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First saw this when I was seven. Mostly memorable for being the only (?) movie I ever watched with aunt Nora. Otherwise I remember it being a pretty cool, very weird space movie which no other kids would discuss with me when I got back home to Texas because no one else had seen it.

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Little did I know I was witnessing the feature film debuts by two new stars, Ethan Hawke (left) and River Phoenix (with the glasses).

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Also this kid, Jason Presson, who was just as good but never got as far as his costars in the movie world (despite a cameo in Gremlins 2).

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And Ethan’s love interest Amanda Peterson, who got her own romantic comedy starring role two years later before disappearing from the screen. She was barely in this movie, the token female character. Ethan kisses her at the end in the above cloud-flying dream-sequence, to show that he has grown up a little bit from his adventures, and to show that despite all this fooling around in basements with his boy friends, he sure ain’t gay. River still might be.

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There’s a schoolyard villain, 17-yr-old Bobby Fite, but the coolest character is of course Dick Miller (above) as a helicopter pilot who sees the kids’ spaceship and single-mindedly tracks them down. A villain, perhaps, a stuffy adult authority figure come to put an end to their fun, but when he arrives at the clearing and sees them taking off in the ship, his reaction is unexpectedly sweet… he just smiles and stays behind the trees.

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Computer effects by ILM, makeup by Rob Bottin (fresh off The Thing), music by Jerry Goldsmith, with James Cromwell as River’s absentminded father… a respectable crew. Not at all a bad movie, but I have a hard time summoning up much excitement for it… just a cute little journey with a refreshingly unexpected conclusion.

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Nerdy German kid River is friends with picked-on dreamer Ethan. They love drive-ins, sci-fi and horror movies (hello, Joe Dante). Both begin to have a shared dream (the circuit board above), so River builds the board to the dream’s specs and has himself a computer-controlled floating forcefield. After teaming up with bully-baiting Jason, a tough loner kid from an unhappy home, they build a ship (called the Thunder Road, using a seat from a tilt-a-whirl) and test it out, surrounding it with the force field and buzzing their town, using alien technology to peep through Amanda’s window. After another dream which reveals the circuitry for a magical oxygen-generation board (?), they head out to infinity and beyond. Some wacky shenanigans with a giant spider aboard the alien craft that captures them, then they meet the aliens, a boy and a girl. Kids first lines: “I’ve waited all my life to say this… we come in peace.” A stunner from the aliens: “ehhh, what’s up doc?” Cartoony sound effects everywhere, kids don’t seem to know what’s going on, layers of TV shows and static all over the screen. Finally the alien craft is captured by a much much huger alien craft piloted by the parents of the TV-addict earth-meddling kid aliens who first met our heroes, and River’s gang returns to earth vaguely disillusioned. But we end on the kissing cloud dream, so it’s alright.

Bad science: “It was airtight – I couldn’t feel myself speed up or slow down.”

“They’re heeeere” reference to Poltergeist, which Goldsmith and ILM also worked on.

by ·Comments Off on Enchanted (2007, Kevin Lima)

No opening credits, and started at the beginning, which it had to since it’s a tribute to classical disney storytelling.

From the director of 102 Dalmations, heh. Cartoon princess Amy Adams gets kicked out of cartoon fantasy land by evil queen Susan Sarandon and is found by Dr. McThingy and his precious daughter. But princess is chased by Prince Cyclops, who was about to marry her, and queen’s henchman Timothy Spall, who we just saw in Sweeney Todd. Cyclops is a buffoon and the princess finally realizes that, and McThingy comes around to falling for the princess and there’s an obligatory explosive action finale when Susan Sarandon turns into a dragon and chases people around. A tolerable and sometimes funny little kids flick. There are cartoon birds and pretty songs which were triple-oscar-nominated. Katy liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Juno (2007, Jason Reitman)

A new movie that did not start at the end, and had opening credits! What’s the world coming to?

This year’s little miss sunshine indie-rock dream-team cast: Ellen Page from Hard Candy, boyfriend Michael Cera from Arrested Dev./Superbad, parents Allison Janney (West Wing?) and JK Simmons (Spiderman’s boss), and adoptive parents Jason Bateman (Arrested Dev.) and Jennifer Garner (Elektra). Ellen gets knocked up and gives the baby for adoption but restless Bateman breaks up his marriage so Garner gets baby by herself and Ellen starts hanging with Cera again, the end.

Waaay overbaked dialogue written by a showoff blogger and a cutey sitcommy setup made it the darling oscar-nom hit of the year. Movie is either a hateful, opportunistic, love-desperate mockery of teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, marriage and parenthood… or, as Katy says, it’s great for being a funny and clever movie (which it is) which portrays real behavior and choices not commonly seen at the movies.

I’ll decide later.

by ·Comments Off on White Mane / The Red Balloon (1953/56, Albert Lamorisse)

The Landmark theater of course played these Academy-ratio films in widescreen, ho-hum.

WHITE MANE, b/w, boy who lives on the marshes in southern France with his father and little brother (played by director’s son / star of Red Balloon) loves a wild horse, wants to capture it. Nearby ranchers also want to capture it. After a chase, boy rides the horse into the river and floats away, swept out to sea.

RED BALLOON, bright color, boy finds balloon which magically follows him around the city. Adults conspire to keep him away from his balloon, and other kids want to steal and destroy it. When the kids are successful, balloons from all over the city fly over and lift the kid up over Paris.

Jimmy says both movies are about the perils of acquisition. Both have somewhat the same ending… the kid getting (more or less) what he’d desired, a sense of freedom and imminent danger.

The two won a bunch of awards at Cannes, and Red Balloon got an original screenplay Oscar beating out The Ladykillers and La Strada. Remarkable for a movie with almost no dialogue. The two share excellent camerawork and primitive post-synched sound. I haven’t heard of anything else by photographer Edmond Séchan. Lamorisse made some other lesser-known children’s movies, including the earlier “Bim” and a widescreen Red Balloon sequel “Stowaway in the Sky”. The documentary he was filming over Iran when he died in an accident got an Oscar nomination after its completion. Best of all, he invented the board game RISK in ’57.

by ·Comments Off on August Rush (2007, Kirsten Sheridan)

A cutesy, saccharine drama with lots of insulting business about fate thrown about, and Robin Williams as Fagin with a soul-patch.

Freddie Highmore (Charlie of the Chocolate Factory) wants to find his real parents, runs off to the big city chased by a well-meaning but barely-in-the-movie Terrence Howard (Glitter, Big Momma’s House) in search of his parents (Keri Russell of Waitress and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who hadn’t been in any bad movies until this one), who only met once and don’t even know that they are parents. Along the way, Freddie is helped/hindered by Williams (of too many bad movies to list).

Hardly any romance in the movie, so not even Katy was happy… just a rooftop hookup then some happy glances at end of film (complete with a shout-out-to-god skyward glance by Freddie). Robin has violent mood changes, Keri smiles too much, Rhys Meyers has a rock music career (in a plot thread as underdeveloped as Terrence Howard’s character)… wait, in fact the whole movie was underdeveloped. How did it spend two hours telling this story without even telling any part of it properly? Even August’s relationship with black 13-yr-old talented guitarist friend Leon is underdeveloped, as is Keri Russell’s whole star-cellist thing.

Director Kirsten Sheridan is Jim’s daughter and is my age. Writer Nick Castle directed “Major Payne” and “The Last Starfighter”. Composer Mark Mancina usually does Disney cartoons and action flicks. The kids come out of this one pretty okay, and if anything, this is a step up for Robin Williams.

by ·Comments Off on We All Scream For Ice Cream (2007, Tom Holland)

From the non-auteur behind the classic horror hits “Fright Night” and “Child’s Play” and the less classic S. King adaptations “Thinner” and “The Langoliers” (also writer of Psycho 2). This is from the writer of “The Fury”, which makes me a little less excited to see that one.

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Holland must not have been allowed to adapt King’s “It”. Here we’ve got a story about grown men being hunted down by a killer klown, with flashbacks of these guys as young kids doing bad things together. Sounds like “It” to me. But this one adds exciting story elements that “It” never had, such as that the young kids once conspired to kill a retarded ice cream man, and that the ice cream man comes back as an evil klown and if the now-grown-men’s KIDS fall under the klown’s spell and eat a special ice cream bar, the men will turn into ice cream and melt and die.

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Ridiculous story, reasonably well acted/directed, not a bad thing to half-watch while I’m doing something else, like writing these entries.

by ·Comments Off on Dolls (1987, Stuart Gordon)

Part three of my Stuart Gordon run during Shocktober 2007. Never thought I’d rent Dolls, but here I am. This movie predates Puppet Master by two years, Dollman and Demonic Toys by four and five years. Of course, stuff like Devil Doll has been around forever, but I used to see the box art for Dolls and assume it was a Puppet Master ripoff… guess not.

This is a gory horror movie for little kids. I’ll bet it didn’t do very well. A doll-loving little girl with an active imagination has a neglectful father and a wicked stepmother. Their car breaks down outside a huge house in the country owned by an elderly dollmaker couple. Coincidentally, a big doll-loving man-child and two brit-punk hitchhikers he picked up are in the same situation. Who will survive the night? Hint: only those who are pure of heart, treat children with respect, love dolls and don’t attempt to steal from the elderly.

Disturbingly, instead of (or in addition to?) outright killing people, the dolls capture them and turn them into new dolls, with awful little apple mummy heads behind their gentle ceramic faces. There are some doll-sized stabbings and shootings, but sadly no Puppet-Master blowtorches or drill-heads. Story really does play out like a children’s tale, which is just confusing. Kinda cool movie overall, cute and short.

The writer of this thing later co-wrote Honey I Shrunk The Kids with Gordon and Yuzna, and is now writing those badly-animated christian movies.

One britpunk girl starred in A-Ha’s “Take On Me” video. The manchild played the Big Bopper in La Bamba and costarred in Gordon’s Pit and the Pendulum. Gabriel the old man played Toulon in four of the Puppet Master films (heh, typecast as a murderous puppetmaker). The stepmother, awesome at being a completely horrible person, is the electroshock-giving evil doctor in From Beyond who gets her brain sucked out her eye socket by Jeffrey Combs. And the bad dad appeared in the Charles Band-written classic Terrorvision.

Movie starts the same way as Dagon… family vacation threatened by a suspiciously sudden thunderstorm.

by ·Comments Off on Labyrinth (1986, Jim Henson)

Back in fashion because of Pan’s Labyrinth.

I keep coming back to the “Dance Magic Dance” song, the biggest batch of silliness that Bowie gets himself mixed up in. He manages to be pretty cool throughout the rest, despite being a glammed up villain in a pg-rated movie. Jennifer Connelly is fine as a spacey, dorky girl. She was better in Phenomena.

Warwick David AND Kenny Baker played goblins. Terry Jones and Elaine May writing, and George Lucas exec produced.

All that talent involved, all those puppets and matte paintings, and what do we have? An over-expensive little mess of a movie. Pretty funny in parts, but not too cool anymore as an adult. Another one lost. Saw parts of Beetlejuice on TV the other day and I’m sure that one’s still good. Still, a fun enough time at the movies. There aren’t enough puppets in movies these days.

Katy says she shouldn’t have even gone.

by ·Comments Off on Harry Potter / Order of the Phoenix (2007, David Yates)

From the esteemed director of The Tichborne Claimant and Sex Traffic comes yet another Harry Potter adventure that I’ll forget three weeks from now. I don’t mind forgetting them though, because I’m looking forward to the mindless six-movie DVD marathon the week before the final movie premieres. So no plot summary.

What We’ve Gained:
Oscar-nominated abortionist Imelda Staunton as a transparently evil teacher.
More Gary Oldman screen time than part 4.

What We’ve Lost:
All the life and energy from Gary Oldman’s performance.
Those broomstick hockey games.
Any sense of art or interest to the proceedings…