Friday film roundup: Decent Family Entertainment, and Some Harsh Unpleasantness
Probably the best surprise this week is a low-key independent family release called The Eye of the Dolphin, starring Carly Schroeder who travels to the Bahamas to straighten our her teen-orphan life. Along the way she bonds with dolphins. Greg Wright calls the film “more engaging, in spite of its flaws,” than Whale Rider.
Rowan Atkinson also delivers the usual goods in Mr. Bean’s Holiday, which, non-Bean-enthusiast Jeff Walls confesses, “did make me laugh, and sometimes that is all you need.”
On the more adult front, Jeff finds Resurrecting the Champ “always compelling and always entertaining,” and not what you’d expect from a boxing movie — a good film for dads, if not for kids. Greg Wright finds The Treatment a realistic R-rated portrayal of a man’s journey through Freudian psychotherapy — “more like real life than most people’s real lives.” Dacia Ray, meanwhile, finds the R-rated 2 Days in Paris “intriguing and well worth the watch for those in love, or not.”
Some warnings are due, says Greg Wright, for a couple of films, though. He finds the global warming documentary The 11th Hour too aggressively evangelistic for its own good, and calls September Dawn, a film about a 19th Century Mormon-led massacre, “one of the most shockingly poor and mean-spirited films of the year.”
Also, Greg Wright interviews writer/director Monty Lapica, who also stars next week in his quasi-autobiographical theatrical debut, Self-Medicated.
