The movie Coraline reminded me of....

Just saw the new movie Coraline with several 8-to-10 year old girls. It was amazing but freaky. It features many themes that are potentially disturbing for any age. It gets down to the basics of what happens if your parents ignore you and you decide to run away...what if your fantasy Mom turns into a monster...and for me, what is the nature of an evil, suffocating mother.

The movie was brilliant. The stop-motion animation was breathtaking. I'd say that whether it's too scary for a child depends on the child's temperament and sensitivity rather than age. This intense, thoughtful movie is meant to be challenging.

Dakota Fanning's vocal performance combined with the animation nailed the character of a disgruntled tween girl. Loved her convincing Michigan accent.

Here are the things that Coraline reminded me of:

The Wizard of Oz
The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Spiderwick Chronicles
The Ring (the super-creepy Japanese horror film. Just a little cross-over there but significant to me.)
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
Desperate Housewives (Terri Hatcher is the voice of the Mom, and the more evil she gets, the more she looks like a character from Desperate Housewives.)

and, the real-life case of Nadya Suleman, mother to octuplets + 6. I kept thinking about her when they explored the psychology of the perfect/evil Other Mother.

City of Ember, a three-star family flick

I am so frustrated by movie reviewers who dismiss a kids' film by saying, "Eh, it was okay but only kids will like it," as though I am choosing between City of Ember and the new Leonardo DiCaprio thriller. That is ridiculous--I am just praying for something that is not Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

I love good kids' movies and in fact my screenwriting teacher always said that studying children's films was a good way to learn how to write. But not every film is going to be The Wizard of Oz, or even Narnia or Harry Potter (uneven, but generally enjoyable).



With that in mind, I give the latest literary adaptation City of Ember a solid three stars. The two young actors, Saoirse Ronan playing Lina and Harry Treadaway playing Doon, were appealing in a relatable way. They fit in to the dystopian surrounding, the collapsing City of Ember, an underground bunker designed to survive an apocalypse. The citizens were supposed to emerge 200 years later, but those instructions were lost, and after 220 years the city is in big trouble. One major problem is that the citizens don't even know they are underground and they are forbidden to explore the outlying dark regions, which would reveal that they are in a cave. Supplies and the electric generator are giving out. Can Lina and Doon save the day before the Ember dies out?

The movie is based on the excellent book by Jeanne DuPrau. I do have to say the changes made for the movie were mostly negative. While the theme of infrastructure collapse seems eerily appropriate right now, whoever decided to randomly introduce super-sized animals into the movie (Radiation induced? It's never explained.) should have been fired. The only good thing I can say about a giant (and I do mean GIANT) star-nosed mole appearing on-screen was that my daughter leaned over to me and said, "It's an R.O.U.S." Girl knows her Princess Bride! I must be doing something right.

The movie is a solid PG. A little scary, but not too bad, though the idea of the city going dark gave me much more anxiety on the screen than it did on the page. I think it' suitable for ages nine and up--it's nice to see something for older elementary kids. Watch the movie and then check out the original book and the solid sequel, The People of Sparks. They are great choices for families who still like to read out loud together even after the kids are old enough to read independently. However, you can skip the third book, the forgettable prequel, The Prophet of Yonwood, which so thoroughly failed to hold my attention that I didn't even finish it.

I just now learned there is a new book in the series, The Diamond of Darkhold. A reader review says it helps wrap up the series. Hmmm, maybe worth a read. Though I still feel burned by book #3, I care enough about Lina and Doon to find out what happens to them next.

'Indiana Jones' review: How scary is it?

My 8-year-old is intrigued but scared by Indiana Jones. She is away on a school trip this week, and helpfully suggested that I go see it by myself while she's gone, and report back on how scary it is. Being a longtime Harrison Ford fan myself, I did just that last night.

I have to say I was left cold by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It wasn't awful, like Temple of Doom, but it wasn't great. The actors were in fine form--yes, Harrison Ford still has "it" as Indy, it was great to see Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, and I even liked Shia LaBeouf. But the plot was an absolute mess. 1950's Russians, crystal skulls in Peru, aliens. It was like a Mad-Lib combination of Indiana Jones mashed up with Chris Carter's X-Files.

The complicated plot is all an excuse for action and chases, I get that. But the overuse of CGI special effects takes the human element out of it. Many of the great moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark were low-tech: Indy taking the gold idol and replacing it with a bag of sand--that set off a chase, but the first suspenseful moment was seeing whether he could get away with it. Marion saying "Indiana Jones! I always knew some day you'd come walking back through my door."

If your favorite part of Raiders was the Nazi villain's head melting, then this one will blow your mind.

One of my pet peeves about movie reviews is that they rarely spell out the scary elements of a film so that parents can decide whether it's appropriate for their kids, so I'm going to try to fill in the blanks for you.

Crystal Skull is a solid PG-13, medium-to-spicy haunted house scary, but I predict it will affect individual kids very differently. Like many summer blockbusters today, Crystal Skull often feels like watching someone else play a video game, which I find extremely boring. Kids who have seen a lot of intense movies and video games will probably think it's cool. My sensitive 8-year-old would not like the movie. Man-eating ants, scorpions, shadowy figures who follow Indy in Peru--it's all a bit too much. There is relatively little blood shown, though in the beginning of the film, people open machine gun fire and kill several soldiers.

One scene was cinematically effective but really creepy. Indy is escaping from a military base in New Mexico and he walks into what looks like an idyllic suburb with TVs blaring, but finds it's populated by mannequins. Then he realizes it's a nuclear test site that is about to be graphically blown up into a mushroom cloud. Indy survives by climbing into a lead-lined refrigerator, which is a dangerous action to model for kids. (Yes, I know the whole movie is one big danger-fest but this example stood out to me as a strange dramatic choice involving something kids might encounter in real life.)

One final observation, I happened to hear an NPR interview with children's author Mo Willems yesterday, and he was asked what he'd learned about writing by working for Sesame Street. He said kids are smart but the one difference is that they don't yet understand cultural references. He gave the example of the Eiffel Tower--to communicate to kids you have to be more literal and say "big thing." In Crystal Skull it's clear who the "good" and "bad" guys are, but the story also has a level of cultural abstraction that will go over the heads of younger kids: do they know about Area 51, the Cold War, the 1950's, aliens, etc? I kept thinking that if I were a kid I'd be pretty confused by the story.

So you'll have to integrate these factors and decide what's best for your family. For me personally, it was good to see the old gang together again but in the final analysis the movie came off as sound and fury signifying very little, indeed.