If there’s one true-life adventure that almost every European school child knows it’s the story of Norwegian’s Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon Tiki Express, the name given to the 1947  trip across the Pacific on a raft. 

In 1950, Thor Heyerdahl made an Academy Award winning documentary about the journey, but now Norway has finally made an adventurous dramatization of the trip.  The film had its Arizona premiere at the recent 2013 Phoenix Film Festival and was a huge success with its festival audience, and with good cause; the film is a rousing, colorful, widescreen adventure, the kind of clean cut, family escapade that used to support a Walt Disney animated feature during the sixties.

Briefly, Heyerdahl had a theory that South Americans originally populated Polynesia and not peoples migrating from the west.  To prove that it was possible for Peruvians to have settled on the island in earlier times he built a balsawood raft using materials that could only have been used 1500 years earlier in order to make the same journey.  With a small crew of five men, all of whom had little experience on the high-seas, he set sail.  Kon Tiki dramatizes what happened on that journey. 

The film starts in 1920.  We see Thor as a young boy who accidentally falls into freezing water and is eventually rescued by a friend.  “Promise you’ll never do something like that again,” Thor’s father demands, but the boy never answers; he has no intention of obeying his father’s order.  As portrayed in the film, Thor is the kind of boy who will always take risks to prove a point, which is exactly what he does years later in 1947 when he sets sail across the Pacific.

The first time we see Thor as an adult, played by Norwegian actor Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, he’s already thinking of setting sail.  With his Scandinavian good looks, healthy, tanned features and blonde hair it’s amazing how the camera often catches him looking like a young Peter O’Toole, reminiscent of O’Toole’s adventurous ocean going Lord Jim days.  As an actor he’s a stiffer than a plank of the balsawood used to make the raft, but photogenically he looks perfect, almost godlike with his cinematic good looks cast against a backdrop of clear, blue skies and the deep azure blue of the Pacific Ocean.  “Early man did not see the ocean as a barrier,” Thor tells us, “But as a means of communication.”  Thor and his crew spend the rest of the film trying to prove that point.

Surprisingly, Kon Tiki has been awarded a PG-13 rating which seems at odds with the film I saw.  Perhaps the age restriction is there because of the tense, almost eerie moment when a huge whale, looking like an enormous sea monster, glides under the raft endangering the crew, or perhaps it’s the moment when a shark is literally pulled out of the sea by a hook and sliced apart.  Such scenes could easily upset the very young, but those moments aside, there is little in Kon Tiki to offend.  If anything, the film is actually a little too squeaky clean.  Considering this is a story of several men stuck together in a confined space experiencing perilous life or death situations, tempers rarely flare, cussing is completely absent, and politeness prevails.

Norwegian critics have complained that the film fictionalizes a lot of what really happened – the film tells us that Thor can’t swim, yet records show he was swimming in 1937, ten years before Kon Tiki – but real life doesn’t always transfer well to a big screen adventure.  Perhaps the film isn’t a real reflection of everything that happened, and events are condensed in order to heighten the more dramatic elements, but for me it’s close enough.  Reading books and watching documentaries are good for understanding academically what happened, but old-fashioned, adventurous films deliver the emotional impact, and Kon Tiki is as as rousing as a sea-faring exploit gets.

MPAA Rating: PG-13     Length:  119 Minutes    Overall rating:  7 (out of 10)

For more film & local theatre reviews CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website. 

Don't forget, if you're going to this evening's performance (Thursday, May 2) of the hit musical Flashdance at ASU Gamage, make sure you stay after the show for KEZ's Talk Back Thursday.  This is where you get the chance to ask members of the cast questions in a special Q&A session, hosted by yours truly,

Enjoy the show, have your questions ready and see you tonight! I'll be the one with  the mic and the white hair.

Currently showing at Arizona Broadway Theatre in Peoria is the fun, musical comedy 9 to 5, the live stage version of the hit Dolly Parton movie of the same name.

The show’s three leading ladies, Carolyn McPhee, Janet McWilliams and Erica Wilpon visited the studios to talk about 9 to 5, how they got the roles, and what it’s like playing roles first created by such famous names as Lilly Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly.  Plus, the ladies graciously answered questions sent in by listener E-mail.

To hear the full interview click on the following.

To find out more regarding times, dates and tickets, CLICK HERE to go directly to the ABT website.

Carolyn McPhee (Violet)

To read the full KEZ review of 9 to 5 CLICK HERE.

Janet McWilliams (Judy)

To read more film and local theatre reviews, CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website.

Erica Wilpon (Doralee)

This week's new releases include an Academy Award winner, a road-trip comedy, a ballroom dancer's feast of a comedy and an inspiring tale based on true events.

The first fifteen minutes of director David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook is so manic
with its overlapping speech and its continual feel of chaos you fear the worst.  Then, like all good movies, something happens and before you know it you find yourself pulled in to the
film’s uneven rhythm and even embracing its chaotic style. What makes Silver Linings Playbook so much fun is watching this cast of neurotic characters come to life with such energy and vigor by a top notch cast of players, including Robert De Niro as Pat Sr., a man banned from attending any Eagles’ game because of past bad behavior. But the center of attention whenever she’s there is Jennifer Lawrence as the persistent Tiffany.  Lawrence
has already proved herself with the magnificent Winter’s Bone, not to mention The Hunger Games and its sequels to come, but to see her here among seasoned professionals like De Niro and to shine with such an emotionally multi-layered character is bliss to watch.  Available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

What works best in The Guilt Trip is the surprisingly inspired pairing of Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen.  Their relationship is the obvious center of the film, and together they make a truly convincing mother and son. The quibbles in the car as they journey across country together have a genuine ad-libbed feel about them that is initially fun to watch, but it becomes all the more frustrating as the film, and the journey, continues, especially when you realize that the situations and the dialog are never going to rise above the basic, mild bickering that began the trip.  The film is consistently pleasant enough, and the bickering between mother and son is relatively amusing, but it’s never flat out funny.  The film goes for poignancy when you’re expecting laughs and ends on a touching note that would have worked perfectly fine had it built up to it with some solid comedy, but doesn’t.  Available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Australian director Baz Luhrmann is about to burst back on the big screen with his new version of The Great Gatsby, so the timing of the Blu-Ray release of his earlier film, the
1992 comedy Strictly Ballroom couldn’t be more timely.  Even though many consider Moulin Rouge to be Luhrmann’s crowning achievement, for me it’s Strictly Ballroom that remains the flamboyant Australian director’s best work.  With the success of TV’s Dancing With The Stars bringing ballroom dancing to people’s living rooms, Strictly Ballroom looks at the subject from the other end, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of over-competitive dancers and the steps they take to win at all costs.  It’s like one, huge, colorful cartoon populated by humans that practically explode in front of you.  And with the clarity of hi-def, the film has never looked better.  Available in Blu-Ray.

Little Red Wagon opened in theatres last year and tells the true story of young Zach Bonner, an 8 year old boy who decided to help children rendered homeless by the devastation of Hurricane Charley.  The film was made by the same team that brought Hoosiers and Rudy to the screen and while Little Red Wagon never quite rises to the cinematic level of those earlier two films, it still conveys a message of hope, resilience and inspiration.  Surprisingly, the film is not as cloying as you might think, and even though it’s soon apparent that Little Red Wagon works better as a TV movie of the week, it’s sincere, good intentions ultimately win you over.  Available on DVD.

 For more film and local theatre review CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website.

The hit musical based on the hit 1983 movie, Flashdance, opens this week on the stage at ASU Gammage in Tempe.  It begins Tuesday, April 30 and continues until Sunday May 5.

One of its cast members, Christian Whelan, checked in to talk about the show, the music, the dancing, and his role in Flashdance.

Christian also talked about his days when, as a 9 year old, he was one of the original baseball players in the famous Walter Matthau comedy, The Bad News Bears.

To hear Christian’s full interview, click on the following.

To find out more regarding times, dates and tickets, CLICK HERE to go directly to the official ASU Gammage website.

Look out for Marty Manning who will be in front of the theatre at the KEZ booth on opening night, Tuesday April 30.  Plus don’t forget: if you’re going to the Thursday evening performances on May 2, stay for KEZ’s TalkBack Thursday, a special Q&A where you can ask members of the cast questions about the production, co-hosted by yours truly.

For more film & local live theatre reviews, CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website.

After a recent flood, two young boys leave their riverbank homes along the Mississippi in
search of a boat they believe is stranded up a tree on a nearby island.  They find the boat, and it is, indeed, lodged up in a large tree, like a ready made tree house, secured in place by thick branches.  They also find that the boat is now inhabited by a man they come to know simply as Mud.

“I grew up around here,” Mud tells the two boys, “But I been away awhile.”

Mud (Matthew McConaughey) is in hiding.  He tells the boys what sounds like a whimsical tale of love and longing and how he is waiting for the love of his life to meet him so that they can escape some bounty hunters who want him dead.  “She’s like a dream you don’t wanna wake up from,” Mud tells the boys when thinking of his woman.

The surprising thing about Mud’s tall tale, made all the more lyrical because of McConaughey’s customary and winning southern delivery, is that it’s all true, and the boys become a part of his story as they help him get the boat down from the tree, repair it and have it ready in order for Mud and his woman to motor away, unseen by the bad guys, along the river.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols has sighted his inspiration as being from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but there’s also a little Charles Dickens buried in there.  As in Great Expectations where young Pip feeds the escaped convict Magwitch with food stolen from Pip’s home, young Ellis (Tye Sheridan) assists the Arkansas fugitive by stealing food from his mother’s kitchen and bringing it back to Mud’s hiding place along the river.  Like the desperate Magwitch, Mud is an escaped convict, having killed a man.  “He was a bad piece of business,” Mud explains to the boys.

The film’s gorgeous wide screen cinematography by Adam Stone never romanticizes the area with a picture postcard style of prettiness; instead, it captures the splendor of the Mississippi revealing its wide open spaces as a part of the country in which you would love to be lost.  The river’s water doesn’t have the clarity or the cleansed look of a Mediterranean blue, but the appearance of a dirty brown, underlining the potential murkiness of a situation the boys are wading into by assisting the desperate, though lovesick Mud.

This is a good, ensemble cast, lead by a charming though potentially dangerous  McConaughey, with solid support from not only the two young boys who appear to be natural products of the riverbank area, but also from Reese Witherspoon as the love of Mud’s life.  There’s also Michael Shannon, Sarah Paulson, Sam Shephard and a surprise appearance from Joe Don Baker.

Director Nichols has made a surprisingly engaging tale of love, broken hearts, and growing up, buoyed by a relaxing story telling style that floats along at a casual pace like a piece of driftwood on the Mississippi. Like that driftwood, it might at times feel as though things are going nowhere, but the story eventually arrives, and even though it’s probably about fifteen minutes too long, the film engages at most stages along the way.  

MPAA Rating: PG-13   Length:  130 minutes    Overall Rating: 8 (out of 10)

For more film & local theatre reviews CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website

As explained in the film, the meaning behind the title The Angel’s Share sounded so whimsical I had to look it up.  It’s for real and it means this:  Each year, two percent of whisky aging in oak barrels simply evaporates.  The two percent that floats off into the
atmosphere is known as the angels’ share.  Evidently, it’s a genuine industry expression.

In the new Ken Loach comedy/drama The Angels’ Share, a troubled young man from Glasgow,  Scotland narrowly misses a prison sentence and instead is ordered to complete several hours of community service.  Robbie (Paul Brannigan) meets up with a small rag-tag gang of other troubled Glaswegians and together they plan what they think is the perfect crime - robbing a distillery in Edinburgh of a ridiculously over-priced cask of perfect whisky.  They amount they take will never be missed; it’s the angels’ share.

In 1970 director Loach made one of the truly great films of the British cinema; Kes.  Today, it is listed by the British Film Institute as one of the 50 films that you should see before the age of 14.  I’ve seen it so many times I can quote scenes line by line throughout.  If you know anything of the socially conscious Ken Loach you know that the cinematic journey you are about to take could well be a rough ride.  He brings a naturalistic, down-to-earth quality to everything he makes.  He’s the social realist of modern cinema.  Having said that, films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Poor Cow, and Riff-Raff pull no punches when depicting working-class life in the British Isles, and for mainstream American audiences they’re tough sells, which is why The Angels’ Share is such a pleasant surprise.

The grit of daily life on the streets of working-class Glasgow is still depicted in all its realism, the rough language is still in place and the odd moments of unpleasant, head-banging violence are there, but there’s a surprisingly light feel to the whole affair which keeps you constantly amused and, dare I say it, enamored with these young Scottish  knuckleheads. 

Glasgow’s real sense of identity is evident despite the light touch, and the depiction of the young and uneducated stuck in a depressing cycle of unemployment is very much in the forefront, but the film has a sense of humor that might make you laugh louder than most regular comedies of late and can’t fail to win you over.

The accents are thick to the point where foreign ears may have trouble distinguishing words, but to the credit of the American distributors they haven’t done what they did to the Scottish comedy Gregory’s Girl back in 1981.  With Gregory’s Girl, the film was re-dubbed stateside to make the sound of the Scottish accents softer and easier to understand.  By doing this, the film lost its comic edge and much of what sounded funny overseas fell flat in American theatres.  This time they’ve done what they should have done in 1981; they’ve subtitled the film and left the dialog alone. The uncompromising Glaswegian accents are intact, and the whole thing works wonderfully.  

MPAA rating:  Unrated   Length: 106 minutes   Overall Rating:  7 (out of 10)

For more film & local theatre reviews CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website

Generally speaking, the average film these days tends to run too long, usually by about ten, maybe fifteen minutes.  The Big Wedding, a new comic farce from director Justin Zackham runs about eighty-four minutes plus credits, and it feels so short that at the final fade out you might be thinking, wait… that was it?

Originally titled simply The Wedding – evidently Big was added after research – The Big Wedding is a remake of a 2006 French sex farce called Mon Frère Se Marie, and you can see the European farcical construction right from the start.  Marriage, an introductory voice-over from Robert De Niro tells us, is like a late night telephone call.  “First comes the ring,” he says, “Then you wake up.”

De Niro and Diane Keaton play Don and Ellie Griffin and they divorced some time ago.  Now living separate lives, they are forced to pretend they’re still a couple when their adopted son, Alejandro, is about to marry.  His biological mother from Colombia is flying in for the wedding and she’s a devout Catholic and has no clue that her boy’s American foster parents are no longer together.

This is the traditional kind of sex farce where characters pretend to be what they’re not and everyone has a secret that is revealed in the final act.

There are several delights in The Big Wedding and watching the great, ensemble cast of seasoned professionals is one of them.  In addition to De Niro and Keaton there’s also Susan Sarandon as Bebe, the woman with whom De Niro’s character currently lives, and she has to move out of the house for a couple of days in order to keep the facade going, and she’s not happy about it.  “You really know how to serve your revenge cold,” she tells Keaton for reasons that won’t be revealed here but will make total sense when you see the film.

Robin Williams has a short though funny role as the family priest.  When the young couple meet him for the required interview before the service, he informs them that “Divorce is a sin in the eyes of God,” then adds, “No pressure.”

Patricia Rae is Madonna, the Colombian mother who flies in for the wedding.  She speaks no English – her dialog is subtitled throughout – and she’s suspicious from the moment she steps out of the taxi.  For most of the film she has the continual, disapproving look of someone who constantly smells something bad.  Even though she doesn’t understand the language, she can see that everyone around her is either lying or having an affair with someone they shouldn’t.  “It’s like watching Telemundo,” she complains to her son.

In many respects, you feel as though you’ve seen it all before.  The set up is really La Cage Aux Folles without the transvestites, and the design of the film – the large, country estate by the picturesque lake, the white walls, the white suits for the men, the white dresses for the women, and everyone’s attractive – has the look of  Sweden’s Smiles of a Summer Night.  It’s as if La Cage’s Renato and Albin spent a weekend in the country with Ingmar Bergman.  Despite its familiar feel, the film’s adult humor – at times, very adult; it earns its R rating – is often funny.  There are even a couple of belly laughs, a rarity in our homegrown comedies these days. 

MPAA Rating:  R    Length:  89 minutes     Overall Rating; 6 (out of 10)

For more film & local theatre reviews CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website.

Despite the presence of the always welcomed and extremely talented Colin Firth and Emily Blunt, the new drama from director Dante Arilola, Arthur Newman, is not particularly good. 

What might have seemed like interesting ideas to explore when the project was in the development stage has turned out to be a plodding affair that does nothing but drag.  Once you become uninterested in the characters, which may happen long before the film concludes, you start to get that dreaded feeling that Arthur Newman is never going to end.

Colin Firth is Wallace Avery, a man who wants to change his past.  His wife has left him and his son all but ignores him.  “Bought you a gift,” he tells his boy as he attempts to be kind and hand his son a small token, but the boy rides away on his bike as if his father wasn’t even there.  So Wallace concocts a plan.  He stages a disappearance, buys a new identity, and hits the road to fulfill a dream; to be a golf pro at a country club in Terre Haut,  Indiana.

On his way to Hoosierland, Wallace, now with an ID that reads Arthur Newman, meets another lost soul.  Emily Blunt is Michaela, known simply as Mike, and she too is traveling under a different identity.  Together they ride through the country, discovering little pieces of information about each other along the way.  “So you’re a phony?” the woman asks Wallace after she finds his real ID tucked away in a side pocket of one of his bags.

Both Blunt and Firth possess excellent American accents and maintain them throughout.  They’re initially fun to watch as they bounce the occasional barb off each other.  “Don’t think this makes us closer, ok?” Blunt’s character tells Firth once he discovers that she too is using a fake name.  At times, when the characters start breaking into empty homes and assume the identity of the homeowners for the duration of their ‘stay’ the film actually seems to pick up, but it dips again as soon as they get back on the road.

For a film that sets its story of personal discovery on a cross-country journey, Arthur Newman feels as though it’s going nowhere. 

MPAA Rating:  R    Length:  101 Minutes    Overall Rating:  4 (out of 10)

For more film & local theatre reviews CLICK HERE to go to the David Appleford Film & Theatre Review website