By Susan Granger
Maya Forbes’ episodic, autobiographical family comedy, “Infinitely Polar Bear,” is based on her own confusing childhood in the late 1970s in Cambridge, Mass. Her father, Donald Cameron Forbes, was manic-depressive or bi-polar, once writing “infinitely polar bear” on a hospital admission form.
Chain-smoking Cam Stuart (Mark Ruffalo) is impulsive, unpredictable and eccentric. He adores his wife, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), and their two precocious daughters, Faith (Ashley Aufderheide) and Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky).
While Cam comes from wealth, he’s unable to hold a job. Both Cam and his patrician parents (Keir Dullea, Beth Dixon) are dependent on bits of money doled by his grandmother, the matriarch of an old Boston blue-blood family.
So it falls to Maggie to be the bread-winner. To that end, she gets a scholarship to earn her M.B.A. at Columbia. For the 18 months she’s in New York, troubled Cam must fight to hold it all together to take care of the spirited, grade school-age girls in a cramped, cluttered apartment.
In the pivotal leading role, Mark Ruffalo (“Foxcatcher,” “The Hulk”) artfully combines rumpled resentment over the hard choices they’re forced to make with a mercurial abundance of humor, love – and Lithium. While Zoe Saldana is sympathetic and believable, her role seems oddly underwritten in comparison with his.
Deftly glossing over the darker aspects of mental illness, innately optimistic Maya Forbes helms her first feature film with insight and sensitivity, deftly integrating sequences from some of her late father’s Super 8 home movies.
In college, Maya Forbes wrote for The Harvard Lampoon, then moved to Los Angeles, where she spent four years as a writer/producer on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” She’s married to writer/producer Wally Wolodarsky and 12-year-old Imogene is their real-life daughter. Maya also writes songs with her younger sister, China Forbes, lead singer of the band Pink Martini.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Infinitely Polar Bear” is an engaging, enigmatic 8, an offbeat, feel-good film that tugs at your heartstrings.
“I’m old – not obsolete,” proclaims Arnold Schwarzenegger’s monosyllabic cyborg, in “Terminator Gynisys,” as the sci-fi fantasy franchise continues.
It begins in 2029, when John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect his mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke). Unexpectedly, the timeline fractures, so Kyle lands in Los Angeles in an altered version of the past, complicating his mission to re-set the future.
The aging T-800 (Arnold) has become Sarah’s protector, turning her into a hardnosed warrior. She’s devoted to him, calling him “Pops.” But they’re up against more sophisticated killing machine, T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee), consisting of menacing, malleably mutating, metallic goo – and it’s even more lethal.
Now, the impending Judgment Day, when Skynet goes rogue, isn’t 1997 but 2017, when Skynet plans to take over the world, utilizing a nefarious operating system called Genisys that coordinates everyone’s portable communication devices.
You may need a flow chart to follow this confusing, fragmented plot, complete with gibberish dialogue and bizarre flashbacks to future events, directed by Alan Taylor, based on James Cameron’s concept.
Since Taylor directed several “Game of Thrones” TV episodes, he cleverly cast Emilia Clarke (a.k.a. Daenerys, mother-of-dragons) as Sarah, a role originated by Linda Hamilton; Emilia has an easy camaraderie with Arnold. Unfortunately, Australian actor Jai Courtney’s Reese, when clothed, turns out to be rather bland and uninteresting.
In an obvious appeal to video gamers, there’s lots of digital spectacle and staged destruction. One of the most memorable scenes has the then-37-year-old Austrian bodybuilder fighting the now-67-year-old ex-governor, courtesy of CGI.
And J.K. Simmons surfaces for comic relief, playing an alcoholic, yet determined L.A.P.D. detective who has spent three decades trying to unravel the Terminator mystery.
On the Granger Gauge, “Terminator Genisys” is a tangled, transecting 7, proving time travel is tricky.
( Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
