[ThisWeek] Dreamer and Friends With Money at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Summer Matinee series begins-
Dreamer (PG)
Wednesday, June 14
1:00 PM
$4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger
(See Reviews below)

Friends With Money (R)
Thursday, Friday & Saturday, June 15, 16, & 17
7:00 PM
Sunday, June 18
4:45 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult
KFS pass accepted for Sunday movies
(See Reviews below)

Price change:
As of June 1, children's movie admission prices have been raised to $3.  The
matinees are still $1 for children.
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (PG)
Wednesday, June 21
1:00 PM

Thank You For Smoking (R)
Thursday, Friday & Saturday, June 22, 23, & 24
7:00 PM
Sunday, June 25
4:45 & 7:00 PM
* * *

Also in June at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (G)
June 28, 1:00 PM

Coming in July: Hoot; Nanny McPhee; Ice Age: The Meltdown

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger
Wednesday matinee prices: $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.  KFS pass good only for
Sunday movies.

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org
* * *

This week¹s reviews-

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story

Directed by John Gatins
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Rated PG for brief mild language


As reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times

One of the most important stories in Sports Illustrated's history was
written by William Nack, the great writer about horses and boxing. Nack grew
up around racetracks, served in Vietnam, and when he returned noticed
something new: A lot of horses were breaking down. In earlier years, it was
rare for a horse to break a leg during a race. His investigation met a wall
of silence, until one vet talked to him off the record, confirming his
suspicions: Owners were using cortisone to deaden the pain of horses that
should not be racing, and the broken bones were the result.

When a racehorse breaks a leg on the track, it is invariably put down.
Nack's story "Breakdowns" told of the death of one such filly. I heard Nack
read it once, at a signing for his book My Turf, and people in the audience
were crying. 

The movie "Dreamer" is based on a true story of the unthinkable: A horse
that broke a bone and came back to race again. She was Mariah's Storm,
winner of the 1995 Turfway Breeders' Cup.

The movie is a well-made use of familiar materials, including the loyalty
between a child and a horse that goes back to "National Velvet" (1944) and
"The Black Stallion" (1979). It's aimed at an audience of teenagers who may
never have heard of those films, and for them, "Dreamer" will be an exciting
experience. It has a first-rate cast: Dakota Fanning as young Cale Crane,
Kurt Russell as her father Ben, and Kris Kristofferson as her grandfather
Pop.

Ben is a trainer for the rich and supercilious Palmer (David Morse). He
likes the prospects of a filly named Soñador, which is Spanish for
"dreamy"-- close enough to Dreamer, especially since the title refers to
Cale. She's at the track one day when her dad tells Palmer he doesn't think
Soñador should run: "She doesn't want to race today." Palmer overrules him,
the horse runs, and she breaks a leg.

Ben later admits, "If Cale hadn't been with me that night, I'd have left
that horse on the track." But Cale is there, and looking at her big sad
eyes, her father has the leg splinted and wrapped, and brings the horse back
to the stable. This inspires an argument with Palmer, who is forced to
regard the results of his own bad judgment. Ben resigns, taking a pay-out --
and the horse.

This is not something he can afford to do. Their farm, which is already "the
only horse farm in Lexington, Ky., without any horses," is facing
foreclosure. But Soñador mends, and Ben and Pop think maybe she can be bred.
That's before Cale gives Soñador her head one day, and the two men watch
Cale and the horse flying across the turf.

What happens next I will leave for you to discover, including the subplot
involving the two Arab brothers who are rival horse owners. What is central
is young Dakota Fanning's performance, as a mite of a girl who stands up to
be counted. Fanning it is said, appears in every third movie nowadays; she's
busy, all right, but that's because she's good, and here she plays Cale as a
girl who has watched horses and trainers and grown up around the track and
tempers her sentiment for Sonador with an instinct that the horse has more
race left in her.

They say girls discover horses right before they discover boys. Whether that
represents progress is a question every parent of a teenager must sometimes
ponder, but certainly any girl (and a lot of boys) in the target age group
are going to make "Dreamer" one of their favorite films.

For adults, the movie offers the appeal of solid, understated performances
by Russell, Kristofferson and David Morse, whose villain doesn't gnash but
simply calculates heartlessly. And then of course there is the horse racing.
If your horse might win but might break the same leg again, you have so much
riding on the race that the odds don't really come into it.


As reviewed bySteven Rea writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer

Dakota Fanning looks tired and worried in Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story.
Her appearance could be attributable to the 11-year-old's daunting workload,
starring in one pic on top of another opposite Hollywood's A-list - Robert
De Niro, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn - over the last few years.

Then again, it could be just the latest example of Fanning's preternatural
abilities to emote. In ³Dreamer,² a charming girl-and-her-horse yarn, she
plays Cale Crane, the daughter of broke (and broken) Kentucky horse trainer
Ben Crane (Kurt Russell), who bets everything on a filly with a bad leg.
Things are so dire at the Crane ranch that they don't have any horses there,
and Mom (Elisabeth Shue) has to work as a waitress to help out with the
bills. Even on a good tip night, it's not enough.

Nicely run through its paces by John Gatins, who also wrote the screenplay
(it's his directing debut), ³Dreamer² is, not surprisingly, about daring to
dream the big dreams. It's about family, and faith, and facing hard times
together. Shot in the splendid horse country of Kentucky (not far from
Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown), and featuring some galloping races both on
and off the track (Cale and So?ador take off across the fields one fateful
day), the movie is just hokey enough to pull at the heartstrings without
making you feel as if you've been worked over by a thug wielding a club made
of cotton candy.

It's Fanning's show (and the horse's), but Russell, who began his own career
about the same age as his little leading lady (he was a contract player at
Disney at 10), does a nice job as the horseman who has to rediscover his
trust in his own abilities - and reconnect with his daughter and his father.

Like any self-respecting underdog (or underhorse) sports pic, ³Dreamer² has
its formulas, its familiar ups and downs. But it's to Fanning's and
Russell's credit, and the filmmakers', that the formula never gets the
better of the film.


As reviewed by Barbara Vancheri writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When John Gatins wrote the screenplay for "Dreamer," he envisioned three
generations of Crane men: a grandfather, a father and a young son. Then he
watched Dakota Fanning in the revenge thriller "Man on Fire" and decided to
change the gender of the child.

The protagonist of "Flightplan" was switched from a father to a mother, and
Jodie Foster made that movie tick, just as 11-year-old Fanning does for
"Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story." The best young actress working today,
she brings to Cale Crane a determination, vulnerability and innocent belief
that anything really is possible -- not to mention a little touch of a real
child, with front teeth that would later be fitted with braces.

"Dreamer" feels formulaic and farfetched, but in a family-friendly,
feel-good way. It's from DreamWorks, not Disney, but it stars one of that
studio's former child stars in Russell and a little girl who shows the same
sort of wholesome appeal and mature talent. She looks like Russell and acts
like him, too.
* * *
 
Friends With Money

Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A little
sex, a little dope.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes


As reviewed by Manohla Dargis writing for the New York Times

In the final scene of Nicole Holofcener's "Friends With Money," a
bittersweet comedy about the drama of being alive ‹ with and without a
fistful of dollars ‹ the actress Jennifer Aniston summons up a small smile
that looks a lot like a frown. It would be a stretch to say that at that
moment her character, a vaguely depressed pot-smoking housekeeper named
Olivia, is actually happy, but neither is she exactly unhappy. It's just
that she, much as the rumpled man tucked into bed next to her says about
himself, has "some issues, you know ... problems."

Most of Olivia's problems involve money, though she also has serious man
troubles (she doesn't have one) and career woes (ditto). What she does have
are three older married friends ‹ played by Frances McDormand, Catherine
Keener and Joan Cusack ‹ who live in degrees of cocooned comfort in the
kinds of Los Angeles neighborhoods where the only people of color are either
taking care of the children or white folks working on their Malibu tans.
Unlike her friends, Olivia seems to expect little from life and never seems
surprised when that's what she gets. Having left her high school teaching
job (the brats tossed her quarters for food), she now cleans up after other
people, restoring to their lives a sense of order lacking in her own.

As might be expected, "Friends With Money" is about friendship and money and
about how having one sometimes, maybe always, interferes with the other.
Materialism and its discontents is a favorite American worry, but with its
melancholic low-frequency buzz and roster of navel-gazers, this film feels
particularly contemporary. Ms. Holofcener never suggests that her characters
need to get out of the house and start ladling chowder down at the local
soup kitchen; even the cars in this film don't wear peace signs. But she
obviously wants to say something about people who have too much of
everything for their own good. (And clearly knocking about the movie
business for years, as well as Los Angeles, has given her plenty of
material.)

Maybe it's the sprawl, but like many Los Angeles-based stories, including
Ms. Holofcener's last film, "Lovely and Amazing," this one radiates in many
different directions at once. In addition to Olivia, there's Jane, a
splenetic clothing designer (a sensational Ms. McDormand), and Christine,
one half of an unhappily married screenwriting team (Ms. Keener). Both women
appear to be struggling through what Gail Sheehy called the "forlorn 40's,"
while the third married friend, Franny (Ms. Cusack), a stay-at-home mom with
full-time help, has apparently skipped that passage and gone straight to
heaven with a fat bank account, a vigorous sex life with her own husband
(Greg Germann) and two kids who seem like pleasant afterthoughts. Rarely has
Ms. Cusack's googly-eyed, otherworldly vibe seemed so right for a role.

"Friends With Money" unfolds as a succession of vignettes organized around
meals, shopping trips and lonely nights, and is punctuated by some
laugh-out-loud bursts and a few punches to the gut. Ms. Holofcener is a
first-rate portraitist and something of a miniaturist, and she likes to use
a single telling detail, a bad habit, say, or a fixation ‹ like Olivia's
fondness for costly lotions or Jane's sudden refusal to wash her hair ‹ to
get at the larger meaning. If on occasion, as with Christine's ritualized
clumsiness, this tactic slips into contrivance (for someone in pain, she
whimpers "ow" a little too often), most of what's here nonetheless feels
startlingly honest.

"Friends With Money" is greatly appealing if not especially adventurous,
either for its director or for her admirers. Ms. Holofcener writes
wonderful, recognizably real women characters, but the narrowness of their
worlds and the continued modesty of her canvases suggest that, much like
Olivia, she would prefer to stick her head under the covers than out the
door. It's understandable that the filmmaker would be ambivalent about the
choices women face, but it would be nice if she herself expanded on those
choices a bit, or at least wrote a character that occasionally checked out
Arianna Huffington's blog. After all, while Olivia and the rest have been
drifting and freaking out, Ms. Holofcener has directed three very good
features that, in themselves, prove there's more to the modern woman's life
than her neuroses.


As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, who had more unambiguous triumphs
with her previous two films, "Walking and Talking" and "Lovely & Amazing,"
"Friends With Money" is about the friendships and life struggles of four
female friends, who all live in a well-heeled part of Los Angeles County.

At the center of the action is Jennifer Aniston as Olivia, the most broke of
the four friends and the only one who doesn't have a husband. Olivia, a
former teacher, is an aimless pothead, working as a housekeeper and pining
over an ex-boyfriend who is now married. The role brings out a fine
performance from Aniston, who has here some of the downtrodden quality she
had in "The Good Girl," plus a touch of recklessness and underlying anger.

Olivia is suffering from the angst of midlife failure, while Frances
McDormand as Jane has the opposite problem. A successful clothing designer,
she has achieved her heart's desire but finds herself angry all the time,
lashing out at minor injustices because she's afraid of having no more
horizons, that the great story of her life is over. Equally troubled is
Catherine Keener as Christine, a screenwriter who is married to her
screenwriting partner (Jason Isaacs) but is developing a bad feeling that
there might be something missing in his moral nature.

Rounding out the foursome is Joan Cusack, who, as Franny, has the least
developed role. She's rich and has always been rich, which makes her more
childlike in some ways and harder in other ways, but unlike her friends, she
is not going through any midlife crisis. In this, Holofcener seems to be
implying, intentionally or not, that it's one thing to have money, but if
you really want to have no problems, be enormously wealthy, and then you'll
never have to worry about anything. This notion is further reinforced near
the resolution.

The film ambles from one incident to another. Sometimes the couples go out
as a group. Sometimes the movie shows the women with their husbands, and at
other times it follows a solo character out and about in the world. Simon
McBurney plays one of the husbands, a gay-seeming straight man who is always
getting hit on by guys. The scenes in which that occurs are interesting in
the moment, but like a lot of what happens in the picture, there's a quality
of randomness. In the end, the good news to take from "Friends With Money"
has mainly to do with Aniston, who, playing opposite a trio of more seasoned
actresses, doesn't just hold her own but snares the best moments.


As reviewed by Philip French writing for The Observer (London)

When Jane Austen was once asked what she wrote about, she is said to have
replied: 'I write about love and money. What else is there to write about?'
These two subjects, thought by some to be intertwined, by others to be
antithetical, are central to Friends With Money, the third, unsentimentally
observant comedy by writer-director Nicole Holofcener, who here continues
her Woody Allen-influenced preoccupation with sisterhood (by birth or
choice), friendship, ambition and frustration among America's professional
middle classes.

>From her first movie, Walking and Talking , we learned that the way to
propose marriage to a live-in lover in New York is to leave a ring in her
diaphragm case. A similar joke opens Friends With Money. A cleaning woman,
her face unseen, keeps returning during her work to a bedside drawer
containing a vibrator. Eventually, she removes it, we hear a buzzing out of
frame and, when it's returned, we see the maid's face - it's Jennifer
Aniston giving one of her lopsided half-grins.

It turns out that this character, Olivia, has given up her job teaching at a
smart school in Santa Monica to do cleaning work, has no money, no regular
guy and is the subject of concern to her three closest friends who are all
married, prosperous and have a small child each. They're a successful
scriptwriter (the marvelous Catherine Keener who's been in all three of
Holofcener's pictures), a dress designer (Frances McDormand) and a seriously
rich philanthropist (Joan Cusack).

In their early forties, they're undergoing midlife crises and living at
various distances from the ends of their respective tethers. Ironically,
only the object of their concern, Olivia, whom they regard as a loser in
need of a man and marriage, has the potential for a change of direction
without causing harm to others.

It's a delightful film, unsparing in its emotional realism and performed by
a remarkable ensemble cast, full of incident and structured only by time (a
few weeks before and after Christmas in Los Angeles). It falls down towards
the end by bringing into the social and moral equation that familiar
Hollywood character, the self-effacing, unprepossessing millionaire who
travels economy class, buys clothes off the peg and is waiting to reward
true love.


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

Take a seat!  We mean that literally.  The Kenworthy is offering you the
opportunity to purchase one of a limited number of theater chairs in the
main auditorium.  Your gift will entitle you to an engraved, brass name
plate mounted on the back of the seat of your choice (based upon
availability).  One individual or business name per seat, please.

This naming opportunity, back by popular demand, is available for a donation
of $500 per chair.  You may purchase a chair in two installments of $250
over two years, or in three installments of $200 over three years.

Your gift will assist with the ongoing operation and renovation of the
Kenworthy Theater and fulfillment of our mission to be Moscow's premiere,
historic, downtown, community performing arts venue and cinematic art house.

For information about the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre, call Julie
Ketchum, Executive Director, at 208-882-4127.
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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