Rating: « out of ««««

Running Time: 99 minutes

Most people, myself included, typically think of The Nutcracker simply as a famous ballet. However, the stage production is actually based on a 1812 short story by author E.T.A Hoffmann.

The new Disney film The Nutcracker and the Four Realms uses the written work as a loose inspiration to tell a new tale. In some ways, one might even think of it as a filmic sequel. It is a colorful picture and one that may appeal to small children, but doesn’t translate nearly as well for older members of the audience.

Clara (Mackenzie Foy) is a downcast youngster, upset over the death of her mother enough to take it out on her father (Matthew Macfadyen).

As the holidays approach, the lead is gifted with a locked, ornate egg and a cryptic message from her mother. During a Christmas party, the girl travels through a magical portal to a spectacular world where she hopes to find a key that will open the oval object. Clara succeeds, but not before the little opener is stolen by a mischievous mouse and his cohorts. She then meets leaders from various realms within this world, including Sugar Plum (Kiera Knightley).

Plum and the others inform Clara they knew her late mom and that Ginger (Helen Mirren) from the Fourth Realm is plotting to use the girl’s key against the entire kingdom.

For a relatively short film (without credits it actually runs under 90 minutes), this is an awkwardly plotted movie that takes some time to really get moving.

There’s a fair amount of set-up involved, between introducing the girl and her relations/family friends, setting up the fantasy world and those within it, including a friendly soldier (Jayden Fowora-Knight) who vows to help, and then introducing the threat.

In fact, it feels as if the film is almost halfway over before the real adventure to retrieve the key begins. Even with all the setup, certain performers like Morgan Freeman and Jack Whitehall seem underused.

The imagery is eye-popping in certain respects when the film retreats into the fantastic kingdom.

There are some interesting visuals with life-sized toys and moving mechanical apparatuses, but the digital animation is more than apparent in the backgrounds and many of the environments presented aren’t convincing. It’s clear that a lot of this movie was shot in front of a green screen.

The characters themselves also are left with little to say... there appears to be a certain flatness to the proceeding in general.

A couple of minor comments earn a chuckle, but much of the dialogue feels stilted and the majority of gags fall flat. Sadly, the shrieking Sugar Plum character comes across as particularly grating.

The editing is strangely clunky as well.

The action scenes don’t offer any thrills or tension, often forcing the young girl and her friends to fight off oncoming forces with lengthy shots involving heavy visual effects. There isn’t enough cutting or coverage used to enhance these sequences, particularly later on, and the confrontations do very little to add excitement to the grand finale.

And while the introduction of themes like grief and loss could have added the potential for a deeper and more meaningful story, the film ultimately backs away from addressing them, at least over the course of the quest. The other realm-based characters are clearly upset about the passing of Claire’s mom, but this movie avoids dwelling on it, missing a big dramatic opportunity.

I don’t want to sound too harsh, and I certainly believe that young children will enjoy the bright and pretty colors on display, but if that’s the best that I can say about The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, then something has certainly gone amiss. If your kids are excited about seeing the movie, it may be best to simply drop them off at the theater and return for them after the credits start rolling.

Visit: www.CinemaStance.com

By Glenn Kay

For the Sun

Rating: «« out of ««««

Running Time: 88 minutes

It has been 15 years since British secret agent Johnny English (who was no doubt a parody of James Bond) first debuted on the big screen. Frankly, I can’t specifically remember much at all about the original film, but it was successful enough to spawn a 2011 sequel that fared equally well at the box office.

After a profitable run in other parts of the world, this week sees the release of Johnny English Strikes Again in North America.

When a mysterious computer hacker releases the names of every MI7 operative to the public, the U.K.’s prime minister (Emma Thompson) is forced to take very drastic measures. First, she must reinstate and assign ex-agent and now schoolteacher Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) to the case.

With trusty tech genius Bough (Ben Miller) by his side, the protagonist heads across Europe to investigate the cyber-attack. While the nervous prime minister considers privatizing the government servers under Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jason Volta (Jake Lacy), English faces off against Russian spy Ophelia (Olga Kurylenko), who may be partly responsible for the breach in intelligence.

There are three jokes in the film that work quite effectively.

One involves English and Bough going undercover and taking on the personas of French waiters. The lead’s attempts at serving up a flame-based dish offers up a chuckle.

Another bit later on features the pair captured while attempting to sneak onto a boat where they believe the online attack originated. After using a loud explosive to break free from the brig, English screams instructions to his compatriot while trying to sneak around the ship unnoticed.

The third and funniest sequence involves the lead accidentally ingesting an amphetamine and unwittingly taking down an assassin multiple times while busting ridiculous movies on a dancefloor.

These moments are undeniably silly and pedestrian, yet Atkinson’s physical comedy skills and bizarre gesticulations somehow manage to sell the gags.

This is clearly a film made with younger audiences in mind, as much of the humor revolves around goofy, broadly played pratfalls and dopey situations.

While there are a few bits of inspired lunacy, three jokes do not make a great comedy. It’s unfortunate that the rest of the movie never really amounts to much. Outside the previously described segments and an odd chuckle here and there, most of the gags as written are telegraphed and land with an obvious thud.

The idea of bringing back an incompetent agent trained in outmoded ways and placing him in the modern world could have resulted in a lot of contrast, conflict and great material, but the script always takes the easy route.

When an interesting scenario comes around, it is played for a quick laugh before the story moves on, rarely building on the gag and taking it to potentially humorous extremes. Instead, the story’s protagonist simply bumbles around, accidentally manages to get the job done and occasionally acts superior to others about his approach. One can get away with that kind of a joke once or twice, but in this film it all becomes repetitive very quickly.

In the end, Johnny English Strikes Again is perfectly satisfied in aiming low and allowing the natural talent of the leads to make up for the various deficiencies in the screenplay. They are all excellent performers and manage to eke out a laugh or two, but they can’t overcome such a lackluster screenplay that never wants to get too wild or parody its subject with any real bite.

Like the other films in this series, one will have great difficulty remembering much about it after the credits roll.

Visit: www.CinemaStance.com

By Glenn Kay
For the Sun

Adjusting budgets to salvage rural health care

Health care is one area of life where one size does not fit all. That can be a real problem for small, rural communities like McKinley County, which rely on local hospitals for a full range of care – some of which isn’t available locally.

Fixing the situation won’t be easy and it’s going to take commitment, a panel of local providers told a community audience Sept. 10 at an event sponsored by Community Health Action Group.

Attendees were treated to a screening of the activist film American Hospitals: Healing a Broken System, which asks the question: “How can we incentivize hospitals to provide the highest quality care with the lowest affordable cost to the community?”

The filmmakers make the point that rural communities are often not well served by a system built around huge, urban medical centers.

Large hospitals are increasingly profit-driven, pushing expensive interventions when a patient is in dire condition and focusing less on the day-to-day care that may be just as important but doesn’t ring up as much on cash registers. This is partly because private investors have taken a stake in the health care business and look at hospitals like any other business.

“Private equity-backed firms have been attracted to emergency rooms in recent years because ERs are profitable and because they have been able to charge inflated amounts for out-of-network care — at least until a federal law cracked down on surprise billing,” as stated in a Kaiser Family Foundation study published in April. The article cited a doctor/CEO of a startup job site for emergency physicians, who found that private equity-backed staffing firms run 25% of the nation’s emergency rooms.

Another study published by Becker’s Hospital Review in February found that less than 15% of hospital board members at the country’s highest-ranked hospitals have any medical experience, but 44% have backgrounds in private equity, banking and finance.

The film focuses on how for-profit health care often puts physicians at odds with their mission by putting pressure on visit times and expensive services.

Local providers Dr. Valory Wangler, Dr. John Mezoff and Dr. Warner Anderson provided commentary and took audience questions after the screening, with CHAG leader Dr. Constance Liu acting as moderator.

One solution the film proposes is replacing the fee-for-service model with global budgeting, which sets an overall limit on health care spending, leaving it to providers and payers to determine how to keep spending under budget. In global budgeted systems, providers are paid an agreed amount to treat a population for a specified length of time.

Such a system might help rural hospitals attract and retain the kind of talent they want, rather than physicians whose first motivation is profit, the doctors suggested.

“It changes the attitude from teaching services that make money and cutting those that don’t make money, like labor and delivery, but which are very community important,” Mezoff said.

Anderson lamented how a shift away from service hurts rural hospitals.

“In the past, 40 years ago, people came here because they wanted to serve…What I’ve found is that [now] people come to Gallup and say, ‘Look at all those people. I can make a ton of money.’ Then they come here and it takes about a year to figure out, no, it’s a lot of work,” Anderson said.

Corporate-style health care often leads to bloated salaries for administrators and a few providers, Anderson pointed out, while neglecting preventive care and services like labor and delivery that are in demand but not big revenue generators.

“A lot of salaries have ballooned to astronomical proportions – high salaries for some providers, administrators, all these high-end people that are getting huge salaries beyond what is reasonable,” he said.

Wangler said any solutions should be data driven to meet the local demand.

“Community input would be important, but balancing that with the actual data,” she said. “This community has a high level of diabetes. How do we make sure that we have the medications and the support services for that?”

One audience member suggested partnering with a federal hospital, as a few rural communities have done, to pool resources so the hospital provides interventions while physicians outside the hospital provide primary care. That’s difficult to persuade the federal government to do, but in McKInley County it may be possible to work with Indian Health Service on that kind of arrangement.

“About 70% of RMCH patients are Native American. If IHS was willing to contract out for primary care, that would be one way to do it,” Anderson said.

Another step could be the citizen advisory panel that CHAG is recruiting, under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce, to counsel the new hospital board, Mezoff said.

“Whatever services are developed here, we have to have a mechanism to make sure they are sustainable,” Anderson said. “We saw what happened to OB-GYN.”

By Holly J. Wagner
Sun Correspondent

Rating: «« out of ««««

Running Time: 141 minutes

Most people know of astronaut Neil Armstrong as the first person to step foot on the moon. However, less are aware of the incredible work and dedication it took to get there. Director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) chronicles the man’s story in the biopic, First Man. The film expertly recreates the tension and peril that all of these explorers face as they head into the sky.

Sadly, the human drama isn’t nearly as engrossing.

The movie begins, following Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an aerospace engineer already engaged in testing equipment. After his young daughter succumbs to weakened health following a brain tumor diagnosis, he applies for a NASA position and becomes determined to help advance the country’s space program.

Over the next several years, he works tirelessly on dangerous missions, often frustrating and upsetting wife Janet (Claire Foy). After several years, Armstrong is assigned his most dangerous and potentially significant mission of landing on the moon and walking on its surface.

The flight sequences are compelling.

From the opening sequence, in which a test flight results in the pilot’s craft bouncing off the atmosphere, the film captures the innate danger involved.

For much of the feature, the camera is kept within the cockpit with Armstrong seeing only what is visible through the glass (with the exception of the finale). This works well to create a sense of confined space and claustrophobia, even as the characters venture out into space.

The movie makes the most of these sequences over the course of the story numerous problems are encountered. Every moment appears to threaten the lives of these astronauts.

Yet, while the film excels on a technical level when the characters are in orbit, the human drama leaves a lot more to be desired.

Gosling portrays Armstrong likely as he was. Qualities portrayed include a muted personality and severe stoicism. This was a quiet man who clearly didn’t enjoy talking or expressing his thoughts and feelings, even to his wife. As a result, the character comes across as, well, more than a little stiff. To counterbalance this quality, the feature explains that the tragic death of his daughter may have caused him to shy away from others even within his own clan.

Still, it seems a bit flimsy. His brief interactions with blunt personalities like Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) end up making one wish the film had included more contrasting personalities.

Ultimately, the movie doesn’t do much to truly get inside his head.

The conflict that grows between Armstrong and Janet appears equally muted and dramatically flat.

Oddly enough, conversations between the lead and his fellow astronauts as well as with family are shot from an intimate perspective not unlike the missions themselves. Perhaps the director was attempting to maintain a feeling of intimacy with his adventurers, but it becomes a distraction as the camera always appears to be inches away from the lead’s face, whether we’re flying to the moon or sitting with him at a table.

The final images on the moon finally open up the frame and show some sense of scope, as well as try to give an emotional release for Armstrong. By this point, we’re so distanced from the central characters that the accomplishment itself doesn’t reach the emotional heights that it should.

Anyone who is a space enthusiast or who wants to get a sense of what it might be like sitting in a confined aircraft will find some tense and captivating moments when the astronauts are striving into the unknown.

It’s just a little unfortunate that the human drama featured in First Man never really lifts off and takes viewers to the same heights.

Visit: www.CinemaStance.com

By Glenn Kay 
For the Sun