missmediajunkie

Moderate spoilers ahead for everything that has aired so far.

Like many others, I remain incredulous that the "Hannibal" television series is airing on a national network. It's not just because of the violence and gore, which appears in copious amounts, but because the series so caters to a specific niche audience. "Hannibal" fans need to appreciate elliptical dialogue, artsy atmospherics, ambiguous plotting, and regular jolts of extreme horror movie imagery. It's so driven by aesthetics at times, you could mistake it for an European art film - except when it's also a sublimely macabre gorefest.

I wasn't all that enamored with the first season, though I appreciated what Bryan Fuller and his collaborators were trying to do with the property. I found the plotting too muddled for my tastes, and many of the characters weren't quite where I wanted them to be. Still, I saw a lot of potential so I came back for the second season, and promptly fell in love. Year Two of "Hannibal" is split up into two parts, the first with Will Graham in a mental institution, trying to clear his name after Dr. Lecter frames him for murder, and the second where Will and Jack Crawford are trying to bait Hannibal into revealing himself. The first half is where Will Graham grows a backbone, taps into the darker part of his psyche, and goes toe to toe with Hannibal in playing mind games. It is also much more tightly and explicitly plotted, with a couple of great twists.

And suddenly "Hannibal" was giving me everything I wanted from the show - lots of visceral thrills and chills without compromising the intellectual bent, and it started developing the major characters in the right directions too. Laurence Fishburne's Jack gets more interesting as he has to weigh Will and Hannibal's claims against each other. As Will becomes more self-aware and bolder in his maneuverings, Hannibal is put on the defensive. Their predator-victim relationship gets much richer and more complex with the two of them on equal psychological footing. Last year I watched the show largely for Mads Mikkelsen's take on Dr. Lecter, but now Hugh Dancy's performance is getting very close to the same level. I especially enjoy the recurring instances of role reversal, where Hannibal gets to play investigator or Will discovers his inner puppetmaster. The arc also makes great use of minor characters like Beverly Katz, Abel Gideon, and especially Dr. Frederick Chilton. Raul Esparza is a joy to watch.

Alas, Will Graham had to be let out of the straitjacket eventually, and the show had to move on to the second half of the season where we meet the Vergers, Margot and Mason, played by Katherine Isabelle and Michael Pitt respectively. There's too much story stuffed into this arc, and not enough time to adequately present it. I really got a kick out of the Vergers, but didn't feel we got nearly enough time with them to get the full impact of their twisted family feud. Will's attempts to entrap Hannibal also felt underserved, with too many pieces of key exposition missing. The final run of episodes wasn't bad in any sense, but it couldn't hope to match up to the intensity of the first half of the year, even with a wonderful finale. I'm hoping that next season fills in some of the gaps, and thank goodness there will be a next season.

"Hannibal" has distinguished itself by happily striking out on its own, borrowing characters, concepts, plot points, and imagery from the Lecter books and films, but being beholden to none of them. Characters have swapped genders, been killed off early, and positioned in different roles. Though the series is following the rough timeline of the books, specific events are ordered differently. Some of the dramatic license gets to be a bit much - there have been at least three fake-out deaths this year, possibly four - but the "Hannibal" creators have clearly become very comfortable with the material and are in a good position to start tackling some of the more famous stories coming up.

As always, I have a few reservations. Catherine Dhavernas still doesn't get nearly enough to do as Alana Bloom, and the most interesting female characters like Freddie Lounds, Dr. Du Maurier, and Bella Crawford have had fleeting appearances at best. Abigail Hobbs and Miriam Lass are really little more than plot devices, and Margot Verger's already gone. I'm hoping Clarice Starling is introduced sooner rather than later to help unskew things here. And while I'm all for letting the viewer figure things out on their own, there have been too many times where the writers simply aren't playing fair - nothing on the aftermath of the Chilton situation?

Then again, I'm getting worked up because "Hannibal" has really gotten its claws into me. I continue to adore the mad visuals, not just the death tableaux but the febrile sex scenes and the disturbing dream imagery. Directors like David Slade, Michael Rhymer, and newcomer Vincenzo Natali have been delivering excellent work week after week. The score and sound design have gotten weirder and and more evocative. The set design just keeps getting better. And the cast - even the one-off killers of the week have been landing actors like Amanda Plummer. It's fantastic.

"Hannibal" has survived despite the odds, and I hope it's around for a long time to come. I still find parts of it a little slapdash and problematic, but it's one of the most unique shows airing anywhere right now, and so well executed that it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as any other prestige series you could find on cable or premium cable.
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Yesterday we took a look at the big studio pictures with real box office prospects. Today it's time for the more modest, but probably more rewarding films of 2014 that I'm looking forward to. Movies that were delayed from last year, including Bennett Miller's "Foxcatcher," are being left off. And here we go:

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" - Wes Anderson's latest is so obviously the work of Wes Anderson, there's no point in even pointing out the avalanche of aesthetic quirks or the presence of Bill Murray and Owen Wilson anymore. However, this time around Ralph Fiennes has joined the fun and the tone looks a touch zanier and more broadly comedic, which is hitting all the right buttons for me. There's also something about the color palette with its rich purples and candy pinks that really make the visuals pop. I'm sure the film itself will turn out to be all too familiar, but I can't bring myself to care one bit.

"The Cobbler" - Thomas McCarthy hasn't made a film that I've disliked yet, from "The Station Agent" to "Win Win." And though I dislike Adam Sandler's typical comedies, when he tries something smaller and more heartfelt, the results can be fantastic. These two sound like they would work well together, so I'm looking forward to "The Cobbler," where Sandler will star as a shoe repairman who discovers a magic MacGuffin that literally lets him "walk in another man's shoes." This is a premise that a big studio would happily turn into yet another idiot comedy, but with McCarthy writing and directing, I'm pretty optimistic.

"Ex Machina" - Alex Garland, the screenwriter of "Never Let Me Go" and many of Danny Boyle's films will be making his directorial debut with the science fiction film "Ex Machina," which has some similarities to last year's "Her." This time the AI is a female robot played by Alicia Vikander and the story is a psychological thriller instead of a straight romance. Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac also star. It's a low budget, small scale film that is being produced in the UK, so it might be a while before we get to see it stateside. The premise and the cast have me excited though, and I'm adding it to this year's ever-growing list of intriguing, ambitious science fiction films.

"Whiplash" and "The Voices" - There are quite a few interesting titles that have emerged from this year's Sundance Film Festival that I'm keeping an eye out for, including "Skeleton Twins," "Life Itself," and "Dear White People." However, there are two in particular that I want to highlight. First, there's the "Whiplash," the tale of a young drummer played by Miles Teller that took home the Grand Jury and Audience prizes. Then there's "The Voices," the latest from "Persepolis" director Marjane Satrapi, where Ryan Reynolds plays a seemingly ordinary man who accidentally kills a woman, and now his benevolent dog and evil cat are both speaking to him, trying to persuade him of what he should do next.

"A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" - Swedish auteur Roy Andersson makes bleak satires with painstakingly composed visuals, many of them incredibly elaborate. He's only released two films over the past fifteen years, but they've both been brilliant. "Pigeon" is expected to complete the trilogy. Production diaries have been slowly appearing on the internet over the past several months, and the project appears to be finally nearing completion. As it's been seven years since the last Andersson film, this is definitely going to be a cinematic event. Not much is known about the story yet, but it apparently involves salesmen, near brushes with death, and explaining why society is the way it is.

"Gone Girl" - David Fincher's been out of the game since his adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," and I'm glad to see him back on the slate, even if he's decided his latest crime thriller should star Ben Affleck - I'm still not sold on him as an actor. However, the original author of the source novel, Gillian Flynn, is penning the screenplay and has apparently entirely rewritten the third act for the adaptation. This one's already gearing up for an Oscar campaign, with a release date set for October and an unusual bit of early marketing - a provocative "Entertainment" Weekly cover picturing Affleck and co-star Rosamund Pike referencing the famous John Lennon and Yoko Ono "Rolling Stone" portrait.

"Inherent Vice" - Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix. That's really all I need to know. Based on the Thomas Pynchon detective novel, this will be another period piece, set at the end of the '60s in Los Angeles. Filming was completed last year, so there's every likelihood that we'll see "Inherent Vice" in theaters by the end of 2014. The novel has been described as noir crossed with psychedelia, which might make me worried if this were any other director. Fortunately Anderson, coming off of "The Master," is more than qualified to handle the notoriously difficult Pynchon material. As the highest profile prestige project of the year so far, this one's going to get a lot more press in the months to come.
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It's always fascinating to see which initially ignored and panned films manage to endure the test of time to emerge as cult classics a few decades later. There are a heap of early 90s children's films that have become cult favorites, sparking a lot of recent discussion. Barely anyone remembers that "Hook," the 1991 Spielberg fantasy film, was met with mixed and downright hostile reviews. There hardly seems to be a Millennial out there who doesn't love it. Was "The Nightmare Before Christmas" too dark and scary for children, as the LA Time fretted back in 1993? Disney sure doesn't think so these days, with "Nightmare" merchandise now a ubiquitous presence at their stores and parks.

Usually I get why one of these old kids' films has become a perennial, but sometimes I don't. I watched "Hook" as a kid like everyone else, and while I love the score and a few standalone scenes, it's become all to clear to me over the years that the movie is a mess. But still, I can understand the appeal. It's a big budget spectacular, stuffed with action scenes and humor and kid-friendly thrills. It has endlessly repeatable one-liners, and Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman hamming it up with all they've got. The special effects still look pretty good, and the loud, noisy, raucous atmosphere must have been irresistible, for little boys especially. When you're ten, you're not paying attention to things like shoddy plotting and bad characterization.

However, the cult status of another 90s kid film that has re-emerged recently has left me scratching my head. Apparently there's a whole generation that has grown up loving the Disney live-action Halloween film "Hocus Pocus," which came out twenty years ago to absolutely dismal reviews. It didn't last long in theaters, though it did make its modest budget back. I remember the movie pretty well, because it was used as convenient holiday time-filler for much of the 90s, particularly on the Disney-owned networks. It also shared a couple of actors - Omri Katz and Jason Marsden - with "Eerie, Indiana," which I was a big fan of. I must have been too old when I watched "Hocus Pocus" for it to get a grip on my affections, because I remember it as a remarkably campy, silly, and all too often awkward children's movie that felt like it had been slapped together out of spare parts.

The witches, played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker are clearly the best the movie has to offer, playing a trio of goofy baddies with magnificent costumes, but they're so cartoonish that they never come across as a real threat. Everything is against them in the movie, from the insanely specific circumstances required for their resurrection to their unfamiliarity with the modern world. I know that they're supposed to be comedic figures, keeping it light for the littlest kids and amusing for the grown-ups, but the plot needs them to be at least a little scary by the third act. But good grief, the CGI "Casper" two years later was more intimidating.

The stuff with the teenagers running around, trying to stop them? Pretty dire. The actors aren't bad, but the characters are sketchy and the scenarios are bland. The teen romance was especially bad, and I cringed through a lot of the tin-ear dialogue about virgins and Vinessa Shaw's yabbos. For a movie meant to be safe for the very smallest tots, it's got some weirdly sexual elements in it that make me suspect that "Hocus Pocus" was initially a very different movie. Perhaps a musical of some sort, as this is the only movie directed by Disney regular Kenny Ortega, who made his name as a choreographer, that is not a musical.

I do like some bits and pieces of the movie. The talking cat is great. Doug Jones as a zombie is great. The best sequence is almost certainly when Bette Midler gets to sing "I'll Put a Spell On You," and vamp as only Bette Midler can. But those things aside, I can't work out what it is kids saw in this movie that stuck with them. "Hocus Pocus" looks like every other generic kids' Halloween movie from the same time. The effects are mediocre. The story isn't all that exciting. Were the Sanderson sisters really all that appealing to kids?

Familiarity is the culprit, I suspect. As I previously mentioned, "Hocus Pocus" has been a staple of Disney Halloween programming for years. Kids saw this movie over and over and over, until it became something nostalgic and fondly remembered, the same way that I got hooked on terrible old Arnold Schwarzenegger movies from the '80s. Young kids really have no sense of whether a movie is good or bad, but they respond well to bright colors and exaggerated characters, which "Hocus Pocus" has plenty of.

So, I suspect the same thing might have happened with any number of other movies if Disney gave them the same treatment. The far superior "The Witches," perhaps, or "The Halloween Tree." But Disney had the rights to "Hocus Pocus," so they played "Hocus Pocus," and twenty years later it's a little scary how many twenty-somethings can quote it verbatim.

Ultimately it's all about distribution.
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I'm still working up to that "Dads" rant, so let's tackle the new FOX supernatural show "Sleepy Hollow" first. A few spoilers for the pilot ahead.

Following on the unlikely success of high-concept shows like "Grimm," FOX has put together its own fantasy procedural with familiar genre names Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Len Wiseman. They've "reimagined" "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," so now Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) is a Revolutionary spy and soldier for George Washington, and his lovely wife Katrina (Katia Winter) is a nurse. After falling in battle, Crane is awoken from the grave after 250 years, to modern-day upstate New York to continue his fight with the also resurrected Headless Horseman, who Crane previously beheaded. Joining him is a black female police lieutenant, Abbie Mills (Nicole Behari), trying to solve a series of recent murders.

Torrents of exposition are shoehorned into the pilot to explain the increasingly silly scenario that the Headless Horseman is really one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from Revelations, and the little town of Sleepy Hollow is the epicenter of a centuries-long battle for the fate of humanity between the forces of light and dark. Opposing covens of witches are quickly mentioned, who I'm sure we'll be spending more time getting to know in the weeks to come. Mills also had an encounter with a dark spirit when she was a child, giving her a personal connection to these events. However, the bulk of the pilot focuses on maneuvering Crane and Mills into their unlikely long-term partnership against the things that go bump in the night.

The first half of the hour is a lot of fun, introducing Mison's charming fish-out-of-water Crane, who everyone thinks must be crazy. However, he's so lucid and intelligent, and self-possessed, it's easy to be won over by him. So it's believable that Mills would eventually come around and start taking his ridiculous explanations seriously. Mison has all the fun stuff with Ichabod Crane, mistaking Mills for an emancipated slave and making observations about Starbucks, but Behari's performance is the vital one. She's provides a strong grounding element amidst all the fantastic silliness, a real person we can are about. Without her, the show wouldn't work. Katia Winter doesn't get to do much but look winsome in a low cut dress, and the only other regular so far is Orlando Jones as Mills' superior, Captain Frank Irving, a typical hard case.

There's a lot of action in the pilot, mostly in the second half, but it's so cartoonish and low-stakes that it's not much fun to watch. The Horseman bloodlessly chops guest stars' heads off, gravity-defying magic makes objects whiz through the air, and there are some pretty tame horrorshow jump scares. What's the point of broadswords and Biblical references if the violence isn't allowed to get properly medieval? We get a lot of the usual B-movie horror elements, but "Sleepy Hollow" is no "Hannibal," and isn't really interested in being frightening or pushing at network content limits. The show's attitude is far too slick for that, clearly more interested in coolness than creeps. In other words, it's exactly what you would expect from the man who made the "Underworld" movies.

Fortunately the writing's not bad, despite the ludicrous plotting. The main characters are established well, the banter's cute, Crane's commentary on the modern world is fun, and the humor is all-around more effective than any of the action or the thrills. The quips are just clever enough to pass muster, though Ichabod Crane handles the culture shock a little too well. I found the treatment of the existing "Sleepy Hollow" characters pretty terrible - wasn't Ichabod Crane supposed to be a coward? And they couldn't have worked in Brom Bones somehow? The series seems to be based on the 1999 Tim Burton "Sleepy Hollow" movie more than the original Washington Irving story, and many period details have clearly been fudged. Then again, I doubt Revolutionary War Era America is going to play much of a role in future episodes anyway.

I'm curious as to what a regular episode of the show is going to look like - the "Sleepy Hollow" pilot was full of expensive stunts they're surely not going to be able to pull off every week, and that Headless Horseman is going to stop being effective pretty quick if overused. The pilot was entertaining enough for what it was, but it's not sustainable. I wouldn't be surprised if this metamorphoses into a much smaller scale light mystery show, sort of a super campy "X-Files" lite. Considering all the talk about witches, we'll probably see "Sleepy Hollow" treading some of the same thematic ground as FX's upcoming "American Horror Story: Coven" this year. That could be fun week to week, but we'll have to see how it develops.

Happy watching.
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Spoilers for the first season ahead.

I've had such a love hate relationship with this show. On the one hand it's one of the most visually interesting crime dramas on television, thanks to the efforts of Bryan Fuller and crew. The cast is also to die for, with Mads Mikkelsen as an irresistible new version of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and good supporting work from Lawrence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, and Gillian Anderson. Hugh Dancy is still not quite up to par, but his performance grew on me eventually. I like that the corpses of the week often make me physical recoil in a way that I hadn't since the weirder episodes of "The X-files." I like that the case-of-the-week format is largely abandoned by the second half of the season to focus on the interactions of the main cast and the fallout of a single case that had been solved in the first episode. And even when it is tracking down guest star murderers, it doesn't play by the rules, paying far less attention to working out the weekly mystery than exploring what the new mystery means for the increasingly tenuous mental state of Will Graham.

On the other hand, "Hannibal" is often a slog, featuring long, long dialogue scenes of Will in psychoanalysis and puzzling his way through the various motives of the murders. The show's cental conflict between the FBI and Hannibal is sometimes wonderfully tense and thrilling to watch, and sometimes feels like they are going around in endless circles, dragging things out. It doesn't help that nobody in this show talks like a normal person, not the agents, not the lab tech comic relief, and not even the teenage girls. Instead, it's reams of obsessive exposition, often in the form of repetitive arguments and interrogations. Aside from Hannibal, everyone seems eager to recite what they're feeling at any particular moment with hardly any cueing. This is necessary for a show that is so concerned with the inner workings of Will's mind and tracking Hannibal's manipulations, but sometimes they lay it on way too thick. Alana and Will's romance predictably goes nowhere because within a few seconds of making her attraction clear, Alana is reciting all the reasons why the pair wouldn't work together, providing a very professional self-diagnosis of all her neuroses.

More troubling are the constant logic leaps the audience is expected to swallow - Jack insisting that Abigail Hobbs should be investigated as an accomplice to murder with hardly any evidence, Will failing to get a second opinion after the mysterious death of his physician, and the remarkably rushed introduction and dispatching of Abigail's best friend who coincidentally looks almost exactly like she does. Lord Dark Helmet once declared that "evil will always triumph, because good is dumb," but this was pushing things. I'm usually pretty forgiving of genre shows, but I do expect the basic plotting to be more solid, especially when we're talking about a show where all the main cast members are highly intelligent FBI agents or doctors or both. I really dislike how Jack Crawford is too often about as perceptive as a brick. If I were to suggest any improvements for next season, it would be to ease up on the "Shining" references and pay more attention to ensuring that the characters' actions make sense.

Last night's finale episode was one of the strongest of the season, though, and provided some very satisfactory payoff to weeks of escalating tensions. I expect I'd like "Hannibal" better if I watched multiple episodes in one sitting, giving the febrile atmosphere more of a chance to work its way into my skull. I may have my reservations about the overly analytical dialogue, but it does fit this heightened, stylized world that "Hannibal" exists in, where the most horrific crimes are often rendered exquisite through Hannibal's dinners and the artfully arranged crime scenes. The show evokes the creeps on very visceral level, but often understated or intellectualized in a way that makes them much more effective. No other horror series I've seen, not even the more graphic "Dexter" and "American Horror Story," has been more consistently disturbing. And as often as it's dull, it can be very clever. I loved the final scene of last night's episode, with that wonderful reversal on the most famous Hannibal Lecter appearance.

And finally, it was all worth it for Mads Mikkelsen's version of Hannibal Lecter, who is one of the best television characters I've met in some time. I'm glad the show's creators haven't been afraid to depart from their source material and expand on the characters in such delightful ways. "Hannibal" is far darker and more daring that I could have every hoped for, and has turned out to be a very good fit for television. I'm not convinced it's as good as some of its fans insist, but I'm looking forward to next year.
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It's pilot season in Hollywood, and we're about to get a new crop of television shows based on movies. This is a trend that has been around for decades, and has yielded plenty of classics. Some movie premises worked better as television shows, like "MASH" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." So I'm going to take a look at five of the movie-based series, currently in development, that may be coming soon to a small screen near you. I'm leaving out "Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D.," which is really a spin-off of the Marvel films, and will only be featuring one or two of the minor characters, existing very much on the sidelines of the ongoing movie franchise.

"Beverly Hills Cop" (CBS) - The 80s action comedy series is becoming an hour-long police procedural. Brandon T. Jackson of "Tropic Thunder" fame will star as Axel Foley's son Aaron, a young police officer following his dad's footsteps. "The Shield" creator Shawn Ryan is on bard as producer, and Barry Sonnenfeld is directing the pilot. No word yet on whether Axel himself will be stopping by the Beverley Hills Police Department to check up on his son. Interviews suggest that the tone of the show will stay light, but it won't be an out-and-out comedy. The original film series was heavily dependent on the charisma of Eddie Murphy, and new version without him might not work. However, between 80s nostalgia and the public's love of police procedurals, I can certainly see why the studios decided that a reboot deserved a shot.

"Bad Teacher" (CBS) - Remember the 2011 summer comedy starring Cameron Diaz? It did all right at the box office, but not well enough that anyone is clamoring for a sequel. However, CBS thought the premise has potential as a half-hour comedy, and is in the process of transmogrifying it into sitcom form. Ari Graynor will replace Cameron Diaz, and the new cast also includes David Alan Grier and Ryan Hansen. The raunch and the foul language of the movie is going to have to be toned way, way down for television audiences, to the point where I doubt the series will bear much resemblance to the film. Still, the concept of an immature, irresponsible female teacher looking for love should have plenty of legs. Television is generally friendlier to female-led comedies than the movies are, so the TV "Bad Teacher" may actually have a better shot there.

"About A Boy" (NBC) - A decade ago, "About a Boy" was a decent sized hit, but I have no idea what prompted writer-executive producer Jason Katims to decide that now was the time to revisit the property and convert it into half-hour sitcom form. Still, this is the guy who resurrected "Friday Night Lights" and "Parenthood" as critically acclaimed television series, so I'm not inclined to question his instincts. FOX actually tried to turn "About a Boy" into a series way back in 2003 with a different creative team, but nothing came of it. This time, they’ve gotten as far as a pilot directed by John Favreau. No word on casting yet, but considering the scarcity of Hugh Grant over the past few years, and the rate that major movie stars have been doing television projects, I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that he’d consider returning to the role.

"The Joneses" (Bravo) - This David Duchovny and Demi Moore indie was released in theaters in 2010, but hardly anyone saw it. That's a shame, because the idea at its core was a fascinating one. The main characters are employees of an advertising agency who are hired to live together as a fake family, push products to their neighbors, and encourage them to keep up with the Joneses (Get it?). Bravo has ordered a pilot as part of its first foray into scripted programming, after ABC took a shot at development. Considering how the movie ended, the television series will likely be a total reboot. Since so few people saw the original "Joneses," it should escape being called a retread. However, I'm not sure about Bravo's claim that it will speak "to the Bravo brand of great aspirational female-driven upscale worlds.” My irony alarm is going off.

"Zombieland" (Amazon) - And finally, Amazon is hot to catch up with Netflix in the production of its own content. It has ordered a half-hour comedy pilot based on 2009's "Zombieland." A sequel never quite came together though there was a lot of interest in one, and the possibility of a television adaptation has been lobbed around Hollywood for a while. Amazon finally took the initiative. The film's original writers have scripted the pilot, and three of the four leads have been recast so far. The zombie craze is still going strong this year, so I expect this one to have a high chance of success. On the other hand, Amazon's distribution system isn't quite where Netflix's is at the moment, and I'm not sure if they have the subscriber base to support a show like this. There are a lot of different factors that could affect this one, so stay tuned.

Happy watching!
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Finally finished all three of last year's animated horror movies. When I saw Sony Animation's "Hotel Transylvania" back in October I didn't think I had enough material for a whole post, so I resolved to wait until I'd seen the other two, and thankfully I didn't have to wait very long. Laika's "Paranorman" and Disney's "Frankenweenie" didn't do very well in theaters, and have popped up inother places pretty quick. It's a shame, because both are pretty solid little flicks, and deserved more attention than they got.

Ranking these three, "Hotel Transylvania" ends up on the bottom. This is not to say that it's a bad film. I think it's actually the best thing that Adam Sandler and a gaggle of his usual collaborators have been associated with in ages. Sandler lends his voice to Count Dracula, who has secluded himself in a remote castle far away from humanity to raise his little girl, Mavis (Selena Gomez). The castle doubles as a hotel for his monster pals, a vacation spot where they can get away without worrying about torches and pitchforks. I wasn't thrilled with the amount of crude humor and tired Sandler schtick that made its way into the film, but at least it's very restrained. The SNL alum-heavy cast dialed back considerably to keep this kid-friendly. This is also easily the least scary movie of the bunch, and the Dracula, Mummy, Werewolf, and Frankenstein we meet are all firmly in the middle-aged family man stage of life.

The result is a sweet little parent and kid bonding story, dressed up in the morbidly fun trappings of an old Universal monster picture. If you're familiar with the old Rankin Bass stop motion movie "Mad Monster Party," this is more or less the same thing, but updated for modern kids, with a little more plot to go with it. The big selling point is really the comedy, though I don't think the cast deserves much of the credit here. "Hotel Transylvania" is loaded with inventive little visual gags, like shrunken head doorknockers and a skeleton mariachi band. There's always something interesting to look at, even if it's only in the corner of the frame. We can thank veteran TV animation director Genndy Tartakovsky for the strength of the visual design work, and for keeping the proceedings very light and fun and energetic. It's hard to believe that this is his first theatrical feature, considering how deft a hand he is with animation.

"Frankenweenie" is another Tim Burton passion project, and thankfully a far more well-realized one than last summer's "Dark Shadows." It's a remake of Burton's 1984 live-action short film of the same name, where a little boy named Victor (Charlie Tahan) is so upset by the death of his beloved dog Sparky, that he finds a way to raise him from the dead. Both versions of "Frankenweenie" are loving homages to old monster movies, chiefly James Whale's "Frankenstein." I was a little worried about the new animated movie being entirely in black and white, when it's already retro stop-motion, but what Burton accomplishes with the visuals and the mood is absolutely worth it. There is some downright gorgeous cinematography in this movie, summoning an appropriate atmosphere of creeping dread. Also, Burton never lets you forget for a second that the revived zombie dog, energetic and lovable as he seems, is still a decomposing corpse.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's quite enough story to support a whole movie. Burton got some parts right, building up the relationship between Victor and Sparky, and making Sparky a more sympathetic character. However, the expansion of the plot to include a controversial teacher, the machinations of Victor's science fair rival, and Victor's crush Elsa van Helsing, didn't do much for me. The windmill sequence at the end of the film feels tacked on, and it looks an awful lot like the one at the end of Burton's "Sleepy Hollow." Then again, there's an earlier sequence involving a gang of the neighborhood kids, their pets, and the misuse of science that is one of the most entertaining pieces of creative mayhem that I've seen in a while. "Frankenweenie" has some flaws, and I expect it's always going to be a hard sell to most audiences, but it's very successful at being what it wants to be, and affirms that Tim Burton has some creative spark in him yet.

Finally there's "Paranorman," which is also stop-motion animation and also contains homages to older horror movies, mostly of the B-movie variety. The story follows Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a gloomy little boy who can see ghosts and other supernatural things that no one else can. This makes it hard for him to relate to his family and get along at school, where he's bullied for being different. I like how gently subversive the story is, the way that it takes common horror tropes and finds news twists on them that help to get its point across. Laika is an independent studio, and not afraid of going to places where the big studios won't go. So it's not afraid of tackling topics like bullying and prejudice, and yes, this is the movie where it turns out that one of the characters is gay. "Paranorman" has some story issues, and isn't quite as focused as it should be, but in the end it's a movie that has something to say and isn't afraid to say it.

I think one of the reasons "Paranorman" didn't do as well as it should have is that it's kind of funny looking, and I mean that in a good way. All the character designs are awkward and slightly grotesque, making Norman and his friends look very different from the cuddly heroes you see in most CGI kids' films these days. It takes a little whiel to get used to the style, but once you do, you really appreciate how well-done the animation is. The attention to detail in this movie is extraordinary. It's easy to get forget, in some of the more mundane environments like schools and bathrooms and neighborhood streets, that everything we see was specially constructed in miniature. However, that impeccable craftsmanship really comes to the fore when we come to the stunning, intense finale scenes, which have some of the best special effects work I've seen all year. Of these three movies, "Paranorman" is easily my favorite.

Looks like we're quickly filling up that deficit of animate Halloween movies. Here's hoping we get more like 'em.
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I don't particularly want to write this review, but since I committed to doing it in a Tim Burton post I wrote a few months ago, I feel that I have an obligation to fulfill. I only regret that I have posted this resulting screed so late, when most people curious about the film have probably already seen it.

"Dark Shadows," based on a '60s television soap of the same name, is about a vampire named Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). Originally a wealthy gentleman in the 1700s, Barnabas spurns the affections of the witch Angelique (Eva Green) for his true love Josette (Bella Heathcote). The vengeful Angelique kills Josette and turns Barnabas into a vampire, who is quickly trapped in a coffin and buried. Barnabas is not unearthed until the 1970s, and finds his descendants still living in Collinwood Manor. They're an odd bunch with a lot of secrets, and have lost nearly all their money and influence to the still young and vengeful Angelique, now a major business rival.

The cast of "Dark Shadows" is terribly impressive and includes Michelle Pfeiffer as Collins matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Jonny Lee Miller as her slimy brother Roger, Chloë Moretz as Elizabeth's hostile teenage daughter Carolyn, Gulliver McGrath as Roger's glum 10-year-old son David, Jackie Earl Haley as Collinwood's caretaker, and of course, Helena Bonham Carter as a live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman. Bella Heathcote also pops back into the picture to play Victoria Winters, David's mysterious new governess, who understandably attracts Barnabas's attentions. And what does director Tim Burton do with this varied and talented cast? Extremely little worth talking about.

"Dark Shadows" seems like it would be perfect material for a Tim Burton film, full of supernatural characters and soap opera kitsch. However, Burton chose to turn it into a pure comedy by making Barnabas a fish-out-of-water in the 1970s. I can find little fault with Johnny Depp's performance, a broadly foppish turn accentuated by elaborate makeup and clothing. The problem is that he's a very limited, one-note character stuck doing variations on the same goofy joke for the entire film. And it's the same joke he was doing as Edward Scissorhands back in 1991! Here's this oddly-dressed anachronistic horror movie character trying to get along in the modern day! Ain't that a gas? Well yes, briefly, but you can't build an entire movie on one joke. So "Dark Shadows" rolls out a tragic romance and a family-in-peril story to go with Depp's hijinks, and neither of them remotely work.

This is one of the worst written movies I've seen this year. There are potentially interesting characters who are never properly developed, story threads that go nowhere, random events that don't seem to connect to anything else in the movie, and too many of the major revelations are not set up properly at all. I was trying to give "Dark Shadows" the benefit of the doubt, but it just kept getting more ridiculous. I suspect that Burton was trying to parody the soap opera conventions of the original show, but he never managed to get the tone right, which was nowhere near as campy and satirical as it should have been. Instead, the movie comes off as very colorful and eccentric and typically Burtonesque, with no substance to speak of and no laughs to be found. It was too much "Alice in Wonderland," and not enough "Mars Attacks."

When the film does manage to get something right, it feels like a mistake. Eva Green is a bright spot as the craven Angelique, who at one point aggressively tries to seduce Barnabas in romp that destroys her office and sends the camera spinning. The scene is pretty amusing and a lot of fun visually, but it also makes it clear that Depp has far more chemistry with Green than he does with Heathcote in their tepid courtship scenes. Helena Bonham Carter's psychiatrist subplot turns out the same way, cut off just as things were getting interesting, in favor of something far duller.

The only thing particularly praiseworthy about the film is that it has some nice art direction and cinematography. It's not hard to see where the budget went, as the sets and costumes are gorgeous, playing with vintage styling and Gothic touches. However, the abuse of CGI visuals is becoming a common problem in Burton films, and this is no exception. Frankly, all the common criticisms that are usually lobbed against Tim Burton films are true of "Dark Shadows." It's indulgent. It's style-over-substance. It's weird for the sake of being weird.

The sad thing is, I think Burton was trying to do something different and stretch himself. "Dark Shadows" is perhaps the closest thing he's done to a straight comedy in a long while, and the humor's a little more adult than we usually see from him. A few more tweaks and rewrites, and this could have been a very different and much more interesting film. In its current state, though, it's barely watchable and not worth defending.

Better luck next time, Tim Burton.
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I feared the worst when I learned that NBC was rebooting "The Munsters," especially when I heard that the concept was to do a prequel series featuring Herman and Lily Munster's early days. Apparently I wasn't the only one with misgivings, because over the summer reports on Brian Fuller's pilot indicated that it was going the more traditional route and following the template of the original series, with Eddie and Marilyn appearing as part of the family. NBC decided not to pick up the show, but was stuck with an expensive pilot for "Mockingbird Lane" on their hands. So they decided to repackage the pilot as a Halloween special, which aired Friday night. And it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected.

Directed by Bryan Singer, "Mockingbird Lane" looks a lot like Fuller's "Pushing Daisies," full of bright storybook visuals and old fashioned whimsy. The Munster family members no longer resemble the old Universal classic monsters. Instead, Herman is played by Jerry O'Connell, and has a couple of visible scars from where he was stitched together from different pieces, but otherwise looks like a perfectly ordinary man. His lovely wife Lily (Portia de Rossi) has no Bride-of-Frankenstein white streak in her hair, and their son Eddie (Mason Cook) only has werewolf features during the full moon. Marilyn (Charity Wakefield) looks exactly as she always has, but this time she doesn't stand out. Only Grandpa (Eddie Izzard), with his continental fashion sense, appears to have stepped out of another era. However, it's made perfectly clear that the Munster family is still very monstrous. Herman's heart, his only original part, literally breaks when he becomes too emotional. Lily appears in a cloud of swirling smoke and enjoys lounging on the ceiling. The move to the new house on Mockingbird Lane is prompted by an unfortunate incident where Eddie's werewolf side manifests for the first time during a Boy Scout camping trip.

Telling Eddie that he's a werewolf is the major dilemma of the first episode, illustrating how "Mockingbird Lane" swaps out 60s sitcom family dynamics with the considerably more complicated and self-aware ones of the present day. The Munsters understand that they're different, even if it's less apparent on the outside, and this is treated as something that they all struggle with to different degrees. The running joke about Marilyn being the oddball normal of the the clan is translated into simmering resentment between her and Grandpa, who disapproves of Marilyn's very existence. Izzard steals the show, as Grandpa wholeheartedly gives into his wild side, wasting no time in turning the neighbors into blood slaves with spiked cookies and playing mad scientist when Herman's heart goes bust. The horrors are more goofy than scary, but they have much more bite to them than in the old days. In spite of the cuddly family angle, I wonder if the show is a bit too macabre to be considered family friendly. There are some tonal issues that need ironing out, especially the humor, which is a little too light on the suburban satire and awfully glib with the one-liners.

I suspect that this is why NBC didn't pick up "Mockingbird Lane." The pilot is perfectly decent with some good ideas, but it has all the earmarks of a cult show. It's not easygoing enough for families, not sophisticated enough for grown-ups, and not ghoulish enough for horror fans. The original "Munsters" is hardly even shown in reruns anymore, so there's not much nostalgia to count on either. I suspect that the price tag also had something to do with it. One of the big selling points of "Mockingbird Lane" is its gorgeous production design, which incorporates lots of stylized visuals and special effects, which we know cost a fortune. But cut out those effects, and what's left? O'Connell and De Rossi are a little bland as Herman and Lily, without much chemistry between them. De Rossi in particular doesn't get to do much in the pilot, never given a chance to show off her formidable comedic skills. Charity Wakefield and Mason Cook are more solid as the kids, and Izzard is a lot of fun, but leaning on him too heavily would be disastrous.

There is a small chance that NBC will move forward with more episodes of "Mockingbird Lane," but I think the people in charge made the right call in turning the show down. The pilot made for some good season-appropriate spectacle, but I don't know if I'd want to tune in every week for something like this. The end product could have been a lot worse, though. We could have ended up with something like the 80s reboot, "The Munsters Today," or the 90s TV movie version. "Mockingbrid Lane" at least tried to do something original with the "Munsters" concept.
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There have been many television shows about the agents of the Devil, including procedurals like "Brimstone" and "Millennium," and more lighthearted takes like "Reaper." The Devil is never explicitly mentioned anywhere in the first hour of "666 Park Avenue," but all the earmarks of the genre are apparent. The unsuspecting residents of the luxurious New York Upper East Side's fictional 999 Park Avenue are tempted and seduced by the building's owners, Gavin and Olivia Doran (Terry O'Quinn, Vanessa Williams), into committing some capital sin in exchange for their heart's desire, and then the pair collect on the price with the aid of supernatural forces, usually manifesting through the building itself. In the pre-title sequence, we see a violinist unsuccessfully trying to flee the scene, but he only gets a few feet away from the beautiful residence before being literally sucked back inside.

The show's protagonists are a young couple, Jane Van Veen (Rachael Taylor) and Henry Martin (Dave Annable), who have been hired as the new on site co-managers of the building, responsible for day to day upkeep. Henry keeps his day job as an attorney who works for the mayor's office, while Jane is an unemployed architect who takes an interest in the building's history. As soon as they move into their posh new apartment, delighted at their good fortune, Gavin and Olivia start working their claws in. This is clearly a long con, and we are only in the very early stages of the seduction phase, but the Dorans' tactics are clear. Henry has political connections they wish to exploit while lovely Jane has caught Gavin's eye. Jane is positioned as the show's central figure, who not only digs up several ominous historical documents during the hour, but gets a major supernatural warning as well.

Meanwhile, other residents are a little further along in the process. Among the show's regulars will be another young couple, playwright Brian (Robert Buckley) and fashionista Louise (Mercedes Masöhn), who are headed for a dangerous love triangle when Brian's roving eye lands on Alexis (Helena Mattsson), Louise's new assistant who is also a resident of the building. Then there's the thief in the building, Nona (Samantha Logan), a teenager who lifts small trinkets, but is clearly courting big trouble. Finally, two characters who we may never see again after the pilot are John and Mary Barlow (James Waterston, Lucy Walters). Mary is quite dead from an apparent suicide, but Gavin brings her back for John on the condition that he kill a few people on the Dorans' behalf. This arrangement is brief and doesn't end pleasantly. However, from the long list of future recurring characters on the show's roster, the vacancy should be filled pretty quickly.

"666 Park Avenue" is going to follow the format of a late evening soap, full of illicit betrayals and other bad behavior by beautiful people, except with supernatural consequences. Unfortunately, I don't think the horror elements really do much for the show. They're not campy or toothy enough to be much fun, and not scary enough to offer any real thrills. Though they feature heavily in the promos, the special effects are a bore, and the atmosphere is sorely lacking. I like seeing Terry O'Quinn and Vanessa Williams as an evil Mephistophelean power couple, but you don't need to be an agent of the Devil in order to pull that off. The rest of the cast is going to have to hustle to catch up to them, though. I'm already far more interested in how the Dorans met and got themselves into this soul-collecting racket than I am about the Barbie and Ken doll hero and heroine who have stumbled into their little web.

However, there is something fascinating about seeing a parade of hapless, weak-willed television creatures fall victim to their own worst natures week after week, and I can see this series becoming something like a gleeful "Touched by an Angel" in reverse. With so many anti-heroes running around these days, it is nice to see a show with more old-fashioned definitions of good and evil, of right and wrong, where we know the comeuppances are coming. That element, more than any long-simmering romantic tensions or any murky series mythology, is going to be the show's best chance at attracting and keeping an audience. At this point most of the show's regular players are simply too generic, and are going to need a few more shades of gray if their fight to stay uncorrupted is going to actually be a proper fight worth watching. It'll probably take a few weeks of spotlight episodes to tell one way or the other.

I think I'll stick around for another episode or two, at least long enough to see if Vanessa Williams will get to cast a few people into Hell the same way that Terry O'Quinn did in the pilot. I admit that was the part I was really looking forward to.
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