Monsters vs. Aliens vs. Snot vs. Poop

Monsters vs. Aliens cuts a wide swath through comedy. One character is called General W.R. Monger, like warmonger, while a brainy scientist says the exclamatory phrase “by Hawkins’ chair,” an offbeat reference to physicist Stephen Hawking, who’s mapped the galaxy from a wheelchair nearly all his life. Brainy stuff for sure. And then a giant insect shoots snot rockets from its nose.

At times, the animated film can’t decide who the material is geared for: the kiddies being brought to see it or the adults doing the bringing. In one scene military experts are looking for science experts when someone says, “call India.” Many adults won’t get the joke — that India produces some of the world’s most gifted science and engineering minds — let alone children, who spent the car ride to the theater checking their nostrils for space invaders. To counterbalance that gag, the president of the United States goes from DEFCON 1 to “Code Brown” because he’s soiled his slacks, and a blob of ooze has to be reminded that “boys don’t have boobies.”

How frustrating this is! Last week I had a conversation with several people who wouldn’t have taken their grandchildren to see the magical Coraline, a far superior movie, had they known two buxom characters strip down to their undies to do an innocuous trapeze act. Yet here, the president poops himself to comic effect and I betcha no one complains. Better animated films (especially those by Pixar) balance the humor more precisely: The jokes are just smart enough for adults and just silly enough for children without going overboard in either direction.

Here I am, though, halfway through a review and I’ve yet to talk plot: An alien super villain tries to colonize the planet so the government sends in monsters it has collected to suppress the threat. The monsters are the fishy Missing Link (Will Arnett), the human roach Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a gelatinous blob named B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a giant furball called Insectasaurus and the 50-foot-tall woman, whose “official government-sanctioned monster name” is Ginormica, but call her Susan (Reese Witherspoon). They live in an underground government facility so vast and labyrinthine that it epitomizes Eisenhower’s definition of the Military Industrial Complex.

Susan is the central character and the way the movie plots her arc from bride-to-be to Ginormica is effective, if also kinda sad. I felt bad for Susan, the way she’s treated by her moronic TV weatherman fiancé, the way she’s hidden in a secret government facility, the way she loses everything except the friendship of the other monsters. She comes into her own, though, and eventually tussles with a giant robot in San Francisco — a fantastic scene — and then the alien geekus Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson). The sequel must give her a new groom, and maybe he’ll be as tall as her.

I must also comment on the voice acting, which I often fault in animated movies that include celebrity voices. These voices are perfect for these roles, especially Rogen, a convincing dunce, and Witherspoon, whose chirpy tones are just colorful enough for those animated frames.

Some of the humor is clearly of the lowest-common denominator kind — anything with snot or poop — but some of it is pretty clever: A headline about the alien invasion reads “U-F-Uh-Oh.” A man scans his iris, thumbprint, palmprint, elbow, tongue and butt to gain access to a war room that looks like the war room from Dr. Strangelove. B.O.B. the blob is capable of all kinds of contortions and bizarre visual gags, one of which involves the hilarious, context-free line, “I taste ham,” the meaning of which I will let you discover.

Really, though, Monsters vs. Aliens is a rather mellow spoof. The monsters are mutated devices from other movies: The Fly, The Blob, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Thing, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and Cloverfield. Notice the clever Vertigo parody as Susan runs across rooftops in San Francisco and dangles from a rain gutter only to realize she’s nearly as tall as the building itself. Or how the alien’s computer is accessed using one of those step pads from that dancing arcade game. Or how the president communicates with a giant robot using the musical notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and when that doesn’t work he busts out with the Beverly Hills Cop theme on his Casio keyboard. Try to listen for the really obscure line about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

These are amusing jokes, but it all relates back to my original point: Will children get them? I think not, which is why Monsters vs. Aliens is peppered with potty humor as well, maybe as a backup. The animation looks good, the action flows well, the monsters are likeable (especially B.O.B., who falls in love with a Jell-O mold), but the film’s sense of humor needs a narrower focus. Or just less snot.

This review originally ran in the West Valley View March 27, 2009.

Stare at this photo and you WILL be whacked

Photographer, forgive me. I don't know where I found this, but I'm going to risk copyright violations to post it just because it makes me laugh. And after laughing I have this unsettling urge to enter into the Witness Protection Program where I can enjoy my egg noodles and ketchup and not fear men like these two. This picture of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci is almost unreal, like it was invented in some designer's head. It's just too perfect: Pesci looks like he's ready to stab you in the throat with a fountain pen, and De Niro is apparently doing an impression of De Niro. Shortly after this photo was taken they beat a man to an oozy pulp in a cornfield and then buried him while he was still breathing. And where has Pesci been all these years; he needs a new movie. In any case, this photo is a classic.

Rashida Jones, your day has come

The Office is one of the most inventive shows on TV right now, but it's not perfect. Look at the blunders: they booted (maybe temporarily) HR goofball Holly Flax, turned Jan Levinson into a breastfeeding Godzilla, booted Toby only to bring him back and then turned Angela into the office whore, and Angela is bizarre but not a whore. Unforgivable, though, is what they did to Rashida Jones who played Karen Filippelli, who was Jim's girlfriend throughout Season 3.

After a more than 20 episodes of Karen's delightful presence, Jim goes to New York City for a job interview, realizes he loves Pam and then leaves poor Karen "standing by some fountain." The writers had set up a cute little storyline with Jim and Karen, and Karen wasn't just the "other girl" to receptionist Pam Beesly but an important force in the Scranton branch, where she pulled her weight and added some much-needed sexiness to the stuffiness of Dunder Mifflin. They brought her back for several episodes, including a recent one in which she's pregnant, but it's not the same as having her on the series as a regular.

Maybe Rashida will get the last laugh, though. With Jim selling Blackberry's and Pam being all cute and Pammy, Rashida's co-starring in the new romantic comedy — or maybe, bromantic comedy — I Love You, Man, where she's set to marry Paul Rudd, who doesn't have any friends eligible for the best man duties. The movie, which also stars terminal penis flapper Jason Segel, opens next week, and next month her new show, Parks and Recreation from the makers of The Office, debuts on NBC. Before all this, the only she'd been seen in after Jim dumped her was the Web shorts "Puppies" and then "Kittens," where her and the contagiously cute Natalie Portman solved the economic crisis with furry little animals.

I go through phases when it comes to celebrity crushes. I've gone through the Natalie Portman phase several times. I just ended a Zooey Deschanel phase when I heard she's engaged to some douchebag singer who thinks he's Bob Dylan. Rashida Jones ... your phase starts now. Her characters are hilarious, her timing is perfect, her look is classy ... oh and she's freakin' hot. Movie and television poducers: More Rashida, please.

Watchmen: Overrated comic geekery

Last year The Dark Knight opened up the comic book universe for the masses. And now Watchmen slams the door shut and retreats to the basement to geek out.

Just as I was getting fond of the comic book movies — I had forgiven Spider-Man 3, adored Hellboy 2, and was in awe of Dark Knight — here’s one that proves why comics are an acquired taste and why they fluctuate in popularity so wildly within every generation.

Nevertheless, though, comics — especially graphic novels, a term which is overused — are still big. As a testament to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Time magazine named it one of 100 important novels — list buddies include The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. The graphic novel may be brilliant, but the film is a convoluted mess, a tired and ridiculous port of the source material. No wonder Alan Moore, who looks kinda like Karl Marx on Watchmen's back cover, had his name removed from the film credits.

Before going any further let's settle some business: I’m reviewing the film, not the graphic novel, which I will leave untouched for its many fans, those who’ve seen the sun the last decade and those who haven’t — or, more bluntly, those who’ve had sex with a real person and those who haven’t. For people who haven’t read the book, like myself, don’t let anyone tell you that reading it is mandatory. The film negates the need to read the book, because, let’s face it, if we wanted to read we’d go to the library, not the movie theater. Besides, a film is obligated to work on its own terms within the medium. If it requires further reading to appreciate or “get,” then it’s not a film, but an appendix to the book and that’s just hooey. That goes for all films, not just Watchmen.

The movie exists in a strange alternate universe: not only did Richard Nixon not resign but he was elected to a third term; masked superheroes emerge as social avengers and occasionally as troublemakers; the Soviets are ready to launch nukes at the United States (I guess that part is familiar); and blimps circle the skies for no apparent reason. It’s 1985, but it feels like the 2019 of Blade Runner.

Watchmen begins like most noir stories: in the rain with a grim voiceover narration. The voice is Rorschach, a gravel-throat superhero detective. His face is covered with a mask stained with mutating, but symmetrical, inkblots — I kept trying to notice a pattern or maybe recurring shapes to no avail. Rorschach is tracking down leads on a murdered superhero, a retired weapons expert and deadbeat named Comedian, who was thrown out a window from a height I wouldn’t recommend jumping from. His investigation leads him to other superheroes: hip brunette Silk Spectre, a Clark Kentish dweeb who used to be Nite Owl, the billionaire conglomerate Ozymandias, and Dr. Manhattan, a glowing-blue transcendentalist who might actually be God, or maybe just his proxy.

These characters — with exception to Dr. Manhattan; more on him later — are not super as we might think of superheroes. They have no special abilities, no mutated DNA, no comet crystals or krypton allergies. They’re more or less like Batman: inventive gadget designers, lethal in a brawl and all-around street smart. The fact that the masked crimefighters co-exist with normal everyday folks is apparently what made the graphic novel so compelling. I wasn’t so compelled with the idea here, mainly because the superhero ideals don’t really exist. They talk about truth, justice and the American way, but they don’t actually go out and live under that credo. Their whole routine feels like a fetish game of dress-up, one that they hardly take serious. When Silk Spectre and Nite Owl do return to their superhero moonlighting, all they can muster is a post-coitus jailbreak for the ever-deranged and now maskless Rorschach, who tells the inmates, “I’m not locked in here with you; you’re locked in here with me.” The scene is fun, but it accentuates that there’s no dynamic between who these people are and what they represent.

I’ve yet to mention a story arc, which is intentional since it’s so often abandoned for all the comic minutiae. The plot, though, involves the murder of Comedian and the devious implications behind it. Rorschach, the only one who senses a nefarious scheme, pushes forward even as the film skids into everyone’s origin stories, which might be effective tangents in a film with more focus or maybe a shorter running time (165 minutes). Instead the film spins out of control with each new series of flashbacks, some of which reveal how Vietnam was won (Dr. Manhattan microwaved the North Vietnamese Army into gibs) and others that provide us with the emotional anchor points of the characters’ lives (Rorschach killing a child abductor). All this is going on while the end game, which might be nuclear war with the Russkies, draws closer with no clear path through the nonsense.

This leads us into Watchmen’s most glaring error: Dr. Manhattan, probably one of the most poorly written superheroes ever written onto a screen. (I’ve since read Roger Ebert’s review, and was confounded as to why he didn’t scrutinize this blue guy more.) Here’s a character that draws comparisons to deity, yet is so consistently stupid that I think he was married to Nick Lachey for several years. He has the power to obliterate every nuclear weapon on the planet, yet he teleports himself and his ever-present wiener to Mars where he meditates on a glass spaceship because … well, because why the hell not. And when the doomsday clock is about to strike for mankind, he pukes poetry about the human condition and asks rhetorical philosophical questions that contradict everything that’s been established from the simplest metaphysical level right on up. This is a misguided character in a chronically misguided movie.

And seriously, enough of his glowing balls. It reminds me of that Film Snob entry on “film vs. movie”: A movie is where you see a woman’s bare breasts. A film is where you see Harvey Keitel’s penis. It doesn’t say anything about glowing genitalia; maybe in the next edition.

Penises aside, Watchmen is thematically confused, if not altogether morally bankrupt. Dr. Manhattan, and those he colludes with, actually make a case for killing millions to save billions. Only in a story this convoluted and preposterous would the characters be denied other choices. The fact that this movie even offers the choice proves that it’s edgy and daring, but to what cost? It sacrifices humanity for the characters’ egos, and that’s unforgivable in a superhero film.

This last development, set in an Arctic lair of all places, reminded me of two films: First, Sophie’s Choice, where a woman is told to pick one of her two children to die in the Holocaust. And another, Fail-Safe, where Americans willingly nuke New York City to pacify the Soviets and stop an impending World War III. Both films offer their characters horrific choices, but we can sympathize with their dilemmas because they’re not omnipotent beings who act on their quantum subconscious (i.e. Manhattan), but real people with real hopes and fears. We sympathize because we respect the path that led to their choices. The audience is not given that much freedom in Watchmen, a movie that mandates our sympathy, yet never earns it.

The others superheroes aren’t so bad, though: Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) plays a retired doofus well enough, complete with giant glasses and ill-fitting suits; Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman, whose pluckiness I admired in The Hearbreak Kid) is both leggy and curvy in just the right proportions; and Rorschach seems to have a warrior’s code and maybe even morals under that smearing mask of his. Rorschach is played by Bad News Bear Jackie Early Haley, who’s so terrific that I was left craving for his own movie away from everyone else.

I’ll just admit it: I hated this story. I hated the way it manipulated the characters into choices. And I hated the way it held itself in such high regard, as if it just assumed it were the coolest kid on the block without having to prove itself. Especially infuriating is the way it mythologized Watchmen’s flat, vacuous plot; give me Dark Knight’s three-dimensional mythology any day of the week. Director Zack Snyder (300), who honored the graphic novel by turning nearly every comic panel into a frame within his movie, is a skilled storyteller; it’s just unfortunate this story is so unfulfilling.

I also admit that I loved the rock ’n’ roll soundtrack — with Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel — and the high-octane action editing over it. Also spectacular are the visual effects: Nite Owl’s impressive bird jet, the electric field generator that creates god-like superheroes, Rorschach’s mask, and Dr. Manhattan’s array of explosion and teleportation tricks. Many of the effects are one-offs, little blink-and-you’ll-miss moments sprinkled throughout. One of them shows Manhattan’s circulatory system suspended in the air. Another has him analyzing an exploded view of a tank, as if every piece were pulled apart simultaneously. Visually, Watchmen is incredible. But just visually.

Does any of this Watchmen bashing matter, though? Probably not, simply because the hype has already been built and reversing it is something even Dr. Manhattan couldn’t accomplish (assuming he’s not on Venus when we’re looking for him). Comic books fans will love Watchmen, not because it’s worth loving, but because they’ve been programmed to love it, as if questioning its authenticity were a high crime against their beloved comics. Non-comic fans will enjoy the pop-art imagery, but they'll agree with this: Watchmen is overrated.

This review originally ran in the West Valley View March 6, 2009.

The mailman is safe this time

Lucy is a dog and she does not poop in Wendy and Lucy. I assume she has all the parts to effectively make poop and dispense with it on other people’s lawns, but we do not see this part of Lucy’s existence, which is why I can safely say that this is a higher breed of dog movie.

But I’m not so sure it’s really a dog movie. The other character in the title, Wendy, is Lucy’s owner. She’s on the road in a beater car, heading to Alaska where a job in a fishery supposedly pays well enough that it’s worth the cross-country trip, and worth living near a fishery in Alaska. Lucy is her travel companion, although we’re denied the typical Dog Movie gags — Lucy doesn’t talk, doesn’t chase down bank robbers or the mailman, and at no point does she eat an expensive loafer or slobber on the record collection. Instead, Wendy and Lucy exists in the margins, in the subtle composition of a woman and her only friend and the closeness that exists between them.

Wendy is played by Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) in a role that should have generated some Oscar buzz last year — the film was eligible since it officially came out in 2008. Her performance is comparable to Melissa Leo’s nominated performance in Frozen River. Both films are about hopeless people stumbling into final acts of hope and redemption. Williams, who’s now the custodian of Heath Ledger’s Oscar statue until their daughter turns 18, evokes a raw, realistic performance void of all the flirty nuance and camera winking of typical roles. She plays it — underplays it, although effectively so — like a real person, like she’s the subject of an impromptu documentary. Passages of the film are spent with Wendy walking, looking, thinking and planning, Lucy always nearby. The audience is just a pedestrian in the story, observing her journey in careful detail from 15 feet back.

As we watch these details — like Lucy’s dog bowls in the car trunk, and Wendy’s sink baths in rest stops — a plot slowly emerges: the beater has broken down in Oregon and money is getting tight. Alaska and the journey’s end seem to take five steps back. With her funds dwindling, Wendy tries to lift some food from a grocery store and gets nabbed by an overzealous stock boy. The police are called and she’s handcuffed and carted away with Lucy still tied to a bike rack. By the time she pays the fine and walks back to the store, her precious travel companion is gone. The stock boy, who she publicly shames, refuses to acknowledge Wendy or her missing dog, which complicate matters further.

The film essentially follows Wendy as she looks for Lucy, tries to get her car repaired and squeak by with what little money she has left. She meets people along the way who are beacons to her backward progression to her new Alaskan life. Will Patton plays a gruff mechanic who delivers bad news in a movie filled with nothing else. An animal shelter worker offers help, but little more than waiting can be done for a missing dog. A kind security guard offers moral support as Wendy’s world crumbles around her. In his last scene, the guard gives her all the money he can spare — it’s $6, and Wendy wants to sob when she counts it out.

Maybe you can sense this movie is heading toward calamity, or at the very least an emotional chasm, but it’s not one of those movies (Patch Adams comes to mind). It doesn’t pull needlessly at heartstrings or manipulate its way into our tear ducts. It’s an honest movie with an honest ending. It speaks eloquently to disenfranchised young people who leave the comfortable parts of their lives to experience new chapters, or maybe just entirely new beginnings. Sometimes their new plans work, and sometimes they don’t. The movie suggests that homeless people are Wendys, people with elaborate goals and dreams but no car, money or dog in which to drive them forward.

Some readers will read the praise I've heaped on this movie and feel as though they should run out and see it. I highly recommend it, although I realize it’s not a movie that everyone will enjoy. This beautiful independent feature doesn’t have all the filmmaking flourishes of bigger pictures: the colors are muted and cold, the soundtrack is quiet, there is very little dialogue, no action, and not even a love story or a cute dog moment. What it does have is a sincere character who makes choices that reveal her deeper humanity. Some people, sadly, will be better attuned to Scooby-Doo or Space Buddies or some other pet movie where the pets talk or fly spaceships or shit on the neighbor’s daisies. Wendy and Lucy is not one of those movies. And proudly so.

Someone reset the genre already

Do horror movies work when the monsters are no longer horrifying? I would argue for the negative, although Jason Voorhees’ fans, who cheered his very appearance in the rebooted Friday the 13th, would argue in the other direction. In their twisted worlds the machete-wielding murderer would have been knighted by now — Sir Jason, Lord of the Welsh Farthing, cousin of the Duke of Westerly. Sainthood would not be far behind.

In any case, Jason is no longer a villain to his core audience; he’s decidedly blue-collar. Horrors don’t work when audiences cheer for the bad guy, especially since great pains are undertaken to introduce good guys, in this case (and in all cases for Friday the 13th movies) hormonal teens screwing around near Camp Crystal Lake, the site of some grisly murders decades back. So they have two-track minds (drugs and intercourse), but the movie requires us to care for their well-being, otherwise the scares don’t work because the victims might as well be ottomans in an Ikea display, just meaningless things.

In the original Friday the 13th from 1980 — way before Jason went to Manhattan, Hell and space (in that order) — Jason’s mother was the bloodthirsty killer; she sought revenge against the camp counselors that let her little boy die in the lake while they were playing naked Twister in the bushes somewhere between the archery range and the whittling den. Jason and his hockey mask didn’t actually appear until Friday the 13th Part II. With the remake, the original movie’s entire plot has been relegated to the opening credits, ending with Mrs. Voorhees’ head being separated from her neck in a method not recommended by most doctors. And that’s where this one picks up, basically at Part II.

It’s been untold decades since the Camp Crystal Lake murders, and the camp, totem poles and all, is overgrown and rotting by the festering marsh they call a lake. College kids searching for a hidden field of marijuana stumble into the camp and find Jason, who hacks up all of them save for one that he wraps in her sleeping bag and barbecues alive. Six weeks later another group of college kids venture into town to party at a rich father’s cabin. They also trespass on Jason’s right-of-way and meet grisly ends. The movie is a series of encounters with Jason, who has to one-up only himself on torture and killing devices — from screwdrivers and elk antlers to the machete that severed his own mother’s head, an implement that proves 98 percent of Freud’s theories true.

This time around, though, the hulking and massive Jason, who was a supernatural force in the original series, is rebooted as a severely disabled (and semi-mortal) orphan, who probably doesn’t understand the concept of his mother’s death. With Jason’s newfound transience from the original series, one gets the impression that with some therapy and some wabbits he might make a convincing Lennie for a production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I liked mortal Jason, and I liked that his behavior could be counted on. He's written with a Norman Bates-like crush on his mother, which would be even more twisted and deranged had he actually vocalized his feelings, but instead he skulks around silently with apparently no will, or mouth, from which to speak. I can see why fans appreciate the Jason character — he's dependable — although I will never understand how he has risen to cult hero status.

The college kids, with their floppy hair, Greek letters and sandals — just asking for some chest ventilating if you ask me — do everything that they’re supposed to do in movies like this: the men use drugs, the women show their breasts, they all wander out in the dark for no reason, they investigate strange noises, they never run faster than Jason can walk … it’s all a very defined routine, like they’re caught in the groove of a record and can’t get out. And the record came out in 1980.

One character, the Funny Asian Guy, doesn’t even have the ironic foresight to laugh when he says, “I’m going to the toolshed and I’ll be right back” … with a hedge trimmer rammed through my ribcage. Then there’s topless water-skier, the Hot Blonde, who is too dense to realize her nakedness just guaranteed her skull-splitting demise. Or the woodchipper operator, who forgot to install the “This Woodchipper Must Be Used As a Weapon In the Climax or Not At All” plaque to his machine's operating panel. Or the Witty Black Guy who acknowledges he's the only black character by making obtuse references to his blackness. Finally there's Girl's Boyfriend, who's like 28 years old but has apparently never had sex before, which is why he tries way too hard to get in the sack with his virginal co-star. That last douchebag has the movie's best line: staring up at a naked girl's chest he says, "Your tits are stupendous." The movie's writers must not have wives or girlfriends, because if they did they'd know better than to call breasts "stupendous" in fear of never seeing another pair again. I'm way off topic, but all these characters and their horrible dialogie are horror-movie clichés and the movie doesn’t even avoid them, or at least poke fun at their expense. It presents them as legitimate developments in a plot it's calling fresh and orginal.

Full-blown aggravation, though, set in when I realized that this could have been a reinvention, not just a remake. Yes, the film needs to acknowledge its roots by setting up dopey twentysomethings like lambs to the slaughter, but here those roots are deified for the faithful fans who expect nothing less. Yes, a remake is a very literal word: the film was made over again, as in re-done, re-filmed, re-examined. But usually such things are done to involve us in more story, better special effects or just something that the original didn’t have. This Friday the 13th lacks nothing that wasn’t in the first franchise. Yes, the mood is scarier, the violence a bit more visceral, and modern cinematography has nailed nighttime photography, but otherwise there’s nothing new that warrants more Jason. It’s frustrating that with so many horror writers working in Hollywood, none could come up with an original premise for the veteran slasher — at this stage even Jason should be bored.

The movie is rebooted by Marcus Nispel, the same guy who rebooted the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. Nispel has done something appalling: he’s remade the two franchises the same way, nearly overlapping them in fact. In both, the villains are large, beastly men who are mentally challenged as well as mentally deranged. Both have signature weapons: Jason uses a machete so large it probably serves no purpose, and Leatherface uses a chainsaw in a part of the Lone Star State where there are no trees. Both films feature run-down houses with macabre shrines made of questionable bone and skin fragments. And both films are nihilist by design, with characters and villains who represent nothing but their own ends. Even the horror feels like black voids of emptiness.

Jason kills out of necessity perhaps, and Leatherface out of dietary requirements, but I can't say they kill for thrills — they're too emotionless and disabled to experience any emotion that might be mistaken for happiness or joy, or even just some kind of bizarre violent perversion. Truth be told, they kill to fulfill the fans' urge for blood, which is why I will never trust the opinions of gore-hounds — their appetites require only blood and every plot they endorse is just a vehicle for more carnage.

The horror genre is desperately waiting for its rebirth. Don’t break out the cigars, though, for Friday the 13th.

More Coraline impressive artwork

Here's more Coraline artwork that further proves how amazing the visuals of the animated film are in relation to its whimsical, if also frightening, story. Also, I neglected to mention the film is shown in 3-D, something that's going to be happening more often in 2009. I must agree with Ebert and say the 3-D goggles dim the picture, and I barely noticed the three-dimensional effects, which leads to this question: If you don't notice it, why have it? And why create an effect that can't be reproduced at home with a DVD release? Apparently, they're working on a home-version 3-D system, but even if they come up with something that works I'm not so sure 3-D is a selling point for a film, especially compared to story and characters.