Recently in Inspired by a true story Category

It's hard to believe it has been almost 30 years since this movie inspired by the real-life New York High School of the Performing Arts exploded into theaters. It remains hugely influential even as recently as the more family-friendly "High School Musical" series. As we get ready for the remake, it might be a good time to take another look at the original. Students at New York's High School for Performing Arts go through familiar adolescent drama and melodrama, but they do it while they are singing and dancing to an Oscar-winning score. Teens will relate to the anxiety and identity crises of the attractive and talented leads as they reconcile their dreams of fame and the reality of hard work, rejection, and growing up. NOTE: The R rating is for rough language, an out of wedlock pregnancy, brief nudity in a predatory situation, and a gay character.

We all have at least one, a summer when everything changes, when we first start to become the person we truly are. Every writer tries at least once to tell the story of one of these summers and the best of them connect us to our own stories as we laugh and cry along with them.

Director Greg Mottola's last film was the box office smash "Superbad," and like that, this is the story of young people at a turning point, told with sex, drugs, rock and roll and with some surprising sweetness. The mix is much more on the sweetness side in this frankly autobiographical film; don;t let the ad campaign mislead you that this is another wild and raunchy story.

For one thing, this movie's lead is four years further along. James Brennan ("The Squid and the Whale's Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated from college and things are not going the way he planned. His parents have had some financial reversals. Not only is his planned trip to Europe with his friends canceled so he can stay home and get a job but there's no money to pay his tuition at graduate school, and his parents seem disturbingly callous about how this affects him. He finds to his distress that an undergraduate degree in literature does not qualify him for pretty much anything, so he ends up getting a job for which no qualifications of any kind are necessary -- working at a decrepit amusement park called Adventureland.

We know what to expect, of course. In just about every summer job, summer camp, and summer trip movie ever made there will be a girl of great sensitivity and insight and a girl of great hotness. There will be a bully or menace of some kind and a boss who is clueless or evil or both. But the humiliating lessons are more in the painful twinge than wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-20-years-later-in-a-cold-sweat category. The bosses (SNL's very funny Bil Heder and Kristin Wiig) are not evil and not really clueless. They just have the requisite benign obtuseness that enables them to continue to run a business that (1) relies on children in unleashed frenzy mode as customers and (2) relies on teenagers in major hormonal crisis mode as staff. Mottola manages to avoid the cliches and create characters with warmth and specificity and -- that rarest quality in movies of this genre -- some grace.

Those who are interested in the Iranian election and protests should see this superb Iranian film that is one of the finest explorations of freedom, elections, democracy, and the rule of law I have ever watched on screen.

It begins with a surreal image as a solitary soldier patrolling an Iranian island coast sees a box dropped by parachute from a plane. Soon after, a boat arrives and a woman disembarks. She informs the soldier that she is there to collect as many votes as possible before 5 pm and he is to accompany her. They travel the island debating the legitimacy of the voting process and the ability of the law to ensure fair treatment. The woman is a stickler for the letter of the law, even when the result is difficult to justify. That is, until they get stopped by a broken red light and she must decide whether to stop at the deserted intersection, missing her boat and invalidating the votes she has collected, or break the law by running the light. The film, made by Canadian-Iranian Babak Payami works brilliantly as allegory and as quasi-documentary. We never learn the names of the characters; they are just "the soldier" and "the girl." But they and their predicament are immediately involving and distinctive. Highly recommended for high school and college civics classes and for anyone who appreciates superb film-making.

How far would you go to save your child's life? How far should you go? Those are the questions posed -- and largely ducked -- in this film based on the best-selling book, My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. The New York Times recently said that in Picoult's books, which often focus on "terrible things" happening to children, "[t]he assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles multiple and unforeseen."

The "terrible things" here are inspired by a real-life story. Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), learn that no one in their family matched their daughter well enough to be able to donate bone marrow or blood cells she needs for cancer treatment. So, they decided to have another baby, one specifically genetically tweaked to be able to provide her sister with healthy cells, starting with the blood from her umbilical cord. As she says, most children arrive by accident, but she was designed to be born for spare parts. At age 11, having spent her entire life being pricked and prodded and now being asked to give up a kidney, Anna (Abigail Breslin) hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue for "medical emancipation," to get permission to stop.

Solomon had to choose between two mothers who both claimed the same baby and he was not related to any of them. But Sara and Brian must choose between their daughters, and they are so desperate to save the one who is sick that they cannot admit to themselves the damage they are doing to the one who is well. The ones who are well -- there is also a son who is so overlooked that he sneaks back into the house after being out all night only to find that no one noticed.

Director Nick Cassavetes ("The Notebook") wisely changed the jarring ending in the novel and is very effective in conveying the matter-of-fact mastery of the details of the symptoms and treatments, a touch of authenticity that is in sharp contrast to the one-dimensionality of the characters. He overdoes the pop songs on the soundtrack, though, with so many montages it feels like a music video punctuated with brief scenes of family anguish. But Picolt insists on allotting tragedy to every character as though she is dealing cards. And she undermines the power of the story and its themes with a syrupy overlay that distorts the issues so that the result is more gooey than dramatic. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel composes exquisite images. But they add to the sense the film does exactly what it says it does not do and ties everything up in a mode that is just too neat and convenient instead of engaging in a forthright and honest way with the issues and the characters. That just rings hollow and ultimately disrespectful to the conflicts it purports to portray.

Patric, who should be in more movies, is outstanding as Brian. The look in his eyes as he watches his daughter go on a special date is heart-wrenching. Diaz, in her first role as a mother, is fine in the quieter moments but never reaches the ferocity that is at the heart of the story. As the sick girl, Sofia Vassilieva is luminious and wise. But the best moments on screen come from Joan Cusack as the judge. Every tiny gesture and look is searingly authentic, a bracing dose of reality in the midst of the gooey saints all around her.

Carrey-ologists will enjoy poring over the semiotics of "Yes Man," in one sense a very slight variation of one of Jim Carrey's biggest hits, 1997's Liar Liar. In both films, he plays a divorced professional man who has in essence checked out emotionally and spiritually. In the first he simply says whatever will get him what he wants, even if it is not true. He does the same here, except that it's all the same lie: "I'm busy." Like Melville's famous character Bartleby he responds to all offers and invitations, one way or another, "I prefer not to." Just as in a wish in "Liar Liar" turns him into a man who can only tell the truth, in this film a "no" character commits to saying "yes" to everything, from spam invitations to try out persianwife.com to a very big guy in a bar asking him if he wants to step outside for a fight.

Both films have wives who with new significant others who make the Carrey character feel diminished, and in both a large part of the screen time and all of the humor comes from Carrey's squirming through the consequences of his reversal and the way he must deal with the larger consequences of his previous bad behavior. As always, Carrey makes some funny faces and uses his rubbery limbs to good comic effect.

But with nearly a decade between the two films, Carrey and Carl, his character, bring a more poignant sense of longing and lost chances. It is significant that this film does not require any hocus-pocus to get the story started. It just establishes that Carrey is a no-guy, feeling sorry for himself and turning down just about everything. Fortunately, he is a bank loan officer, so this tendency has professional benefits. But in his personal life, he says no to his friends and would-be friends (his nerdy boss) to stay home and watch DVDs and feel sorry for himself.

And then one day an old friend suggests that he go to a motivational seminar led by a man named Terrence (played by Terence Stamp, no idea why the character name has two r's and the actor has just one) who persuades him to start saying "yes." To everything. That means giving a ride to a homeless guy and going to his boss's Harry Potter party, taking Korean lessons, and learning to fly. Not to mention approving a lot of loans. It seems to him that there is a pattern because each of those yeses leads to something unexpected and wonderful, the best of all being a free-spirited girl named Alison (Zooey Deschanel), a natural yes-er. Just a hop skip and a jump to the getting-to-know-you montage, the second act complication, and a happily-yessing-ever-after conclusion with a little gratuitous nudity.

The characters around Carl and Alison don't add much and her character does not have much depth, but the Carrey and Deschanel have an easy chemistry that gives the film a strong center. And the film nicely hints at the interconnection of all things and the way the messages we send out to the universe -- whether yes or no -- reverberate and return to us.

My second DVD pick of the week for Valentine's Day is the other new Audrey Hepburn release, "Funny Face," a gorgeous musical set in Paris with Fred Astaire and songs by Gershwin. The title tune, and "How Long Has This...

The classic musical Meet Me in St. Louis has a wonderful Halloween scene with Margaret O'Brien as Tootie dressed as a hobo, being dared by the other children to "kill" a scary neighbor by throwing flour at him. Beautifully filmed...

The real-life story of a group of MIT math whiz kids who won millions playing blackjack gets the glossy Hollywood treatment here -- a poor but worthy son of a single mother who needs money for med school tuition makes...

In 1935, the debate team from a tiny all-black college took on the top white team in the country and they won. This is that story, Oprah-fied to be sure (Winfrey's company produced the film), but powerfully told by...

This quiet little independent film is the story of the friendship between two New York City schoolteachers, an Orthodox Jew and a Muslim, who transcend the assumptions of those around them. They quickly realize that they have more in common...

Based on the real-life story of the two reporters who would not give up on the story of the Watergate break-in, this is as gripping as any detective novel. Bob Woodward (Robert Redford), a junior reporter for the Washington Post,...