Forever Frankenweenie

I've seen a new movie since Frankenweenie.

It was Neil Marshall's The Descent, which I started watching on Wednesday morning when I inexplicably awoke an hour earlier than I needed to. Since movie-watching time is rare and precious, I put that extra hour to good use, and finished watching on my lunch break.

I've also revisited a movie since This Is Spinal Tap. It was Quentin Dupieux's Rubber, which my wife and I liked so much when we first saw it, I decided to buy her the BluRay for her birthday in February. We watched it again on Friday night.

Neither of these viewings is reflected in my Most Recently Seen For the First Time or Most Recently Revisited sections on the right of my blog, however, because Blogger is broken.

I don't usually have to write too much -- or anything, really -- about the functioning of this free service that Blogger provides me, because usually that functioning is top notch. But since Wednesday, when I tried to update you on the fact that I saw The Descent, the gadget that stores that list has been busted.

See, everything that appears in the right column on the blog is called a gadget. A gadget is basically a blog part that has a certain function. You can have as many or as few as you want, but many of them are pretty core parts of the functionality of the blog, such as the display of my followers, the listing of recent posts, the quick bio of me and my extensive list of labels.

The Recently Seen lists (which were accompanied by a Recently Reviewed list when I was still regularly writing reviews) are just a gadget called a list, which can be anything you want it to be. I decided that these lists would be a good way to keep you up to date on the most basic level with my viewing habits, since I certainly don't discuss every movie I see in the form of a blog post.

I've been unable to since Wednesday, however, because when I try to delete Butter as the third most recent movie I've seen, move the others down to slots 2 and 3, and add The Descent at the top, I get the following error upon saving: "Please correct errors on form." In fact, I get this error if I try to do any one of those things, so it's nothing about the "complexity" of my transaction that's causing the error. In fact, even if you just open the gadget, do nothing, and then hit save, it still gives the error. Your only choice that does not produce an error is just hitting cancel and closing the gadget that way.

I didn't even notice the form had given me an error on that first day. In fact, I was at work, and I just hit save and shifted my attention to another open window on my computer. It was only the next day, looking at my blog, that I noticed Frankenweenie was still the most recent movie I'd seen. Surprised at the oversight, I then noticed the gadget window still open, hidden behind my other open documents, with the error. I repeated the action and got the error again.

A couple hours later, after another failed attempt, I finally googled it, and discovered that dozens of other people reported the same issue -- with no response from anyone at Google (which owns Blogger) about what was happening and when it would be fixed. Not to mention plenty of bloggers frustrated with Google's inactivity.

Since then I have tried it again about once a day with the same result.

I don't care all that much, really. Although it's a bit annoying, I don't sit here and say I have some right to a string of perfect, unbroken functionality on a service I don't even pay to use. Of course, Google gets its money from me in other ways, charting my activities and selling it to advertisers. Still, I think I've gotten a plenty good deal by writing this blog for over four years and never paying anyone a single dime.

I did want to let you know that no, I did not go blind, or no, my DVD player and internet are not broken, or no, I'm not suddenly too broke to go to the theater.

I did want to give you some sort of explanation about why Frankenweenie will forever more be my most recently seen movie ... either forever more, or until sometime this Tuesday, when someone at Google finally finds the small piece of screwed up code and fixes it.

Frank-n-(double)-feature

I must have ballpark franks on the brain because of the upcoming start to the baseball season. What my wife's explanation is, though, I have no idea.

See, on Sunday night we watched a double feature of movies with the name "Frank" in the title.

Yep, sometimes that's all it takes for an Audient blog post.

We were on night #3 of the latest installment of the Garage Movie Projector Series. Haven't told you about this? Well, at intervals of two to three weeks, I've been borrowing the projector from work and projecting movies on the inside of our closed garage door. We have our old couch in the garage, so it works out perfectly. To take full advantage of having the projector, I've been watching two movies per weekend night, and this past weekend, my wife joined me for the second on both Saturday and Sunday.

We'd been having decent luck with streaming from Netflix in the garage -- up until we watched Butter on Saturday night, that is. We got through it, but it stopped to buffer a half-dozen times, and some of the rest of the time, the stream was out of focus. We decided it'd be better to stack the deck in our favor with actual DVDs for Sunday night.

So my wife checked out the Redbox titles online that she'd be interested in seeing. Me, I'd been missing Redbox a bit. I use the service at least once and more often twice a week during the latter half of the year, when it's stocked full of releases from the current year that I need to see before I close my list. But then I completely foresake the kiosks from the middle of January until the middle of May, since the last thing I want is to see more movies from last year. Redbox must wonder if it's something they said.

With the emphasis on having physical DVDs in our hands, however, Redbox was back on the table as an option. A promo code for 50 cents off sweetened the deal.

In order to convert the double feature, though, they needed to be two short movies. Sinister had been mentioned and probably would have taken one of the two slots if it weren't nearly two hours long. It probably would have been Sinister and Robot & Frank if time were no object. My wife has been talking about Robot & Frank since it came out, and got damn near giddy when she saw it was at Redbox.

R & F's 89 minutes met our criterion for a short running time, and so did Frankenweenie -- which I was surprised to hear my wife mention as something she wanted to see. (I thought she disliked Tim Burton almost as much as I do.) It's actually two minutes shorter than Robot & Frank.

Of course, seeing that they both had the word Frank in the title sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, that's where this mesmerizing profundity ends. There isn't anything unexpectedly similar between the two movies, other than their titles.

Oh, and the fact that they both qualified as mild disappointments. I liked most of what Robot & Frank was doing, but I expected to like it more. Though I should stop to compliment Frank Langella, always a treasure, on another memorable performance. As for Frankenweenie, it too did some things well. Ultimately, though, it still felt a bit safe for Burton, which is the opposite of what I want to see from him. Not putting his stamp on (i.e. ruining) a beloved property is a start, but even this original idea is still too deep in his wheelhouse to have surprised or enchanted me.

Next weekend we watch movies with the name "Beauregard" in the title. 

Spawning the next generation of horror fans

I have a friend with an eight-year-old son who's been into ghoulies and goblins over half his young life.

You name it, he loves it. Ghosts. Skeletons. Witches. Jack-o-lanterns. Eyeballs. Fake blood. Even severed body parts don't faze him, though they would have to be the kind that looked pretty fake.

I'm sure that at least some of this has to do with having watched The Nightmare Before Christmas at a young age, and then seeing Jack Skellington and friends at Disneyland. But the joke was that he would start preparing for Halloween sometime in May. The best part of the joke was that it wasn't really a joke. He does start preparing in May -- or at least he used to. He'd probably start even earlier, except there has to be some amount of preparation that just qualifies as ridiculous -- even if our definition of what constitutes ridiculous might be different than his.

My friend's son is not alone. It seems that one of the chief ways for a young kid to assert his budding adulthood is to test his limits when it comes to fear. Even if this stuff is not all that scary, and the horror characters are pretty PG version of what they represent in reality, it still says something that young kids prefer things intended to scare them than things intended to be cute or make them laugh.

Naturally, the movies have taken notice.

Hotel Transylvania, opening today, is the middle of three high-profile animated movies released in a span of less than two months that seek to feed the macabre to children. Last month we got ParaNorman. Next month we'll get Frankenweenie.

Each of these movies actually appeals to me in some way, though it's unlikely I'll see any of them in the theater. At least they aren't just another movie featuring animals who team up for crazy adventures.

As discussed previously, the "fear" peddled here is very mild. My guess is that most of the characters in these films are comic relief, and their voices will be goofy if not actually cute.

Of course, this trend is nothing new -- it's just thrusting itself into the forefront of my consciousness because of the timing of these three movies. I'm not even sure there will be another movie aimed at children released during their two-month reign (unless you count Oogieloves. And really, do you?). Which means that if parents wanted to take their kids to the movies between early August and early October, they needed to test their children's tastes for this PG horror -- if their kids weren't already begging them to go, that is.

But like I said, it's nothing new. Allmovie.com has a very useful feature on each of its movie pages, which is to list similar movies -- a godsend when writing a post like this. The similar movies for ParaNorman include Coraline, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (the word corpse in the title of an animated movie?), Igor, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9, James and the Giant Peach, Monster House, Beetlejuice, Alice in Wonderland, and of course The Nightmare Before Christmas, among others that don't advance my thesis in any useful way. Oh, and of course Hotel Transylvania and Frankenweenie. For Frankenweenie's page, you can add to those titles Edward Scissorhands (not really a kids movie), Where the Wild Things Are and some other rather inexplicable choices, including Midnight in Paris and When in Rome. (Hey, I never said the algorithm was perfect.) Transylvania's page also offers us Monsters Inc. (that should have come up earlier), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Addams Family.

So, "scaring" kids has been a big business for years.

In fact, you could argue that a film in which there isn't some kind of intense antagonist is dramatically limp. Think of how far Disney has gone portraying its variety of witches and wicked queens over the years. It would be easy to say that some of those baddies are more intense than they really need to be. But clearly, having something that's genuinely at least a little scary raises the stakes for kids.

Since Hotel Transylvania stars the voice of Adam Sandler, I'm going to say there's a ceiling on how scary it will actually be. However, I'd bet you a hundred bucks there will be at least one character who can remove some or all of his limbs, and possibly even his head.

As long as it doesn't look realistic, I guess.