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…

by ·Comments Off on Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Dayton & Faris)

Among the top 200 movies ever made, according to the IMDB!

Failed motivational speaker Greg Kinnear hops aboard the family’s busted VW bus along with goodwife Toni Collette, heroin-sniffin’ grandpa Alan Arkin, silent sullen teen Paul Dano (the kid from L.I.E.), suicidal gay Proust scholar brother Steve Carrell, and little miss sunshine candidate Abigail Breslin to get from Albequerque NM to somewhere in California in a day or two.

Grandpa dies, Dano finds out he can’t fly jets cuz he’s colorblind, Kinnear goes bankrupt when his buddy can’t sell his program at a big conference, Carrell runs into his crush at a gas station, and mom ties it all together and doesn’t get any quirks of her own. The little miss sunshine pageant is a disaster, and after Abigail does a striptease dance her grandpa taught her, the whole family dances on stage and is thrown out.

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Not really a plot-strong movie, but funny, especially in the first half. Alan Arkin won an oscar for delivering the funniest lines and swearing a lot, narrowly beating out Marky Mark for doing the same thing in The Departed… that’s all it takes these days. I’m just glad he beat Eddie Murphy, who dared to expect an Oscar for his work the same week he released Norbit.

Movie has caught some flack for being depressingly negative with its hopeless characters, but it’s not like I took any of them seriously, so I didn’t think so. Grandpa’s death wasn’t even sad (or funny, really… I would’ve preferred to see him laughing at the strip dance at the end). Wasn’t painting a dark, downward-spiralling portrait of the american family, just showing a bunch of silly weirdos on a road trip. Don’t think the movie had any higher purpose than that, which makes you wonder why it got a Best Picture nomination I guess. Nowadays you’ve just gotta hand it to any halfway-funny comedy that doesn’t die in the second half.

Katy liked it too.