Dolls is no exception to those rules. Judy Bower is a young girl with a strong imagination. Her best friend in the world is her teddy bear and only he gets her through the struggles of long summers spent with her father and stepmother. The reluctant family gets caught in the mud somewhere in Great Britain and are force to spend the night in a large mansion populated by an elderly toy maker, his caring wife, and thousands of handmade dolls. A bumbling man and a pair of pickpockets join them for a stay during the longest night in the world.

Judy has an overactive imagination centered on toys and fantasy

Ostensibly, the only problem with the film is a very distinct tone. It’s very dark and fantastique. No one, not even our young protagonist, acts like a normal person. Every movement, every word, every expression is a grotesque caricature of human emotion. It’s not enough to smile–everyone must grimace. A tear must be painful and pain must be the worst thing in the world to see. It’s an unsettling blend of fantasy and the grotesque to say the least.

The house is elaborately staged to be Gothic and an ever-expanding toychest at the same time

Dolls is not a very serious horror film. Where it excels is creating a morality tale surrounding a child intended to speak to adults. It’s too graphic to actually be a children’s story, but it might just open up a childlike sense of wonder again for the adult viewer.

Rating: 8/10

Thoughts? Dolls is available on Netflix streaming right now if you haven’t seen it. What do you think? Sound off below.

First, Wreck-It Ralph got an arcade game port for E3 and an official trailer. It’s the story of a video game bad guy (think Donkey Kong) who wants to do good in the world. It has a very Monsters, Inc. look, which is never a bad thing.

Watch the Trailer at the interactive Wreck-It Ralph Site

It looks like it might turn out really cute. I’m also digging all the video game parodies and straight-up copies in the Bad Guys Anon meeting.

Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstein, aka Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara

Disney also announced its next princess/fairy tale title. Frozen, based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” stars Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel. Menzel will voice the Snow Queen who casts the kingdom in a blanket of frost and Kristen Bell will play the young girl fighting to save the world.

It’s going to be a musical with original songs by Robert Lopez (The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q). Don’t worry about Lopez. He also did the songs for the new Winnie the Pooh movie last year. He doesn’t have to work blue. He just chooses to.

Finally, in animation-adjacent news, Disney’s Maleficent just started production. Maleficent is the untold tale of one of the most memorable movie villains of all time. Angelina Jolie gets to act out the circumstances that led this poor misguided sorceress to curse an infant as the ultimate act of revenge.

Here’s the first look at Angelina Jolie as Maleficent.

Perfect casting, no? Love the contacts.

That would be four promotional stories that broke for Disney (close enough to) animated films so far this month. What else are they hiding from us?

What do you think? Sound off below.

Writer/director Andre Ovredal hits on a good concept here. One of my favorite documentaries is a nature documentary called The Legend of Bigfoot. A world class documentary team (the Marx family actually filmed a number of Pacific Northwest creatures for the first time in history) goes on a journey to find the location of bigfoot. They discover evidence from Native American tribes–sculptures, paintings, totems–that begin to change the way they go after the colossal beasts.

The TSS keeps the knowledge of trolls hidden from the world

That is the greatest aspect of Trollhunter. You know it’s not a real documentary. Trolls don’t actually exist. Yet, at its best, you start to believe the expertise of the government’s top troll hunter. You’ll question rock patterns, tracks in the woods, and any explanation any expert gives you that isn’t “trolls did it.”

For all the authenticity, Ovredal tips his hand too often to special effects. Anytime the trolls are onscreen, the illusion is ruined. Could you imagine Cloverfield if you saw the whole beast every time he attacked? What about seeing the inner workings of the mind in Chronicle every time they sent a potato chip in the air? In the fake documentary/found footage vein, less is more. Create believability but don’t test the audience with so much special effects.

We learn so much, yet they explain so little

Trollhunter has a bit of an identity crisis. If it wanted to be a low budget fake documentary, it should have gone all the way. Focus on the facts and tease the audience with their presence. If trolls actually showed up like this in real life, the government wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for a day, let alone decades or centuries.

If it wanted to be a monster movie, it needed to focus more on the conflict. The motivation of the troll is written out with one diagnosis in the final scene that doesn’t actually add up. Why, even with that, do they attack humans? Why do they leave their territory? Why do they fight with each other? None of their motivation is explained. There just isn’t enough relevant information to shift tactics in the last fifteen minutes.

Trollhunter has its charms, but it just doesn’t quite gel as a cohesive horror film.

Rating: 5/10

Thoughts? Have you seen Trollhunter yet? You can stream it on Netflix right now. What do you think? Sound off below.

Darius is an intern at a general interest magazine. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life. She has no friends and no real source of income. Jeff, one of the staff writers, brings her along on a gig investigating a classified ad. Someone is looking for the perfect companion to join them on a dangerous time travelling mission. After a quick series of misfires, Darius becomes the bait for the magazine story.

You won’t know why anything is happening, but it will make sense

Derek Connolly’s screenplay will put you at ease. It’s so easy to let go once the whole investigation is set into motion. The comedy is natural and the character development rich and welcome.

Safety Not Guaranteed likes to linger on inactive characters

The cast is more than able to handle all the odd things Conolly and Trevorrow throw at them. Aubrey Plaza gets to show so much range beyond her typical pouty cynic as Darius. She’s clever, she’s funny, she’s honest, and she wants everyone to be happy even at her own expense. Jake Johnson is a perfect balance as Jeff, playing a character who should be more put together than his intern in crisis but is perhaps the biggest mess in the film. Jenica Bergere and Karan Soni round out the writer/artist group nicely as Jeff’s ex-girlfriend and other intern, respectively.

Duplass is committed to Kenneth like his life depended on it.

Safety Not Guaranteed is one of the more unusual sci-fi films to come around in years. It’s not a big idea film like Prometheus and it’s not a character piece like Another Earth. It is a narrative-driven story about a group of lost souls trying to find worth in a five line classified ad.

And really, what more could you want in an adorably menacing sci-fi romantic quirky indie comedy movie?

Rating: 9/10

Thoughts? Have you seen Safety Not Guaranteed yet? Do you plan on it? Sound off below. Love to hear from you.

The full theatrical trailer for Resident Evil: Retribution is more of the same. Alice and a ton of returning characters (some of whom we thought were long dead) are racing round the world. The Umbrella Corporation’s T-Virus has apparently destroyed the whole world, not just random generic cities and deserts in North America.

There is a glimmer of hope here. It looks like the newest entry will pull back the curtain on Alice herself. Everything she’s known might be a lie. She’s fighting against the Umbrella Corporation possibly because the Umbrella Corporation wanted someone to fight. That’s a different angle for once.

Resident Evil: Retribution comes out on September 14 in 3D. Will you be watching?

The difference between those films and the Lynn Ramsey-directed/co-written adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin is narrative cohesion. Swinton is at her best when you get to see the progression of her character. Chop up her work and the spell is broken.

Eva wants to be the victim in this story

Now imagine trying to tell that story using an epistolary novel where only one person writes any letters.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a pastiche of scenes from the life of a boy who knows how to get on his mother’s nerves. Sure, he could use the toilet anytime he wants to around four or five years old. It’s just more fun to torment his mother by insisting on wearing a diaper and punishing her with bowel movements. He could be nicer to his younger sister, but getting a rise out of Mumsy is far more entertaining.

At least that’s how Eva views the situation. The reality might be quite different. Eva is nowhere near a reliable narrator. She constantly looks outward for someone to blame. One of the most disturbing images in the context of the film is when Eva walks Kevin in his stroller into the middle of a construction site so she doesn’t have to hear him scream. A minute later, he’s four or five years old and Eva is convinced the child has gone deaf from screaming too much. There is no moment of self-awareness that any potential damage could have been caused by jackhammer field trips for her own sanity. Eva wipes away her offenses as soon as she can lay blame on someone else.

The problem is that we don’t get to see these calculations at work. The first hour of the film is the world actually abusing Eva. She wakes up to find that someone has covered her house and car in red paint. A grieving mother splits her lip because “someone’s having a nice day.” She can’t walk down the street without someone staring at her and her son’s crimes are constantly laid at her feet.

Ezra Miller steals the show as Kevin

Then you realize that Eva really is insane and the story gets interesting. Once Tilda Swinton actually has a real scene partner–Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin–and the film can focus on their relationship, it’s thrilling. Kevin has grown up to be the spitting image of his mother. He’s passive aggressive. He’s vindictive. He’s prone to random acts of violence and blaming everyone else for his problems. It’s not that he’s a sociopath by choice; he learned it from his mother. Or did he? The film wisely refuses to take a stand on that issue.

If We Need to Talk About Kevin shuffled the scenes around in the first ninety minutes, it could be a masterpiece. There is nothing to grab onto for the first ten or so minutes of the film. What does Eva at the La Tomatina festival have to do with the story at hand? Is it Eva’s safe place? Why doesn’t it recur later on then? As it stands, it’s just a bizarre scene with no bearing on the story being told.

It’s almost as if Lynn Ramsey didn’t know what she could get rid of from the novel. Two hours feels like the right amount of time for this story. It’s just not organized well enough to sell Eva as a character whose story needs to be told.

Rating: 5/10

Thoughts? I hear the book is quite upsetting. Would it be worth reading to try to understand what was happening at all in the first hour of the movie? Sound off below with your thoughts on the book and the film. I’m don’t think I’m done with Kevin yet and I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve been saying for years that this film adaptation is going to be hard. The through line of the novel isn’t even set during the action. It’s a historian travelling around the world collecting the stories of survivors of the ten year war against the living dead. The totally unconnected stories are arranged in chronological order, but don’t even contain the same thematic framework. The only consistency is that the survivors are the ones who followed the rules in The Zombie Survival Guide whether they planned to or not.

When news broke that the screenplay was being rewritten for major reshoots, I wasn’t surprised. The only surprising thing to me is that the rewrite is focused on the third act. Only the third act? So the rest magically works until you reach the point where there’s no epic battle scene?

I want World War Z to be a great film. I doubt it’s going to happen. If it turns out to be great, there’s a good chance it will bear little resemblance to the novel. It will just be another strong zombie movie rather than a strong adaptation of a great novel. If it does stick to what the novel does right, it won’t work onscreen.

My understanding from boilerplates leaked to the press years ago is that the narrator is the central figure. He’s just travelling the world as the war breaks out and captures everything. That in itself is problematic. The narrator is not the empathetic figure. The doctor in China who serves the dying children in remote villages is. The young girl who escapes after her family is destroyed is. The rich and famous people who went insane locked up in a Hollywood mansion are.

The narrator of the book is a historian. His job is to tell other people’s stories with as little intrusion as possible. Turning that figure into an active presence in the story means sacrificing the emotional impact of the the survivors. People all over the world have been tormented by the same menace and forced to experience horrors we will never fully understand. They aren’t heroes because they survived. They’re heroes because this narrator chooses to focus on those who helped others above their own safety.

I don’t see how a big horror action epic will elicit empathy like that. Prove me wrong, Hollywood. I dare you.

What do you think? Any chance this winds up working? Sound off below.

If we never reach that point, we can at least absorb what a new wave of science fiction films are giving us. Movies like Sunshine, Prometheus, and Moon are less about the individual story being told and more about the creation of a rich universe filled with ideas to ponder and debate. To judge any of these films on the story–when there is story–alone would be a pointless endeavor. They’re not narrative features. They’re idea films.

Prometheus, the latest sci-fi/horror epic from Ridley Scott, seems to do away with traditional notions of storytelling all together. The plot–presumably taken from the screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof–is nothing more than an excuse to tell a series of vignettes concerning the reality of life and death in the contexts of faith, fantasy, science, and society.

Cave paintings, sculptures, architecture, all with the same map and figure

Prometheus succeeds and fails in its approach to this small bit of plot. If you view the film as an interactive text designed to stimulate the mind and provoke a response, it’s a great success. If you view it as a prequel to the Alien series or an actual attempt to answer questions of our origins or the existence of god, it’s a total failure. This is not Avatar. There are no easy answer here. This movie exists to make you think, think, and think some more.

The acting is strong. Rapace, Theron, and Marshall-Green have a great dynamic that drives the conflict until the darker sci-fi elements invade the story. Michael Fassbender, however, steals the show. As David, the humanoid android whose only purpose is to see to the needs of the expedition, Fassbender creates one of the most compelling sci-fi images in year.

David is the ideal human, save being totally self-absorbed and unfeeling

Ridley Scott attempts to do something so different with Prometheus that people are bound to be disappointed. No one can have all their expectations met because his goal is not satisfying any singular goal. Would the film be easier to absorb and discuss if he focused in on a single issue or a specific character’s development? Yes. Would it be as rewarding as the debate his sprawling sci-fi epic has created? No.

A dream expedition puts a religious scientist at odds with herself

Prometheus is everything and nothing. It is the alpha and the omega. It’s is the best and the worst film you will see this year. It is brilliant and flawed. It is beautiful and ugly. It is inspiring and lifeless. It is all of these things because the goal is an exploration of humanity through the lens of speculative fiction.

Is it entertaining? Depends on who you talk to.

Rating: 8/10

What did you think of Prometheus? Sound off below.

One of the more baffling arguments against Prometheus, to me, is the intrusive sound claim. The music is too invasive. The sound is overblown. Too much is happening for space.

Have we been so spoiled by Alien‘s tagline, “in space, no one can hear you scream,” that we’ve forgotten how integral sound was to that movie? Lack of score does not mean lack of sound. So many of the major moments were set up by a brief moment of absolute quiet before a big explosion of events onscreen. Otherwise, everything made noise: doors, computers, controls, people, footsteps, and the cat, just to name a few.

The same applies to Prometheus, just slightly off. If the music stops playing, you have problems. Even the naysayers have to acknowledge that this is a beautifully mixed movie. The sound is possibly more immersive than the 3D visuals.

SoundWorks Collection is an excellent series of videos that deals with the how and the why of sound design in big movies. Their newest video is all about the wealth of sound in Prometheus. The sound team argues that the atmospheric scoring is the silence of this movie. It’s an intentional choice, not a random musing or mistake.

So what do you think? Did you like the sound design in Prometheus. I’ve heard arguments both ways and some are rather compelling against it. Sound off below with your thoughts.

Yet, I found myself clapping with delight at the expected beats. Look, there’s Christoph Waltz’s bounty hunter shooting faster than any man without bullet time abilities in years. There’s Jamie Foxx digging into Django’s transformation from slave to honorary bounty hunter. And there’s Leonardo DiCaprio being as smarmy and privileged as can be.

The footage looks beautiful but still has those Tarantino flourishes. Can another US director splatter blood on a pretty white landscape as nicely as Tarantino? I don’t think so.

Last time Tarantino went for a twist on history, he scored big. Inglourious Basterds netted seven Academy Award nominations for rewriting the history of WWII by way of melodrama and long tight dialogue scenes. Will Django Unchained provoke a similar reaction with darkest chapter in American history? We’ll see when it comes out on Christmas day, 2012.

Thoughts? I’m most curious about the editing of the picture after the unexpected passing of his long-time collaborator Sally Menke. What about you? Sound off below.