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Movie Reviews By Mary J. Schirmer
Pride
Based on the true story of an inner-city swimming coach, Pride was written by Kevin Michael Smith, Michael Gozzard, J. Mills Goodloe, and Norman Vance Jr., from a story by Smith and Gozzard. Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac portray employees of a Philadelphia recreation center that's slated for closing. Howard's character was on his college swim team, however, and he cleans up the pool and invites neighborhood teens to jump in.
It's hard to beat a good sports movie. By definition, the audience roots for the good guys, and they almost all the time win big in the end. So the storytelling device used is visual character growth. Non-swimmers become swimmers.
In addition, this story has a ticking clock. Will Howard's character pull together the swim team and the neighborhood before city officials actually close the rec center doors?
Audiences like to watch older people with strong belief systems work with underprivileged kids. Although Pride hits a little too hard in playing off the yuppie swim team from the suburbs against the all-black swimmers from the rec center, still the film makes the point that what you're doing is what counts and not what you look like.
Oh, my goodness, think about standing before God and country in a teeny-tiny swim suit. Such brave actors.
Meet the Robinsons
John Bernstein, Robert L. Baird, Michelle Bochner, Daniel Gerson, William Joyce, and Shirley Pierce lent a hand, or maybe a computer, in writing Meet the Robinsons.
In this animated movie for the whole family, Lewis wants to locate his real mother and learn why she left him on the doors of an orphanage when he was just a baby. In his search, he travels into the future and meets the Robinsons, a family of tolerant knuckleheads-- not unlike any of our families.
So the theme of finding yourself and figuring out where you fit into the future drives the story. The film was a little long for the short people in the audience, and I got the feeling that some scenes and images were included just because the artists thought they were pretty cool.
Firehouse Dog
Easily the most fun I've had at a movie in a long time, Firehouse Dog makes the audience remember why they love their dogs. Doggy energy fills a hole in your heart. If you don't believe that, come and take my dog for a walk. Or a drag, if she sees a squirrel.
Rex, AKA Dewey, steps away from his movie career and becomes a firehouse dog in an engine house slated for closure. (Hey, where did we hear that movie problem before? See Pride above.)
You guessed it. Dewey saves the day, some firefighters, and the engine house. But all the positive publicity allows Rex's owner to locate him and come to claim him. Come on, it's a kids' movie. Everything turns out OK.
La Febbre (The Fever)
We saw this charmer at the 2007 Italian Film Festival, ongoing in St. Louis. Watch for foreign films at universities and museums because they usually feature the best of the best.
Written by director Alessandro D'Alatri, Gennaro Nunziante, and Domenica Starnone, and starring the impish Fabio Volo, La Febbre follows a 30-something Italian man in his government "career." He and his friends really just want to start a nightclub in an abandoned shop and date women, but in the meantime he fulfills his parents' wish for him to take a steady bureaucratic job.
The movie's about trying to find happiness. Isn't that what we all want?
To read past Film Fuss columns, click
here.
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