The idea for "We Need to Do Something" is better than the movie they made. This tense horror/psychological thriller has a family trapped in their bathroom while sheltering from a massive storm. They can't get out and their emotional fault lines, already amazingly fractured, grow to yawning chasms.
Blood starts to flow and fears spike to the redline, especially as it becomes apparent there are supernatural forces at play.
With just five people, a movie needs distinctive, sharply drawn characters who we can relate to. But the family falls into fairly typical horror stereotypes -- the odd teen girl, the abusive dad, the innocent younger sibling, the harried mom who is fiercely protective of her kids.
They behave more like puppets in a street show, performing the same old tropes and tricks we're used to.
"12 Mighty Orphans" is an old-school sports movie based on a true(y) story that plays its cards straight down the line -- too straight, if you ask me.
Back in 1938 a Texas orphanage formed a football team with just a dozen boys, giving hope to the Depression masses as they turned people's heads, fought their way to the state championship game and changed the way the sport was played forever.
It's inspiring stuff with rousing action, technically well-made and sure to draw a tear or two from the audience. It shares a lot of the DNA of "Hoosiers," as castoff hicks are dismissed by the titans of the sport, a troubled coach is brought in from outside the community and, after butting heads with some of the local powers-that-be, forges the players into a tribe of warriors.
There's even a drunkard assistant coach a la Dennis Hopper, played here by Martin Sheen, who also serves as narrator.
Director Ty Roberts ("The Iron Orchard") co-wrote the screenplay with Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer based on the book by sports author Jim Dent. Together they've built a movie that is completely impervious to irony and subtlety. All the Texans say what they mean and mean what they say, and each of the boys falls into a pretty predictable "type," as do the supporting adult characters.
The actors deliver the dialogue with all the heartfelt conviction they can muster, particularly Luke Wilson as head coach Rusty Russell. But it often registers as hammy and stilted, one cornpone bit of soothsaying merging into the next.
This movie plays earnest as all hell, but scores no points of originality.
It takes place at the Fort Worth Masonic Home, which in the 1930s housed about 150 boys and girls ranging from tykes to near-grownups. Some were orphans whose parents were dead, but many were simply abandoned by folks who couldn't afford to feed them in the wake of the Dust Bowl.
Russell, who was nearly blinded in the Great War and later had success with other sports teams, is recruited as a teacher and to build a football program from scratch. His wife, Juanita (Vinessa Shaw), is brought in as English teacher and to do supportive wifey things while staying firmly relegated to the background.
Things follow a pretty standard route. First they have to overcome the lack of a field or equipment, then get the students academically eligible to play, and finally convince the Texas football A-league to admit them as a team. After all that plays out, they're left with just the titular dozen players, none who have football experience or are big enough for traditional toughman play.
Sheen plays Doc, the over-the-hill doctor and good soul who's looked upon as a father figure by most of the orphans, who tends to split lips and strained knees, in between constantly nipping at his breast pocket whiskey.
It's tough to create 12 distinctive characters for each of the kids, so three or four get star billing and the rest sort of fade into a Greek chorus -- including the two Latino students, which seems a very un-woke choice these days.
There's Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), the scrawny but scrappy kid who really has no business on a gridiron; dashing Fairbanks (Levi Dylan), nicknamed after the movie star, constantly chased by girls off the field and by opposing players on it; and Wheatie (Slade Monroe), the gritty natural leader who becomes quarterback by default.
The spotlight falls mostly on Hardy Brown, played by Jake Austin Walker, who's not that big but hits like a sledgehammer. Brought to the orphanage in the opening act after witnessing his father murdered -- Hardy's overalls still sticky with his blood -- he is the sullen troublemaker who gets into fights with the other orphans, joins the team under protest and, of course, will become the most fervent team-firster by the end.
(A note on historical accuracy: the real Hardy Brown did indeed go on to a 12-year NFL career as a feared tackler, though he was too young to play on the 1938 orphans team and his father's death occurred when he was little. By Hollywood norms, these are fairly standard deviations from recorded reality.)
A couple of rival newspaper men, including one played by Treat Williams, help get the word out about the Mighty Mites aka orphan team, at one point even enlisting the help of FDR himself to help overcome some cattywampus sports bureaucracy. Robert Duvall turns up in a too-short cameo as a school booster.
There are two main villains. Wayne Knight plays Frank Wynn, who runs the "day-to-day" at the school, meaning he has sign-making class that is basically a child-labor operation, and he carries a big wooden paddle that he swings freely with the boys in the name of discipline, but enjoys a tad too much. Screenwriter/actor Garrison plays Luther, head of the rival Polytechnic school team, a football snob who's constantly rubbing Russell's face in his lack of resources or talent, though the bait is amiably refused.
As screen heavies go, there's the top, there's over the top and then there's over the top of the top, which is where these guys fly. Luther wears a Hitler haircut and sports John Lennon sunglasses, a little twerp braggart sucking on phallic stogies, and seems like a time-traveling alien who picked up bad habits from every era.
Frank has the mustache to go with Luther's hair, though if his mustachios were a bit longer I think he might start twirling them. He's always sweaty and stooped, a foot shorter than the orphans he terrorizes, and we're just waiting around for his uppance to come.
I don't want to pick on Knight, who's had a lovely career, but he's transparently doing a (more) evil version of his Newman character from "Seinfeld," and even whips out the tittering laugh. This is a situation where you look to director Roberts to step in to protect his actor and his movie against bad choices, and he didn't.
The football action, and there's quite a lot of it, is staged very well with plenty of kinetic mayhem. This is back in the day before face guards or body padding, and the players are basically hurling themselves into a brick wall on each down. I also liked the portrayal of Russell's innovation of what became known as the spread or motion offense, using the whole field and putting more emphasis on speed and skill than just sheer size.
"12 Mighty Orphans" is far from a bad movie. My guess is most sports film fans will cheer for it more than I did. To me, it's the storytelling equivalent of the anachronistic way of playing ball the orphans overcame: line it up, plow straight ahead and hope for glory.
"Big Miracle" came and went at theaters without much of a
ripple, but it's well worth checking out on video. This admittedly sappy
story about three whales who get trapped beneath the Alaskan ice and
elicit a flood of worldwide attention is certainly manipulative, but at
least goes about jerking its tears in an expert manner.
John
Krasinski plays a TV reporter yearning for his big break when he
stumbles across three California gray whales caught in the encroaching
ice, unable to travel south for the winter. Based on a true story from
1988, the trio soon attract hordes of television cameras, plus dozens of
people looking to help.
Director Ken Kwapis and his screenwriters
do a good job juggling a large cast of characters, including Drew
Barrymore as the headstrong local Greenpeace leader; Ted Danson as an
oil company CEO lending a hand for PR reasons; Dermot Mulroney as a
National Guard helicopter pilot sent in to assist; Vinessa Shaw as a
White House aide looking to burnish the president's environmental
credentials, Kristen Bell as a hotshot reporter from L.A.; and John
Pingayak as the chief of the local Eskimo tribe.
Despite its TV
Movie of the Week feel, "Big Miracle" is a smart, tenderhearted flick
suitable for the whole family -- and there aren't too many of those
these days.
Extra features are pretty decent, and you don't have to shell out for the most expensive package to get some good stuff.
The
DVD includes deleted scenes introduced by Kwapis, plus the director
provides a feature-length commentary track. There's also a featurette,
"Truth is Stranger Than Fiction," interviewing the real people behind
the true story and the actors who portrayed them.
Upgrade to the Blu-ray addition, and you add a making-of featurette, "A Big Miracle in Alaska," plus a digital copy of the film.
Yes, “Big Miracle” is a sappy story about some whales trapped in the ice, and the people who came together to save them. It’s a family-friendly tear-jerker, unabashedly trying to wring heartfelt emotions out of the audience, and impart a tasty feel-good message covered by a light sauce of environmentalism, with a side of can’t-we-get-along political optimism.
For one great big Warm Fuzzy, it’s an extremely watchable movie. The cast, led by John Krasinski and Drew Barrymore, are enjoyable to hang out with, and the story has a certain weight of authenticity, since it’s based on a true story that happened in 1988.
The movie uses lots of news clips with Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and others to show what a big story it was back in the day, though I confess I have no memory of it whatsoever.
Krasinski is known for his smart-aleck role on TV’s “The Office,” but he’s had a busy if largely unnoticed film career (16 credits over the past six years, including the little gem “Away We Go”). Here he plays Adam Carlson, a television reporter stuck in Barrow, Alaska, who stumbles across three California gray whales trapped beneath a thick layer of office.
No one quite knows why the mammoth mammals haven’t already migrated southward, though it may have something to do with the fact they’re a family: father, mother and baby. The locals quickly dub them Fred, Wilma and Bamm-Bamm.
Barrymore plays Rachel Kramer, head of the Alaskan Greenpeace chapter, who spends most of her time railing against the big oil companies drilling in the neighboring oceans. When the whales become a national story, she’s soon to arrive on the scene, complicating matters since she and Adam recently ended a romance.
I was pleased that the film does not make their relationship the centerpiece of the story. Most Hollywood movies would have played up the love angle to the maudlin hilt, so credit to screenwriters Jack Amiel and Michael Begler (working from a book by Thomas Rose) for sticking with the whales. An aura of sexual tension colors Rachel and Adam’s interchanges, but it doesn’t suck all the air out of the room, narratively speaking.
I also enjoyed the way director Ken Kwapis juggled a large cast and competing story elements.
There’s stuff about the tension between the local Eskimos, who hunt whales for food, and the environmentalists; Ted Danson as the chief of Alaska Northern Oil, who volunteers to help as a way to get the pesky Rachel off his back; a National Guard helicopter commander (Dermot Mulroney) unhappy about being handed a PR assignment; a White House official (Vinessa Shaw) who sees a chance to burnish then-outgoing President Reagan’s (weak) environmental record; and Adam’s ambition to get a job in the Lower 48 by sucking up to a star reporter (Kristen Bell) from Los Angeles.
Particularly nice is the interplay between Adam and Malik, the local Eskimo chieftain, and his grandson Nathan (Ahmaogak Sweeney). The Eskimos see harvesting the whales as the most humane thing to do, but Adam warns Malik how it will play out in the media. Malik is played by first-time actor John Pingayak, who exudes a warm mix of nurturing and command – I was not surprised to learn he is a teacher in real life.
I won’t bother discussing how “Big Miracle” turns out, since even if you don’t remember it’s not hard to guess (or to Google).
All I’ll say is, if one has to have your emotions manipulated, it’s at least a comfort to have them jerked around expertly, with style and wit.
