Spring break might come in the form of your annual trip to Bora Bora, or it might just mean going home to sleep for seven days straight. No matter what your plans, the free time means it’s time to hit the movie theater right when the theater most needs the money. Intermission has the top movies you should check out over the break.
Peter Hedges’ new film, “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” features characters similar to those of his last film, “Dan in Real Life”: clueless but well-meaning parents and children that are wise beyond their years. Whereas as “Dan in Real Life” was a breath of fresh air, including an all-star cast and modern themes, the characters in “Timothy Green” are plain and hackneyed and play out a story so simple-minded and quaint that it could have been written 30 years ago.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series first appeared in 1912 with the immensely popular “A Princess of Mars.” Over the course of Burroughs’ life, he wrote 10 more books about Barsoom – or Mars, for us human folk – all of which became massively influential both during his lifetime and long after his death. Famous science-fiction authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke and H.P. Lovecraft were inspired by the series, and both George Lucas and James Cameron cited the books as explicit influences for “Star Wars” and “Avatar.” With such a wide swath of the American zeitgeist carved by Burroughs’ stories, it is surprising that it has taken a full century for Barsoom itself to appear on the silver screen in “John Carter.”
On opening night of “Beauty and the Beast” the audience was filled with parents and their young daughters, many of whom were dressed as princesses. While this is an appropriate and fun musical for kids, with enduring music, it is based on an 18th-century fairytale and thus is a bit outdated. While it’s a story of inner beauty triumphing over outer beauty, it must be noted that the story requires that the beautiful woman, Belle, see past the bad looks and bad temper of the man, the Beast, and not the reverse. Would the story be so popular and believable if the gender roles were reversed? It’s the 21st century, so is it too much to ask for a tale about a beautiful man and an ugly woman with inner beauty where the man must see past her looks?
Everyone loves a comeback kid, and as literally the only Disney star who can carry a tune, let alone sing, Demi Lovato has everyone rooting for her after a long year of personal battles. Her third album, “Unbroken,” isn’t quite perfect, but it’s good enough to satisfy the masses while remaining true to her original sound.
If “Cars 2” was made by DreamWorks, it’d be a pretty good movie. But because “Cars 2” is, of course, a Pixar film, it’s held to a higher standard.
21 isn’t the beginning of the rest of our lives, not in the sense of sinking into full-fledged adulthood. Technically, almost all of us at Stanford are adults, yet it strikes me how much of a transition stage we’re still undergoing. High school may be the time of so-called teenage angst, but college introduces a fresh dilemma: during our four years as undergraduates, we find ourselves highly conscious of the fact that we are no longer kids, but we do not always feel like adults, either.