"My Kid Could Paint That" and other recent DVD releases

"My Kid Could Paint That" is a fascinating, almost heartbreaking documentary about a family living in upstate New York; a quite unspectacular family at first glance. There’s the father, Mark Olmstead, who works the night shift at the local Frito-Lay plant. There’s his wife Laura who works days as a dental assistant. And then there’s the children, son Zane who’s just past his first birthday when the story begins and Marla, who is 3 going on 4. When she was 2, she watched her dad dabble in his oil painting hobby and told him she wanted to paint, too. Mark figured why not and much to his surprise she produced a painting that was quite advanced for a child her age. Then she did another. And another. And another. Soon the owner of a local coffee shop asked if he could hang some of his pictures in his shop. When his patrons started asking about the price of the paintings, it attracted the attention of the owner of a local gallery who decided to have a showing of her works. That led to a local newspaper article which was picked up quickly by the New York Times and before you could say "pint-sized Pollock," Marla had gone from a carefree 4-year-old girl who had fun playing with oils on canvas to a phenom whose works were selling for close to a $100,000 Then "60 Minutes" enters the picture, airing a segment on Marla that questions whether she really did paint these pictures, that perhaps the entire saga of Marla Olmstead is a fraud. The documentary reveals the devastating effect all this has on the Olmstead family, particularly Laura, who sensed from the very beginning that the media attention on her daughter could portray her as a freak. It is Laura’s story that is the heartbreaking one because, as she herself admits, she can’t remember clearly anything that happened to her when she was 4, so she doubts all this will leave permanent scars on Marla. The scars it leaves on Laura, however, are permanent, ugly and quite noticeable. In the end a movie about this family in upstate New York becomes a meditation on how we judge truthfulness and the effect the media has on those judgment calls. Grade: B-

"Into the Wild" is the overly romanticized version of the Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) story, the story of a 24-year-old graduate of Emory University who, in in the spring of 1992, hiked his way into the Alaskan wilderness, made his home in an abandoned bus, and died there four months later. Sean Penn’s filmed version of McCandless’ odyssey features some stunning camerawork and magnificent performances from Hirsch, Catherine Keener and Brian H. Dierker as a hippie couple he meets along the way and Hal Holbrook as the last human being McCandless had any real contact with and who wanted to adopt him. The film is based on, but significantly different than, a book by author/mountaineer Jon Krakauer. Penn gives us a McCandless who is motivated by a desire for ultimate freedom, spurred on by the writings of Thoreau and Tolstoy. According to Krakauer, McCandless was driven by much darker instincts, specifically a hatred for his father, who fathered a son by his first wife after his second wife had given birth to Chris. According to Krakauer, McCandless wanted to shed himself of the materialism his father represented (this is alluded to just once in the film, when Chris vehemently rejects his parents’ graduation gift to him of a new car). Penn is intent on portraying McCandless as a tragic hero when it appears he was nothing more than an idealistic kid who literally bit off more than he could chew. Grade: B-

Wes Anderson’s "The Darjeeling Limited" stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as three brothers who try to heal their individual and collective wounds with a trip through India. Wilson as Francis is recovering from a motorcycle accident, Brody as Peter is running away from pending fatherhood and Jason as Jack is trying to get over some heartbreak. Collectively, they are also not fully recovered from the death of their father a year earlier and the fact that their mother (Anjelica Huston) never even showed up for the funeral. At one point in the film someone asks Francis what they are doing and he replies "We were on a spiritual journey but it didn’t work out very well." That about sums up my feelings about this movie -- there’s something missing here but because Anderson never makes clear what he’s trying to achieve, it’s difficult to identify the missing ingredient. It’s a road movie in which the travelers have no idea where they are going which makes it difficult for me to invest that much into their journey. But I will also admit I have gone one trips with a lot less entertaining traveling companions than Francis, Peter and Jack. Grade: C+

"Things We Lost in the Fire" is an uneven film highlighted by another dynamic performance from Benicio Del Toro and a return to excellence from Halle Berry who shows, finally, that "Monster’s Ball" wasn’t a fluke. The film is about recovery—Berry’s Audrey Burke must recover from the murder of her husband Brian (David Duchovny), killed trying to save a woman who was being beaten by her husband; Del Toro’s Jerry Sunborne must not only recover from the death of Brian, who was his best friend since second grade, but also his own heroin addiction. How Audrey and Jerry come to depend on each other is the crux of the film and the powerful scenes between these two characters make this a DVD worth renting. The film has the courage never to make it easy on these two. However, you’re going to have to put up with a lot of minor irritants as well, such as flashbacks to the deification of Brian; some silliness involving a neighbor, Howard Glassman (John Carroll Lynch) who for reasons I never could fathom decides that Jerry would make an excellent mortgage broker and for reasons I could understand completely decides to leave his wife; and Danish director Susanne Bier’s habit of filming people in extreme closeups, so all we see is an eye, a corner of a mouth, etc. Audrey and Jerry are fascinating specimens to watch, but I never wanted to be that intimate with them. Grade: C

If, like I have heard, the computer animation whatever-it-is that went into the making of "Beowulf," is the future of motion pictures, count me among the less-than-enthused. Watching this made me feel like I was trapped in a wax museum when all the pasty characters came to life. Somehow this film has a PG-13 rating, although it has more blood and gore than "Pulp Fiction" and "Sweeney Todd" combined. In the mid 5th century, Beowulf (Ray Winstone) sails to the Denmark kingdom of Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) because he has heard that the people there are being ravaged by the evil troll Grendel (Crispin Glover). Beowulf slays the beast but doesn’t reckon with Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie) who makes Beowulf a deal he can’t refuse (a deal similar to one, it appears, she made Hrothgar many years before). The deal results in a dragon who returns to annihilate what is now Beowulf’s kingdom many years later. The movie has its silly moments -- Beowulf fights Grendel in the nude in a scene right of Austin Powers, which I don’t think was meant to be the inspiration here. But it also has some breathtaking ones, like Jolie emerging from her watery lair wearing only stiletto heels that seem permanently attached to her feet. She was telling Beowulf something, but I’ll be damned if I was paying attention to the silly dialog at that moment. Grade: C-

The wonder of "Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium" is how director Zach Helm got such high-priced talent as Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman into this mess. It couldn’t be because his last screenplay was the Charlie Kaufmann-esque "Stranger Than Fiction," (in which Hoffman had a far more interesting part than the one he has here). Surely they read this script, about Edward Magorium (Hoffman doing an Ed Wynn imitation), a 243-year-old owner of a magical toy store who decides after all these years to just up and die and leave the store to his downhearted assistant Molly Mahoney (Portman, who doesn’t play it as Irish as the name would lead you to believe). This is a movie that would be more suited to people like Robin Williams and Shelley Long who don’t even have to try that hard to be irritating. I’m thinking the moral of the story is you can make magic if you just learn to believe in yourself, but that isn’t terribly original. I did like the set decoration, especially in a scene in which Hoffman, alone in the store, launches a paper glider in flight. Grade: D