Special Movie Review - Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian


Ben Stiller and company had a smattering of success with 2006's Night at the Museum. The formula - take a night guard and put him face to face with a museum full of living, breathing antiquities - was cute and adventurous, and full of enough kiddy humor to warrant taking the tykes, as well as having an adult appeal. Stiller and director Shawn Levy are back again for museum mayhem, but this time they move to a new location, as evident in the title.

With a host of familiar characters returning from the first Museum film, fans of the films will find themselves slipping back into the world that Stiller's character Larry Daley inhabits. It's less confusing if you've seen the first film, but newcomers to the series won't have a hard time getting into the thick of the plot - there's a helpful introduction to characters at the start of the movie. Essentially, the artifacts at the Museum of Natural History, where Daley had worked as night security guard in the first film, are being moved to the archives of the Smithsonian Institute, where they will cease to become alive at night without the help of a magical Egyptian stone. Daley is called to help the displays when one of the figures steals the stone and all of the antiques in the Smithsonian Institute come to life, including villains such as Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), Napoleon (Alain Chabat), Ivan the Terrible (Christopher Guest), and Al Capone (Al Bernthal). Kahmunrah wants the Egyptian stone to open a portal to take over the world, and it's up to Daley to stop him, along with new friends such as Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) and the statue of Abe Lincoln and old buddies Jedidiah (Owen Wilson) and Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams).

The main plot is set up fairly quickly, allowing for the film to develop more subplots throughout the near-two hour runtime. Though it seems long for a kids' film, the story moves along at a nice clip and rarely loses its adventurous appeal. Also, the plot is logical without becoming too generic or predictable, and even offers up its fair share of pleasant surprises like a quick and appealing love interest between Daley and Amelia Earhart.

The playful, adventurous nature of the film will attract both old and young viewers, which is a good thing because there's a lot of content that will interest both age groups. For the young ones, it's an educational trip through time, with throwbacks to famous historical lines and people that may fly over their heads; yet some allusions might trigger an "oh-yeah!" reaction within that adds intelligence to the film.

Stiller plays his part well, and is actually a bit more likable as Daley this time around. The stand-outs are Amy Adams as Earhart and Hank Azaria as Kahmunrah. Adams' cute and bubbly personality, her impressive recital of old-fashioned lingo, and her wide-open eyes add so much to the film that her character almost overpowers the bland Daley. Azaria's Kahmunrah is a lispy, power-craving Egyptian who spouts witty one-liners with ease and, in the end, becomes a tragic villain almost, as his humorous, over-the-top persona brings him closer to the viewer. There's a cast of familiar faces, though, each with their own unique addition to the film, and it's nice to see cameos from a lot of The Office stars.

Perhaps one of the qualms with NatM:BotS that I have is the humor; the film resorts to a lot of scenes with awkward dialogues between characters, and while funny, the formula is overused and tired here. The physical gags are semi-funny, but still don't add a lot to the comedy. Instead, it's best to go into the film thinking of it less as a comedy and more as an adventure - otherwise, it may come up short on laughs, at least for adults.

Yet Battle of the Smithsonian is a smart and practical film, using the strengths from the first film and building off of its new setting. In fact, the film uses the wide range of the Smithsonian Institute to its advantage, allowing the characters to travers new areas and expanding what it can do with characters and the displays within the museums. There's a lot to enjoy within the film, and this is definitely one that you'll want to see with the kiddies; there's education, action without much violence, and even a little bit of good-hearted love, and Adams' Earhart character attracts the child in all of us.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian at Rotten Tomatoes

Television Review - Harper's Island Episode 1 & 2

Harper's Island


I posted about this a month or so back, and I meant to follow it from week to week, but my schedule has just not allowed for that type of coverage. Instead, I'm forced to scrounge around on my DVR, watching it when I can. I sat down to watch the first couple episodes the other day - and to be honest, I was both excited and a bit wary of the new series. The show's premise piqued my interest - a slasher miniseries? That sounds awesome! But my faith in the bigwigs at CBS to craft a successful and frightening horror television show wasn't exactly at a high point.

In the first two episodes, we meet some of the characters of Harper's Island. The main focus is on engaged couple Henry (Christopher Gorham) and Trish (Katie Cassidy), who gather a bunch of their friends and family together on a trip to Harper's Island. But what fun is the show without a mysterious background to the island? Seven years ago, a man named John Wakefield killed 6 people on the island, including the mother of Henry's friend Abby (Elaine Cassidy). As the party gets back to the island, they start meeting up with friends from their past and soon encounter strange experiences on the island, which especially creates suspicion in Abby.

So far, Harper's Island hasn't done much for me. It's script is quite generic and corny, including the characterization of each character. There are a lot of characters to remember and most of them don't do a damn thing in advancing the plot one way or the other. It seems like a lot of them are there for eye candy and death scenes, because in the first two episodes, there's been an awful lot of half-naked scenes and sex, and all of the deaths have been doled out to characters that we've barely met. For Harper's Island to make an impact, whether it be an attempt at actual fright or a throwback to older slashers, it needs to stick to its promise of killing off the main cast of characters rather than resorting to the lower reserves of the cast.

Most of Harper's Island seems to involve the characters running through the woods as well. I'm wondering why the island doesn't have normal roads that they can use to get around. Of course the killer is going to strike in the shrouded, mysterious woods - it's so obvious that it's sometimes painful to think that the rest of the series might be this cliched and foreseeable.

While the show is trying to extract some curiousity from the audience by giving us a bunch of scenes where we might suspect a new character as being the killer, it's pretty poorly done for two reasons. One is the fact that there are just too many characters to keep track of, and most of them aren't even characterized yet. The second is that the character's motives are transparent and don't need explanation from the show. I get the point - there's animosity within the group, but I don't suspect ANY of the characters I've met in the show to be the killer yet. For some reason, I can't help but think that towards the end of the series, we'll get a surprise "twist" that unveils the killer as not being a part of the in-group we've followed, and that is going to be an uber disappointment.

Harper's Island is semi-entertaining, taking into account it's one of the only shows to use this formula over an entire season of television. Yet I think that it's missing a few things to make it truly successful - it needs much better dialogue, it needs to be less obvious, and we need to know the characters better before we can even begin to relate to them. The only problem is the audience's need for instant gratification; the formula I set up would probably take a few episodes to pan out, and even then, we'd still be getting to know the characters. This doesn't work very well for a TV show that's trying to get in and out in only one season, and I don't think it's possible with a show so full of characters. Here's to trying though, and hopefully Harper's Island can draw the viewer in more with less formulaic scripts and more suspenseful turns.

Book Review - Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle by Vera Dika

Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle



Vera Dika's 1990 book talks a lot about the slasher genre, but what it makes most mention of is what Dika calls the "stalker cycle." This is defined by films that include an initial death which unleashes the stalker's evil, who then goes on to kill a group of individuals, the "in-group" (teens), who fail to see him until our heroine is able to see and harm the stalker. Dika states that the films that most use this set of rules or guidelines include the mother of all stalkers, Halloween, plus Friday the 13th parts 1 and 2, Happy Birthday to Me, Graduation Day, Prom Night, and a few others.

Dika devotes a good portion of her book towards describing the stalker film. It's interesting, especially considering she has come up with a bunch of similarities between films, but then again it feels a bit redundant. Throughout the book, Dika devotes whole pages and/or chapters to films that follow this same design, and she goes on to outline each part of the movie and list how they relate to the stalker formula. After about the third movie, Dika repeats herself over and over. It obviously gets the point across - the most successful stalker films followed the formula rigidly - but it doesn't make for very fun or enlightening reading.

In fact, I had a hard time following exactly what Dika was trying to prove through her research. Was it that stalker films are similar to each other? That seems pretty self-explanatory. Is it that the stalker film is full of Freudian references and psychosocial conflicts? This is a pretty widely-known fact. Or does she just wish to throw all of this information out there without a overarching point? This seems to be mostly the case, because even her conclusion fails to get across any significant finding. Instead, it presents even more cases of the stalker film and relates them to their predecessors, including Psycho and The Eyes of Laura Mars.

I guess the problem I have with Dika's book is not the fact that I disagree with a lot of her feminist critique (especially on a point about Halloween which states that Laurie is shown to be feminine by the lack of phallic symbolism, including keys, because if you look closely she does have them in the scene where she leaves to go to her friend's house... whew!), or because Dika repeats herself endlessly for 4 chapters, but because her book just doesn't seem to go anywhere or do anything new for the genre. It creates a new distinction between other films in the slasher genre, but other than that, most of Dika's points aren't so much new material as they are rehashings on other research.

Yet I could be being a little harsh here. This was written in 1990, so Dika's research could have been a bit newer and fresher than it feels now. But that doesn't rule out the fact that I don't feel a lot of substantial information presented here. Rather, Dika just continually points out the rules of the stalker film and the conflicts they present. It's fun to read about the films, but other than that I didn't glean much real knowledge from the piece. I would recommend this for Dika's interpretations of films, though, because they're interesting and a arguable. For the most part, however, the things Dika does find here feel a bit outdated now. Definitely don't pay $300 for the book on Amazon, whatever you do.

Book Review - The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon

The Traveling Vampire Show



To be honest, I had never read a Richard Laymon book before this one. I had barely even heard of him. His name gets so bogged down with the weight of names like Stephen King that one can go years without experiencing one of Laymon's novels. Yet I picked The Traveling Vampire Show out at a Barnes & Noble, wanting to read what everyone was talking about, and was sure glad that I did.

Laymon's 2000 Bram Stoker award-winner takes us all back to the 1960s (or in my case, for the first time), focusing on a boy named Dwight and his friends, Slim and Rusty. They're all 16 and out of school for the summer, looking for things to do, and one day they find out that a traveling vampire show is coming through their town, with a supposedly lovely mistress as the vampire. It's also an 18+ show, which spikes their interests more - will there be violence? NUDITY? Through the help of Dwight's brother's wife, Lee, they get tickets for the show, but encounter some problems along the way because of Rusty's little sister. For a while, the three friends think that the weird vampire show workers are out to get them for killing a dog, but they find out all of the mischief was just a prank. But when Lee, Rusty, Dwight, and Slim finally make it to the vampire show at midnight, they find out that Valeria really is the lovely and fearsome vampire that they thought she would be, but they weren't expecting all that they got themselves into.

Laymon's ride to the past is amazing, especially because of his characterization of the three teens. The sexuality that runs rampant through Dwight's mind is not exaggerated, but is a reality of a pubescent mind that can't stop thinking of the opposite sex - and naked too. It's true to life and allows the reader to relate to Dwight, whether male or female, because his thoughts are uninhibited. We can get closer to him because we are deep in his psyche.

It helps that all of the characters have some really distinguishing characteristics. Rusty is a chicken who tries to act tough, and though Dwight and Slim are best friends with him, they soon tire of his macho attitude. There's also an undercurrent of strangeness running through him and his little sister that is presented but not dealt with in the book that leaves the reader wondering. Slim is a tomboy, but a feminine one who likes boys, especially Dwight. When the two get together towards the middle of the book, it feels right and not cliched because it doesn't just magically happen as the book closes. It's already been established from the beginning, and it doesn't feel like love at first sight. Lee is one of the cutest characters; Laymon's description of her is very flattering and the reader will have a crush on her just as Dwight does.

What I liked so much about the book is not the violence of the end finale, which is intense and a great closing to the novel, but the fact that Laymon doesn't jump right into the vampire show. He spends more time with the teens, giving them a deep background and building their relationships up so that there's a real shocker at the end. The backstories that Laymon writes about build off of normal teenage adventure stories but add originality to both tone and event. It feels like it actually happened at one point or another, and the bit about Halloween really made me yearn for the holiday.

The Traveling Vampire Show is not full of action or violence, though, and if one goes in expecting an onslaught of vampires and death, one might be surprised and a little disappointed. But the horror is still found with every turn of the page - it may not always be a literal monster, but Laymon is always tackling some emotional monster of being a teen or what it feels like to be in puberty that adds a suspense through the whole novel. It's an emotionally charged, fun ride through a host of creative experiences that leaves you wanting more as you flip the back cover closed. I'll pick up another paperback by Laymon any day.