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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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Blood Diamond (Movie Review)
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by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
Grade C PG 95 min.
Unaccompanied Minors is like a Christmas time Breakfast Club for eight to fourteen-year-olds, minus the drug references, with better chase scenes, “funnier” material, and with tons more holiday shlock. That’s exactly how I envision the picture being pitched to studio execs. It seems to borrow form a cadre of kid’s movies, like Home Alone. It’s updated, of course, following six kids of very different backgrounds traveling without their parents and stuck in an airport because of snow. It’s not the most original flick to hit theaters, but it is sure to be a winner with kids in the above mentioned age group, provided that they aren’t too sophisticated in their tastes.
Luckily, the movie moves fast enough that you might not have time to ponder the conventions being re-treaded. It’s definitely a safe movie to take your kids to, as there aren’t any sexual references or bad language. Also, the child actors filling out the roles do an excellent job of charming their audience and are very well cast.
The film is directed by Paul Feig, who also directed the short lived cult TV series Freaks and Geeks. Unfortunately, I was counting on his past resume to make this flick more interesting than it was.
As a fan of That 70’s Show, I was happy to see actor Wilmer Valderrama in a major motion picture. He plays the harried and sympathetic flight attendant Zach Van Bourke who furtively helps the kids.
Comedian Lewis Black plays Oliver Porter, who oversees the operations at the airport and is the film’s overwrought Scrooge. He plays his part in an over the top manner that fits horrible lines like “Last one down is a fired apple.”
We follow six kids in the movie, although the core four stay together for the majority of the movie. Gina Mantegna plays the rich girl Grace Conrad, who escapes from the pen of unaccompanied minors to go to the airport spa (where she runs up a $450 bill). Her brand conscious snobbishness soon disappears as she joins the other renegade kids. Spencer Davenport, played by Dyllan Christopher is just an ordinary, awkward fourteen-year-old boy, working to impress Grace. His attempts to impress Grace are thwarted by his little sister, Katherine Davenport, played by Dominique Saldana. Tyler James Williams, from Everybody Hates Chris, plays the ivy-league bound Charlie Goldfinch. He’s a complete nerd, who seems to have mostly been around adults and doesn’t normally hang out with kids his age. He escapes to The Sharper Image Store, where he tries out all the gadgets and eventually ends up singing karaoke. Tough, tomboyish Donna Malone, played by Quinn Shephard, fulfills a fantasy I’m sure everyone has had: she steals a skycap cart and drives it at top speed through the airport. Timothy “Beef” Wellington, played by Brett Kelly is the weirdest of the bunch. He fills in the consummate weirdo role played by Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club, with his own particular brand of weirdness and imagination.
Grace and Spencer pair off in the end, as do the tomboy Donna and the nerd Charlie. The scriptwriters seemed to have found the fact that “Beef” wasn’t coupled off a bit sad, so they wrote a slapdash scene in at the end, giving him a romantic interest. That, like much of the movie, had a manufactured quirkiness that I found hard to swallow.
I tried very hard to suspend my belief at several points in the film, mostly because security was so utterly inept. If it’s that easy to get around security at an airport, why do I have to take my shoes off and get wanded? These kids would have been arrested by real cops the moment they stole that sky cab cart and trashed an airport book stand.
Some of the best moments in the film came from the adults that just had cameos, like Teri Garr as the tipsy, over-decorating aunt, who continues to festoon her already decorated house as she reassures Valerie Davenport (Paget Brewster) who is worried about her kids stuck at the airport.
For most of the movie, I was looking for a big laugh, and I never really found it. The movie was cute, but it never had me laughing out loud. I’ll forgive a great deal, if a movie can deliver punch lines that have me laughing rather than groaning. The characters are somewhat memorable but the script and plot lack originality. Still, it’s a fun holiday romp with plenty of physical comedy that younger kids are sure to enjoy.
The endearing screenplay for Unaccompanied Minors was based on Susan Burton’s coming-of-age story “Babysitting” on Chicago Public Radio’s Peabody Award-winning program This American Life. “I heard this story on the radio about two sisters who get stuck in an airport traveling from one parent to another,” recalls producer Michael Aguilar. “It struck me as a great idea for a movie because there was adventure, fun and an emotional center. So I got together with writers Jacob Meszaros and Mya Stark to create a group of young fictional characters who get stuck in an airport over Christmas without their families and create a little makeshift family of their own.”
Together with Aguilar, fellow producer Lauren Shuler Donner looked for the right director to realize their project. A few years ago, Paul Feig had established his knack for telling stories about adventures in adolescence as creator of the critically acclaimed television series Freaks and Geeks.
Shuler Donner states, “We were so glad that Paul really responded to the material. He has such a unique voice and style, and he is so good at combining physical comedy with heartwarming elements. Plus, nobody understands early teen angst like Paul.”
Having appeared on This American Life himself, Feig shares, “I was drawn to this project for so many reasons. I am always trying to tell stories about family or about people bonding together. Here you have five kids from separate families joined together by the fact that they’re mostly kids of divorced parents and, during the holiday season, are sent around from one parent to the other. I just love the idea of strangers who are thrust together and find that they have things in common. Also, I’d been wanting to make a fun, physical, sort of old-fashioned comedy like the kind I grew up watching. I just wanted to try and capture that fun slapstick style of comedy.”
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