They're Here. Again. POLTERGEIST

A marvelous horror movie, 1982’s Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg Poltergeist is a terrific entertainment, and one of my favorites of its kind. It’s a sustained piece of slowly mounting haunted house tension, with warm family dynamics and small creepy details eventually erupting in a spectacular crescendo of special effects-driven freak outs. A quintessential portrait of early-80’s suburbia wrapped up in skillful metaphor about expanding without regard for unintended consequences (or evil sprits) unchecked sprawl might kick up, it’s one of those films that has a time capsule quality, but has enough evergreen genre elements to make it timeless. When it came time to remake Poltergeist, building an entirely new film on the bones of the old was out of the question. Most of Gil Kenan’s remake is a bland updating, content to riff on the original’s most famous moments, finding new and slightly worse ways of doing everything.

The result is a contemporary Poltergeist of high competence, but little interest. It only works because its inspiration is still a good movie, and following it closely is a good way to make an effective little horror picture. This one plays like a passable tween-friendly summer diversion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can almost imagine heading home for s’mores and giggles around the campfire afterwards. Kenan’s film is brighter and lighter, with 3D and CGI taking the place of practical effects, and rounder edges on the frights. It runs nearly 30 minutes shorter, adds an awfully conventional arc for a young boy from coward to hero, and by and large keeps threats and moments of wit in a lower key. It’s both a little more and a lot less than what you’d expect. Unfortunately a bunch of clown dolls isn’t significantly creepier than one. Grown-ups sneaking a sip of liquor isn’t as interesting as sharing a joint. Nor is ditching a realtor as funny as pushing a TV for a concluding punchline.

But there’s entertainment value here, and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (of Rabbit Hole) does some smart updating. Now the neighborhood isn’t new. It’s hollowed out with foreclosures. The family moves into the house because of layoffs constraining their finances. There’s a recessionary sadness hanging over the opening. How were they to know their house was built on a cemetery? Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt play the parents, in a likable pair of performances. Their kids, sullen teen (Saxon Sharbino), nervous boy (Kyle Catlett), and little girl (Kennedi Clements), are the first to discover the haunting in their house, like electric disruptions and strangely menacing trees and clown dolls. Then the threat becomes very real when the youngest daughter is snatched by malevolent spirits and held hostage in their ghostly realm.

Who they gonna call? A paranormal researcher (Jane Adams) and a TV host (Jared Harris), of course. It all builds to flashes of nightmare hallucinations, a portal to the spiritual plane opening up in a closet (and looking a lot like Insidious on the other side), and a suburban home barfing up its supernatural secrets. It’s predictable button pushing, with fluid camerawork tracing digital intrusions through an eerily normal house pulsing with malevolent creepiness. Never particularly scary, it at least isn’t a desecration. It’s just barely enjoyable enough, I suppose. Kenan manages a brisk trot through some shivery concepts, efficiently deploying fine effects while finding a good deal of charm in the actors. The kids are sufficiently freaked out, and the adults get some dry one-liners to cut the tension. It’s not a bad time at the movies, with some moderate chills over before you know it.

As a fine example of what it is, I suppose you can shake off the déjà vu and find comfort in familiar rhythms. But why settle for a competent, but lesser, vision unless you absolutely have to? It’s hard not to wish the exact same cast and crew had been put to use on a wholly original movie. Not only has this been done better before, but Kenan’s even done a better family-friendly 80’s horror throwback before, his 2006 animated debut feature Monster House, a fast, funny, creepy good time. (Rent it and the original Poltergeist and have yourself a good double feature.) Here’s hoping this big budget remake allows the filmmakers opportunity to do more interesting original work in the future.

Behind the Curtain: OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

It can’t be easy to set out to make a film dancing around in the iconography of one of the greatest films of all time. Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful, a film that may not be great and powerful, but is certainly good and entertaining, uses memorable aspects The Wizard of Oz both big and small in inventive and surprising ways without embarrassing itself or seeming a diminishment of a beloved cultural masterpiece. That is some kind of wonderment. The film itself, which is set decades before the 1939 classic and follows a Kansas con man magician into Oz, is an earnest work of sturdy craftsmanship and showmanship, sparkling with a zippy sense of fun. Though it seems to wobble here and there, threatening to fall flat on its face, it rallies for a rousing ending. Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire’s script constantly walks up to convention only to back away in delightful flourishes.

James Franco plays the magician who will become the Wizard of Oz. He’s not quite believable, which is in some ways the point. (Just don’t imagine what Raimi’s regular character actor Bruce Campbell, who appears late in the film in a cameo, could have done with the role.) He’s a huckster with sparkling charisma hidden behind a desperate layer of slimy smarm. The prologue, set in a classically square aspect ratio and filmed in jaw-droppingly gorgeous black and white, finds his magic act at a county fair dying painfully when a sweet girl in a wheelchair begs him to make her walk again. The crowd turns on him (“He’s not a real magician!”) and on Oz’s face is written both the pain of a performer facing a hostile crowd and a man torn up by the fact that there’s nothing he can do to help someone in need. He feels like an unhelpful man without a purpose, unable to scam more than a few coins from people he considers country bumpkins.

His personality problems don’t go away, but take on larger phantasmagorical stakes when circumstances conspire to send him over the rainbow. When he’s sucked into a tornado, he’s terrified that he’s about to die, a natural reaction I’d say. When he lands in Oz, the screen expanding, filling with color and obvious digital fakery, he’s befuddled and amused, but tries to hide behind an opaque confidence that slips a bit when the real magic starts sparking around him. It’s an interesting role that calls for a leading man to fall into the background, confused and adrift in a sea of colorful spectacle, while, thrillingly, the women around him hold all the real power in this land and, whatever emotions romantic or otherwise they feel towards him, view him as a pawn in their game of thrones. He meets three witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams). At least one is a good witch. One’s a bad witch who, by film’s end, becomes awfully wicked. The third will probably have a house dropped on her head at some point in her future.

The man who would be Wizard is told he’s fulfilling a prophecy by showing up in Oz. To claim the Emerald City’s throne – and all the riches the position supplies – all he must do is kill a wicked witch. Seems easy enough, so off he shuffles down the yellow brick road where, along the way, an ingratiating flying monkey (Zach Braff) and a broken China Doll (Joey King) join the quest. Raimi draws upon his directorial skill sets from both his horror background (The Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell) and his big budget spectacles (Spider-man, Spider-man 2), staging sequences like a tantalizingly creepy/funny walk through a gloomy forest with ominous crows, snapping plants with glowing eyes, and a hooded figure gliding out of the fog of a graveyard, modulating tension and relief in supremely entertaining ways, cut together in a variety of pop art frames with smartly varied pace. Later, he’ll stage a dazzling witch-on-witch battle that follows a supreme visual and narrative pleasure in the reveal of the surprising way the fraudulent Wizard claims him throne. It’s all of a piece with Raimi’s skill with mixing humor and thrills, creating playful spectacle that’s always aware of its own fiction without lessening the impact of its storytelling.

And what storytelling! It’s lumpy in spots and the character arcs are obvious, but the film is wrapped up in an old-fashioned, hyper-earnest sense of theatrical flourish. By the time the curtain (quite literally) falls, there’s a sense of a master showman shouting “ta-da!” To the tunes of one of Danny Elfman’s best scores in recent memory, the screen is filled with colorful CGI landscapes and charming creature work that’s gloriously fake, approaching the Technicolor perfection of The Wizard of Oz’s painted backdrops. But that’s not to say the effects are wholly unconvincing. On the contrary, they’re often quite spectacular when they need to be. Franco’s travelling companions are effects that work incredibly well. The monkey, for instance, sells some nonverbal punchlines through nothing more than the shifting expressions on his face. The look of the film is appealing through and through. The Land of Oz itself is a glittering jewel of manufactured whimsy and the witches’ elegant wardrobes look like they were cut from the same cloth as MGM’s 1930’s costume department. To top it all off, the 3D is as dazzling as any I’ve seen. (Put it on the short list with Avatar, Hugo, and Life of Pi as essential live action 3D.) Oz is a funny, surprising magic music box of sturdy childlike wonder.

Note: Although I like this film a bit less than the unfairly maligned and forgotten John Carter, it’s interesting to note that two years in a row Disney has released in March an expensive live action film inspired by turn-of-the-20th-century genre fiction about a man in the early 1900s who is whisked away to a different world where he’s just the variable needed to tip the balance in a struggle between competing factions.

The Jack Frost Rises: RISE OF THE GUARDIANS

When it comes to representations of magical legends of childhood, it’s basically Santa Claus or nothing. Rise of the Guardians starts off with a good idea by knocking the jolly old elf down a peg or two by putting him on equal footing with his fictional colleagues: the Easter Bunny, the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy. The movie imagines them as a sort of holiday-themed supergroup a la The Avengers, using their powers of presents and wonder to protect the children of the world. Would that they could also use their powers to preserve a sense of wonder and fun in this film, but hey, one problem at a time.

At the film’s start, things appear to be relatively peaceful, but soon the apparently long gone Boogeyman appears. He’s gathered some kind of mumbo jumbo ability to convert Sandman’s dream sand into pure nightmare fuel, which leads to some finely animated menace with galloping yellow-eyed sand creatures and roiling seas of black grit. Santa, a burly, tattooed chap with a thick Russian accent activates the Aurora Borealis, which is apparently the secret distress signal for legendary beings. Once assembled, these guardian angels hear from their silent leader, the man on the moon. He signals that the Guardians need a new member to help them save the world’s dreams: Jack Frost.

Frost is a thin, hoodie-wearing scamp who flies around the world spreading cold and snow, touching surfaces with his magic staff that spreads frost in a way reminiscent of the ice-spreading fairies in Fantasia’s Tchaikovsky segment. Though he enjoys bringing slippery ice and snow days to the children of the world, he’s sad that none of them believe in him. When the Guardians show up and ask for his help, he’s reluctant. If you guess that he’ll end up travelling a rough approximation of the hero’s journey from begrudging help to a full-fledged Guardian throughout the course of the movie, you’d be right. This being a rather self-serious, if still determinedly bouncy, fantasy, he’s given the requisite troubled past, though here the twist is that he can’t remember it. (The reveal is one nice card the film has up its sleeve). The plot, adapted from the William Joyce books by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, becomes a typical clash of good and evil played out thinly, but with some energy.

Every aspect of the film is highly competent, brightly colored and full of hectic movement. The character design is more or less as creative as the voice work is functional. Frost (Chris Pine) is designed, oddly enough, as some kind of teen matinee idol, as if shipped from a Generic Protagonist factory. I liked the rougher conception of Santa (gruffly voiced by Alec Baldwin) as an amiable bruiser with an army of big, helpful yetis and diminutive, largely useless, elves at his command. The Easter bunny (Hugh Jackman) is simply a large rabbit, but I like the way his colorful eggs can sprout legs and hide themselves. The Sandman’s a silent, short, sandy fellow, whereas the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) is a giant hummingbird lady who flits to and fro. The Boogeyman, however, makes for a rather bland villain, like someone sanded the distinctiveness off of Tom Hiddleston and gave him the voice of Jude Law. He’s easily dwarfed by his nightmare-magic.

Where the movie fails most of all is in its central thesis. The Guardians gain their powers from children believing in them and so they, in turn, protect children with their powers. That’s all fine, but the film plays out like forced frivolity, constantly extolling the benefits of childlike wonder and belief in magic while being itself depressingly literal about magic while assuming that an audience’s wonder will follow. Though first-time director Peter Ramsey has a nice control over the film’s visuals, no aspect of the film manages to rise above the level of competent. It felt to me like a long 97 minutes, filled with lots of talk of magic, but little magic felt. It clunks along from one sequence to the next, stopping at each of the characters’ lairs for a little bit of visual invention and spinning the oh-so-simple plot in place long enough to movie it ever-so-slightly forward. I’d bet kids won’t mind it so much, but what do I know? I’m not them. It’s a colorful distraction with a modicum of imagination, but all that I can testify to is that sitting through it once was more than enough for me, thanks.