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April 2-8, 2009
buzz@boulderweekly.com
• Attack of the offbeat cult comedy
by Michael Phillips
• The daunting in Connecticut
by Michael Phillips
 Attack of the offbeat cult comedy
by Michael Phillips
The new DreamWorks animated 3-D feature Monsters vs. Aliens is blessed with a high-concept title — possibly the highest ever; my son’s been hocking me about this movie since before he was born — and Seth Rogen’s serenely dense line readings in the role of a genetically altered tomato gone wrong. But a bizarre percentage of the project went wrong somewhere, along with the tomato.
Pilfering everything from Mothra to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to Men in Black and Monsters, Inc. the script piles on the mayhem and forgets the funny. Compared with last summer’s DreamWorks smash Kung Fu Panda, which really was funny, or even the second Madagascar outing, Monsters vs. Aliens is pure marketing without anything to market. To add insult to a paucity of jokes, the look of the picture is bright, cold and oddly flat, even when someone’s whapping a paddleball right at your face to remind you that 3-D is supposed to count for something. (Late reminder: See Coraline if you want 3-D that counts for something.)
The directors are Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, who directed Shark Tale and Shrek 2, respectively. In other words, you’re in good hands when it comes to jaded pop culture references. (Here, the riffs list includes Dr. Strangelove, Beverly Hills Cop and Apocalypse Now.) On the day she’s to marry a smarmy TV weatherman (voiced by Paul Rudd), heroine Susan (Reese Witherspoon) gets creamed by a meteor. Presto: She’s turned into a nearly 50-foot dame, no evildoer, but fearsome enough to intimidate the general populace.
For years, a la Men in Black, the government has confined various monsters to a holding facility. The lineup includes B.O.B. (Rogen in full-on, entertaining stoner-slacker mode), a cockroach scientist (Hugh Laurie), the so-called Missing Link (Will Arnett) and a Mothra-style grubworm, Insectosaurus. Once Susan, renamed Ginormica by the U.S. government, gets to know her fellow monstrous cellmates, she realizes they’re OK, just misunderstood — unlike the film’s antagonist, space alien Gallaxhar (voice by Rainn Wilson), who deploys a bunch of alien robots to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge and move on from there. I didn’t care for the Golden Gate Bridge scene; it settles for tone-deaf realism and conventional action beats. Although it’s loud. And loud’s probably good enough for the target audience.
It’s tough to get on board with these monsters. They don’t get the banter they — or we — deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes such as the doltish military brass (Kiefer Sutherland growls away as General W.R. Monger) and the brainless, craven president voiced by Stephen Colbert (who may have ad-libbed much of his material, but not enough). Susan’s transformation from trophy bride-to-be to empowered, independent female feels like feminism for kids of dummies. Witherspoon can be a terrific actress but has criminally little to play here. Only Rogen’s merry gelatinous cretin comes to any sort of comic life. At one point he tries to make small talk with a plate of Jell-O. It’s a pretty good gag. And in this bombastic context, it’s a pretty lonely one.
—MCT
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 The daunting in Connecticut
by Michael Phillips
There’s not much wrong with the house in The Haunting in Connecticut that a little WD-40 couldn’t cure. Everything creaks, including the dialogue. You’d swear the place was haunted by the ghost of a sound designer whose predilection for metallic clangs every time an apparition swoops by a mirror turns this thing into a virtual anvil chorus.
The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it’s not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so. It offers the requisite “jump” bits — Scary face in the mirror! Moldy ham in the fridge! — and first-time feature director Peter Cornwell manages some evocatively grisly images of long-ago mortuary activity and necromancy and PG-13-level nastiness. The PG-13 horror market’s generally pretty attractive to investors, and The Haunting in Connecticut may get by. But the results are more dutiful than driven, beginning with its drably functional title. What’s next, A Seance in New Jersey? A Medical Conference at the University of North Dakota?
The film alleges to be based on a true story, and for a little more on that, I refer you to carmenreed.com, maintained by the inspiration for our film’s stalwart God-fearing heroine. (Sample website header, offering supernatural housecleaning for a fee: “Do you need help with a haunting?”) Preceded by the book In a Dark Place and a Discovery Channel doc, also called A Haunting in Connecticut, screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe waste no time getting to it. Sara (Madsen) and recovering alcoholic Peter (Martin Donovan) rent a big Victorian house near the hospital where son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is undergoing experimental radiation treatments for cancer. All that square footage for such reasonable rent. “I’m just wondering: Where’s the catch?” asks Madsen, as only a game alum of Candyman (good, scary horror film) could spin it.
The catch: It’s a former mortuary, though the movie’s weirdly fuzzy on how much Sara knows about the history, and when she knows it. In the basement, years ago, horrible things were done to bodies, and the funeral parlor director had a clairvoyant son, Jonah, whose specter wastes no time in psychically friending poor Matt. At first he’s the only one in the house who can see the blood on the floor and the maggots here and there. Then everybody starts freaking out. Elias Koteas, whose weary countenance comes from the Jason Miller Exorcist school of method horror acting, portrays a reverend who helps settle the hash of the spooks, though Koteas takes everything in such blasé stride, you’d think it was the guy’s 15th haunting that week.
The Haunting in Connecticut, for the record, was shot in tax-advantageous Manitoba. Will the U.S. ever get the hint that it might consider similar refunds on a federal level to compete with runaway production? Next thing you know they’ll be shooting the musical Chicago in Toronto. Oh. Wait. They did.
—MCT
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