I did a double-feature this week, which I don't do as much as I used to. There was a time when I was fresh out of college–waiting tables and working at Blockbuster to pay off my credit card debt–that I'd always take Fridays off, to check out the new release slate. Once, when a friend of mine couldn't reach me at home, he drove over to my local multiplex and talked his way into the last 10 minutes of Major League II, because he figured that's where I'd be. And he was right
There's been a lot of talk about whether the theatrical experience has become obsolete in a time when DVDs and widescreen TVs often trump nights at the movies marred by cel phones, unskilled projectionists, and teenagers who snap their gum and talk through the movie and shuffle past you en masse even though you're sitting alone on the end of the aisle and the other end is wide open. (Or maybe that last bit just happens to me.) But pulling a double or a triple at a multiplex is still it's own kind of kick, fraught with the sweet tension of figuring out the best way to sneak from theater to theater, and sitting through the end of one movie while fretting over when the next one's about to start. Spend a day at the movies and you see the same trailers over and over, you find details from one movie creeping into the next, and sometimes you even forget what you're about to watch until the opening credits start. It's a mass-media bliss-out.
I can't say I found too much crossover between Lady In The Water and Monster House, except that both of them are pretty weird for would-be blockbusters.
Enough has been written–positive and negative–about Lady In The Water, so let me just say that I was astonished as always by M. Night Shyamalan's unconventional framing, I admired anew his willingness to risk embarrassment for the sake of saying what he feels, and, naturally, I was frequently embarrassed by how silly the end result is. That said, there's a lumpiness about this Lady that's kind of lovable, and Paul Giamatti holds a lot of it together (especially the late-film mini-twist). The audience I saw it with scoffed some–with good reason–but they also jumped at the scary parts and laughed at the intentionally funny parts. I think this is the kind of movie that's going to wear better over time. Whatever his apparent arrogance, it's hard not to have a loony affection for Shyamalan, who makes movies that look and feel unlike anyone else's.
As for Monster House, up until it's cacophonous climactic action sequence, it comes pretty close to being the best kids' movie of the year. (With the caveats that, for one, there haven't been that many good kids movies this year, and for two, Monster House is more for the 10 and up crowd than the wee ones.) It's one of the most distinctive-looking computer-animated films I've seen, with a lot of "handheld camera" shots, and a tight frame urging a sense of depth. I'm not entirely sold on the motion capture technology, which makes the characters look like sauté pans with eyes, but there's an appealing naturalness to the way the kids in Monster House talk to each other.
Actually, strike that. It's not "natural" so much as "Hollywood natural." The kids in the movie talk like kids in movies. But good movies, by and large; and not, so to speak, cartoons. There's a none-too-subtle subtext to Monster House, having to do with how puberty drains away (or at least re-focuses) a child's imagination. So a lot of the story revolves around the kids just hanging out, kicking around ideas. It's like the computer-animated version of Stand By Me. (Well, sort of.)