Monster House
PG, 91 minutes
Now playing at Carmike Cinema 6
For some reason, live-action films now aspire to be cartoons, and cartoons aspire to be live-action films. And then there are those weird hybrids. Monster House, like last year’s The Polar Express, started with live actors, who were required to wear special suits embedded with thousands of tiny reflectors. The performances were digitally recorded, then animators used the reflectors as reference points, constructing animated characters that would have the fluidity of motion that human characters have. Or so the theory goes. Myself, I found these characters to be a little marionette-like—but then there would come this moment where, like Pinocchio, they suddenly seemed realer than real. It’s creepy.
And so is Monster House. Ostensibly for kids, it’s a haunted-house movie in which the house itself is the monster, gobbling up anyone who happens to step past the property line, especially on Halloween. But the kid who lives across the street, a Harry Potterish youngster named DJ (Mitchell Musso), can’t stay away. Along with his Ron-like sidekick, Chowder (Sam Lerner), and their new Hermione-esque friend, Jenny (Spencer Locke), he launches an assault on the old place armed only with Super-Soakers. But first they have to get past the decrepit man who lives there, an Oscar the Grouch with bloodshot eyes and cadaverous skin played by—who else?—Steve Buscemi.
“Motion capture” more than proved its usefulness in Lord of the Rings and King Kong, where Andy Serkis gave a captivating performances as both a 90-pound weakling and an 8,000-pound gorilla. Here it’s used to create characters who look like they’ve just stepped out of a children’s storybook. The movie gains momentum, but loses focus, when the kids enter the morphing house. But before that it has a nice early Spielberg flavor, thanks in part to a very kid-savvy script by Dan Harmon, Ron Schrab and Pamela Pettler. There’s also some lovely artwork, as in the film’s opening, where a leaf drifts to the sidewalk, only to be run over by a tyke on a trike on her way to wherever. But here’s the real question: Why isn’t this scary little movie coming out in late October?
Strangers with Candy
R, 97 minutes
Now playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6
I suppose I should tell you to beware of Strangers with Candy. It’s nowhere near as good as the Comedy Central show it’s derived from. But those of us who used to set our clocks by the demented misadventures of Jerri Blank—“a boozer, a user and a loser” who, after a lengthy stay in prison, takes another swing at high school, having struck out the first time—will accept whatever comes our way. And that’s what sent me running out to see this strangely disappointing movie, a lost episode that remains to be found. The good news is that Amy Sedaris, the woman who yanked Jerri from the far reaches of her fetid imagination, is in top form, scoring laughs off her face alone: that vicious overbite, the nervous eye tic, the ski-jump hairdo. Unless you’ve caught one of her hilarious “Letterman” appearances, where she shares her own demented misadventures, you’d never know that Sedaris is actually quite attractive. But what makes her such a great comedian is her willingness to let things get ugly.
That was the TV show’s strength as well. Taking off from those ‘70s after-school specials where, when life dealt you lemons, you made Lemon Pledge, it showed us just how bad high school can be—wave upon wave of intense boredom, punctuated by random acts of senseless cruelty. And the movie version doesn’t let up a bit, sending Jerri back into the educational sausage factory, where she spends half her time sucking up to the cool kids, the other half warding off blows. And rest assured, she remains a rather dim bulb. When Principal Blackman (Grey Hollimon, as amusingly deranged as ever) asks her what her I.Q. is, she doesn’t miss a beat. “Pisces,” she replies. And yet she winds up competing in the annual science fair, an intramural wrestling match that brings out the worst in everybody—and I mean that in a good way. Still, you have to wonder: Is this the best the filmmakers could come up with? A science fair? Do schools even have science fairs anymore?
Paul Dinello (who also directed) and Stephen Colbert (who co-wrote the script with Dinello and Sedaris) are back as Mr. Jellineck and Mr. Noblet—a priggish pair whose office romance is a secret to nobody but themselves. And a number of big-name actors—Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, and even Philip Seymour Hoffman, who acts like he just stopped by to have his parking ticket validated—put in appearances. But nobody can seem to lift this thing out of what appears to be a bad case of the doldrums. Dinello gives many of the scenes a shadowy noir look, which makes no sense at all. And the comic bits, though often amusing, don’t build. Except for the script, which contains some wonderfully wicked lines—“I need more out of this relationship than I’m willing to put in,” Noblet tells Jellinek—the movie seems to have been flung together on a couple of spare weekends. And that’s too bad, because Jerri Blank, the buck-toothed poster girl for No Child Left Behind, deserves much, much more.