Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Reviews

Frontrunners

A very entertaining documentary

By GERALD PEARY | October 25, 2008

3.0 Stars

Comparisons with Alexander Payne’s Election won’t fly. There’s no equivalent character to Reese Witherspoon’s conniving Tracy Flick in FrontRunners, Caroline Suh’s very entertaining feature documentary about a hard-fought battle for student-body president at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. The three serious candidates for the office are decent, smart, high-achieving kids — what you’d expect at New York’s most competitive public high school, one open to just the top three percent of applicants. Among the candidates, two stand out. Hannah is a cheerleader and a talented actress (she appeared in the indie feature Palindromes) who lives with her liberal mother on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. George, the son of Greek immigrants, resides in a Queens split-level. Both are charming and charismatic, though George, a cute junior version of Christian Slater, speaks in odd philosophical bites that wander perilously close to malapropism: “We want to get at the very spinal cord of student government.” Does this high-school election have any relevance to our national one? There’s a debate near the end pitting a highly motivated, verbally articulate candidate without student-government experience against one with several years of experience who resorts to clichés ( “Let’s raise the bar!”) and gnarls his rhetoric. 80 minutes | Brattle Theatre: October 24-30

Related: My two Dads, Christmas On Mars, Swede heart, More

My two Dads
For those still jonesing for The Sopranos , Chazz Palminteri's A Bronx Tale (at the Colonial Theatre through April 5) may provide a somewhat sanitized fix.
Christmas On Mars
Stylized after the sci-fi B-movies of yore, the film recycles Atomic Age angst: a group living in a space station on Mars have run out of spare parts, and it seems that everyone’s doomed.
Swede heart
Few contemporary singers achieve as perfect a confluence of sound and image as Sarah Assbring. It's deeply reassuring to hear mournful, stylized '60s pop coming out of a melancholic beanpole who resembles a recently bereaved Edie Sedgwick.
New stuff
One thing that impressed me was that dance invention seems to be making a comeback as a major challenge for young choreographers after years of being stirred into the multimedia stew.
Music Seen: Anticon's 10th anniversary
Sure, Ray LaMontagne is huge and the Rustic Overtones saw their national time, but there is something to be said for a record label co-founded by Mainers that is more than a decade old and can still sell out the Knitting Factory in New York City.
Paris je t'aime
The concept for this anthology was a short film representing each of Paris’s 20 arrondissements, from the Jardins des Tuileries (#1) to the Cimitière du Père Lachaise (#20).
Bike Porn cranks your gears in Cambridge
If you still want to view steamy cinema in a public setting, we have a festival for you
52 ways to leave 2009
Your usual lackadaisical approach to New Year's Eve — just see what happens and go with the flow — is not going to cut it this year. Sure, the end of this decade may not have the same kind of new-millennium pressure riding on it as the last one, but the plunge into 2010 is a milestone nonetheless.
Photos: Lost Finale Party at the Brattle Theatre
This party had What It Takes
What John did and saw
In anticipation of the July 1 release of Michael Mann's Public Enemies with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and as part of its week-long "Classic Gangsters" series, the Brattle is screening two rarely seen films this Sunday: John Milius's 1973 Dillinger and W.S. Van Dyke's Manhattan Melodrama.
Review: Beeswax
Beeswax as in, mind your own . . . ?
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