a good cast of actors.

Asa Butterfield is a talented young thespian (“Hugo,” “Ender’s Game”), Britt Robertson has stood out in some not-so-great flicks (“The Longest Yard”), and Gary Oldman is, of course, Gary Frickin’ Oldman. Toss in Carla Gugino as a supporting figure, and that’s more talent than most movies can muster.

Alas, the story (screenplay by Allan Loeb) is a mish-mash of random themes and plot threads that don’t weave themselves together in any sort of coherent way. It ends up feeling like a combination of the old David-Bowie-as-space-alien movie, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” with a human boy standing in for the cute outworlder being chased by a small army of scientists and law enforcement.

The set-up is that Gardner Elliott (Butterfield) is the first human born on Mars – an accident, as his mother and the leader of the astronaut expedition got herself pregnant shortly before takeoff. Now 16, he’s a super-smart kid with obvious impulse issues and a clinging longing for a chance to walk on Earth -- preferably in the company of a cute teen girl.

Tulsa (Robertson) is the gal in question. They’ve been communicating via video chat and messages for a while. She’s a tough outcast sort, so they share a sense of loneliness.

Through a lot of high-tech hi jinks, Gardner manages to get himself to Earth and, eventually, hook up with Tulsa. Unfortunately, after growing up in a low-gravity atmosphere, his body isn’t very suited to Earth’s weight. Ignoring the advice from the NASA eggheads, he and Tulsa run off together for an adventure.

After landing the girl, tops on his list is finding out who is father is. All Gardner has to go by is a photo he found in his mother’s stuff. (She died, of course, because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.)

Leading the chase for them is Nathaniel Shepherd (Oldman), a super-rich entrepreneur who dreamt up the Mars colony years ago, but has become something of a recluse ever since. He’s very fidgety and prone to neurotic outbursts, and seems able to command government troops and resources with a phone call, for some reason.

Director Peter Chelsom (“Hannah Montana: The Movie”) can’t manage to sustain a consistent tone to the movie or a steady emotional keel from his actors, so it’s not surprising that they seem to go off in different directions from each other. For Butterfield, that means coming across rather flat, while Oldman is a whirligig of haphazard behavior. Robertson tries to break out of the teen romcom prison bars the movie puts her behind.

“The Space Between Us” is a stellar idea for a film that never achieves liftoff.

Bonus features include five deleted scenes and an alternate ending. There is also a feature-length commentary by Chelsome and a 4-minute featurette, “Love.”

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Review: "The Space Between Us"

“The Space Between Us” is a cosmically flawed science fiction love story filled with talented actors striving mightily against bad material.

Some of the scenarios and dialogue ring so false, even the talents of Gary Oldman can’t save him from seeming preposterous at times. Asa Butterfield, who anchors the movie as the first human born on Mars who years to travel to Earth, has been terrific in fare like “Hugo” and the underrated “Ender’s Game.” Here he's a bit stiff and remote.

And Britt Robertson has often been the best thing about some not very good movies like “Tomorrowland” and “The Longest Ride.” She tries hardest of all, attempting to craft a character out of meet-cute tropes and puppy-love-on-the-run contretemps.

(Though somebody needs to tell her people that her days of passing as a teen are behind.)

I didn’t buy this movie for a minute. I didn’t swallow the premise, I didn’t believe in the characters, I wasn’t engaged in the plot the film puts them through. The whole affair is just tiresome and often ridiculous.

It plays like a combination of “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and any one of a dozen teenybopper romances.

Butterfield plays Gardner Elliot. In a long, tedious and largely unnecessary exposition, we learn about how his mother (Janet Montgomery) was the lead astronaut on the mission in 2018 to permanently colonize the red planet. Except she made a little mistake and got pregnant right before the launch. (Apparently none of the 8,500 physical tests they put astronauts through detected this.)

The heads of NASA and the Genesis company that conceived the Mars mission decide to cover up the baby's existence as a potential PR disaster, especially after Gardner's mom dies during child birth. Oldman plays Nathaniel Shepherd, the Steve Jobs-like head honcho who's always flinging his hands in the air and shouting in an exasperated manner.

Flash forward 16 years, and Gardner is now a hyper-smart, mischievous kid who longs to go back to Earth -- in no small part because he's got a gal pal with whom he exchanges text and video messages. (Despite taking nearly a year to travel between the planets, apparently by 2034 data can ping back and forth without even any buffering.)

Tulsa (Robertson) is a typical tough, alienated girl struggling through high school. She takes her nickname from her hometown, because here she has absolutely no friends. There's this weird scene where she wanders into the band room and starts noodling on an electric piano, and some boys peer over the edge of the window outside to laugh at her. Then they literally chase her out of the school as she tears off angrily on her motorcycle.

Haven't these boys ever seen someone playing a piano before. (Especially in the band room.) Or don't they just have better things to do? It plays out like a fourth-grader's conception of what high school must be like.

Let's skip ahead. Gardner manages to get himself to Earth, but his body isn't suited for the heavier gravity. He skips out from the NASA facility to hunt down Tulsa, and pretty soon they're on the lam while the science guys and lawmen are on their tail. Tagging along with the chasers is Carla Gugino as Kendra, a scientist who acted as Gardner's surrogate mom while they were on Mars.

The second half of the movie is one big chase, interrupted by smooches and the sort of deep, abiding love that normally forms over the course of two days. Gardner and Tulsas commit an astonishing number of crimes along the way, including stealing innumerable cars.

This is low-budget science fiction, so the world of 2034 looks astonishing similar to the one we have right now. The cars, the clothes, the smartphones and tablets -- they didn't even dress it up a little bit. Heck, the astronauts even ride in rockets that wouldn't look out of place in "Apollo 13." The one concession is laptops with clear cases, which are kinda cool.

After hooking up with Tulsa, Gardner's big quest is to find his father. The only evidence he has is a photo of his mom with him at a beach house. I won't say more, other than if you haven't figured out the ending by the midway point, you need some lessons on Screenwriting 101. (Allan Loeb gets the blame... er, the credit, for the script.)

"The Space Between Us" contains a few nice moments, mostly intimate little cues where Butterfield and Robertson are allowed to behave like real people rather than characters in a movie. Most of the rest is otherworldly bad.

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.

Video review: "Tomorrowland"

The most disappointing films are usually not aggressively bad, merely forgettable. Though it has been but four months since I saw “Tomorrowland,” I can barely recall the plot without reading my own summary of it.

With director Brad Bird at the helm -- a man whose previous worst film was merely “very good” -- and an intriguing premise, “Tomorrowland” seemed to have all the makings of a sci-fi fairy tale. But the movie gets bogged down in a convoluted plot, and even George Clooney seems grumpy and fuzzy about what’s going on.

The story centers on a bright young teen, Casey (Britt Robertson), who finds herself transported into an amazing future world whenever she touches a mysterious pin. It’s all an illusion, sort of, but leads her to the door of reclusive inventor Frank (Clooney), with the help of an enigmatic British girl (Raffey Cassidy).

Things go on from there, which are hard to describe without ruining the movie’s (attempted) allure. Suffice to say they end up on a Da Vinci Code-like ride, finding clues to the Tomorrowland in famous places. They eventually reach it, but of course there’s more to the futuristic fantasyland than meets the eye.

A well-meaning film loaded with stellar talent, “Tomorrowland” is the proverbial sleek rocket that never gets off the launch pad.

Bonus features are excellent, though you’ll have to spring for the blu-ray combo pack to get most of them. One of the neatest things is production diaries by Brad Bird. There are three, though the DVD edition only comes with one of them. It also has “Blast from the Past,” a fictional commercial for Tomorrowland.

With the Blu-ray combo pack, you get all the diaries, eight deleted scenes, four Easter eggs, three making-of featurettes, a fictional children’s show, “The World of Tomorrow Science Hour” with futurologist David Nix, and an animated short, “The Origins of Plus Ultra.”

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Review: "Tomorrowland"

Maybe you’ve seen the trailer for “Tomorrowland,” in which a young woman touches a pin and is instantaneously, breathtakingly transported to another place. Like me, you probably found it highly intriguing, but after watching it you didn’t really feel like you had any idea what the movie was about.

Well, I’ve seen the whole film now – and I still don’t have a clear picture of it.

It’s a weird cotton candy concoction. It wants to be fun and fluffy, but the film also has this determined air of mystery to it, like it resents sharing its secrets. And there’s some late portentous stuff that seems way too sour for what came before.

This is surely one of the most disappointing movies of the year, given expectations and the talent involved: star George Clooney, who seems to instinctively gravitate toward quality material or vice-versa; director Brad Bird, one of the top animation filmmakers (“The Incredibles”) who successfully made the jump to live action; Damon Lindelhof, co-creator of the TV show “Lost,” who wrote the script along with Bird.

I’m afraid this may also prove a disappointing review, since I feel like I can’t tell you very much about “Tomorrowland.” Its entire appeal is steeped in guarding its enigma, then slowly – too slowly – revealing itself. Even though I found the movie underwhelming, blurting out its secrets seems a disservice both to the film and its audience.

I’ll stick to things that are shown in the trailer, or you can figure out easily. Given the title and that it’s from Disney, you can guess that it has something to do with the utopian vision of the future from the ubiquitous theme parks. Touching one of these odd ceremonial pins immediately teleports you to a magical, soaring city of arches and scientific advancement -- at least for a while.

Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is a smart and gutsy teen who comes to be in possession of one of these pins, and tenaciously follows the thread of its mystery. This includes gaining the companionship of a strange young girl, Athena (Raffey Cassidy). She in turn leads Casey to Frank (Clooney), an isolated inventor who appears to be very, very angry at the world.

Together they have all sorts of adventures involving rockets, robots, cross-dimension travel and guzzling Coca-Colas. For a while it almost seems like a science fiction version of “The Da Vinci Code,” with famous locales and figures revealing long-shrouded purposes.

The movie takes a long, long time to get rolling. It feels like a roller-coaster in which two-thirds of the ride is clickety-clacking up that first big rise. The last 45 minutes or so are pretty engaging, but some of the twists are more jerky than thrilling.

Clooney is dyspeptic and missing his usual facile charm. Robertson is buoyant and enthusiastic, though the script often has her saying or doing patently ridiculous things. Young Cassidy has terrific screen presence; somehow she speaks in a very clear British accent, yet I struggled to understand her words.

“Tomorrowland” is a story for and about dreamers, those who dare to strive for something better and never give in to the naysayers. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but the problem with that is sometimes the naysayers are right. And though I dreamed of adoring this movie, I must say: nay.

Review: "The Longest Ride"

Movies based on Nicholas Sparks books tend to be short on brainpower but long on emotional tug. "The Longest Yard" is the best one since "The Notebook," making up most of the yardage in smarts without sacrificing too much in the way of passion.

Like all Sparks flicks, it centers around a volatile relationship between two young people from different worlds. It also borrows the familiar technique of giving us a parallel story of another love from another time, with connections between the two growing stronger as the film goes on.

It stars Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood as one couple in the current time, while Oona Chaplin and Jack Huston are the antique pair.

If some of those names sound familiar, that's because they are. Chaplin is the granddaughter of the great Charlie Chaplin, and Eastwood is the son of Clint Eastwood. (I thought Huston might be one of the Hollywood Hustons, John/Danny/Angelica, but no, he's a Brit.)

Overall it's a nice cast, with each couple sharing warm chemistry between them. It also features Alan Alda in the old man role, and he's quite effective in an understated way.

The story is this: Sophia (Robertson), smart art student from Wake Forest meets Carolina bull rider Luke (Eastwood). They fall hard for each other, but she's soon headed to New York to work at a gallery, while he's chasing the elusive championship after some very hard knocks. On the way home from a magical first date, they rescue Ira (Alda), an old man whose car has run off the road, along with a box of old letters.

While visiting Ira in the hospital, Sophia reads the letters to him, which chronicle the tale of his lifelong love, Ruth (Chaplin). Part of the close-knit Jewish community in Greensboro in the 1940s, they fell in love themselves and started a life together, but not without certain challenges and tragedies along the way. Huston takes over the role of Ira as a youngster.

"Love requires sacrifice -- always," says elder Ira, in the sort of movie where characters just blurt out its main theme.

In the case of Luke and Sophia, that means he must give up the ranch and cracking his skulls falling off bulls, and she has to shelve her dreams of curating great art, or both.

Robertson is a charismatic and likeable star. Her face looks like a cross between Lena Headey ("Game of Thrones") and Linda Hamilton, and she has the spunk of a young Reese Witherspoon about her. Eastwood is like a prettier version of his dad, and much of the early going involves both cowgirls and college girls growing woozy at the sight of him. His acting's a bit stiff in the talkie scenes, but again, just like pop.

The Chaplin/Huston pairing is even better, enhanced by spectacular period costumes, cars and sets. Director George Tillman Jr. ("Men of Honor") shows off Sparks' North Carolina backyard in all its sun-dappled gorgeousness. He even manages to capture the frenetic, bestial grace of bull riding -- though, like the quarter mile races in "The Fast and the Furious," those 8-second rides somehow get stretched out to a minute of screen time.

"The Longest Ride" is a big cinematic piece of caramel-covered melted cheese, unapologetically sweet and sappy. But it will cause warm swells in the heart and a tear or two to be shed.