DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Neil Gaiman writes scary stories. Honestly scary. Few writers working today are able to summon the eerie landscape of our nightmares better. These aren’t the hokey bigtime evil scares that usually pass for modern horror. His are the quiet, personal, “things that go bump in the night and just might have nefarious plans” kind of scares. That much of his work is geared toward younger readers might be cause for consternation to some), but the best creepy tales have always been for kids, who still believe in the unseen enough to go along for the ride. In other words, they’re not yet so stodgy that they insist on always allowing logic trump imagination. But we prefer our scary kiddie tales sanitized these days—we’re just thinking of the children!!—which is why Gaiman couldn’t even get one of his best stories published without a movie deal attached: Coraline was too horrifying for its target audience, publishers said.
Luckily, a movie deal was made, the book was published, and now, seven years later, animator Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) is ready to scare us all over again. In the story, Coraline is a willful little girl with an explorer’s instinct and a profound distaste for her stick-in-the-mud parents. But she gets a little more adventure than she bargained for when she finds a secret passage from her apartment to one that is a mirror image of her own, complete with replicas of her parents. While they’re much more fun loving than her real parents (who have disappeared from the other end of the passage), something’s not quite right about them; besides just that they have buttons where their eyes should be. Selick has changed a few plot points (in frequent consultation with Gaiman) and moved the action from England to the States, but we’re hopeful that this is just as cold-chill-inducing as the text.
Here’s the official trailer, though we rather prefer this non-traditional one with author Neil Gaiman talking about…buttons.
Opens tomorrow at theaters across the area. Coraline was shot with a special process to allow for 3D presentation, though it appears Georgetown is the only local theater showing it in that format.
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Short films always get short shrift. With virtually no means of making back the money the makers put into them, most filmmakers have little motivation to even attempt the medium. While we long for a day when the screening of short films (and not Coca-Cola-sponsored long-form advertisements awarded to a lucky filmmaking contest winner) might be regularly shown before features, that day isn’t coming anytime soon. Even Wes Anderson had trouble convincing his distributor that they should package his short Hotel Chevalier with The Darjeeling Limited, and that was a related prologue. Of course, web video has given makers of shorts more options for making their work accessible (though David Lynch does an excellent job of explaining why that’s less than ideal). All of which is why you should take advantage of the opportunity to check out all of the short films that have been nominated for Academy Awards in the animation and live action short categories this week while they’re making a rare appearance on a big screen.
Separate programs for animated and live action shorts begin screening tomorrow at E Street.
