Late Halloween

I didn't watch a single horror movie in the last nine days leading up to Halloween, an obvious consequence of traveling abroad and the fact that they don't tend to program horror movies as choices for your in-flight entertainment. Apparently, it's not such a good thing if you're a child trying to sleep on a 14-hour flight and you see someone's head getting cut off on the screen next to yours. (I do remember watching the horror movie Lights Out on a flight I took in early 2017. It must have passed some threshold of minimum gore.)

I made up for this with a day-night double feature on Sunday, my third day back, after returning from a family-oriented music festival at which we camped on Saturday night. (Which cannot have helped with my jet lag, now in its fifth glorious day.)

The first was a selection that was reluctantly mutually agreed upon by my kids, to pass the late afternoon as we recovered from the festival. The second was a Sunday night viewing of a movie assigned to me in a movie challenge for the month of November, teasingly missing its target month of October by the narrowest of margins.

Monster House is a movie we own on DVD, but as often happens, it took seeing it as an option on Netflix to promote it to an actual viewing. My older son wanted to watch a movie that for some reason the younger one didn't: Madagascar 2: Back to Africa. I was sort of rooting for this one as I have actually not seen it. The younger one wanted to watch Dinosaur Island, which I am absolutely not going to sit through a second time. I was surprised to see the older one agree to this compromise, because Monster House (or as he used to call it, Spooky House) was something he could never fully sit through because it was too scary for him. Apparently he was willing to give it another shot.

For a time. And then he remembered why Spooky House had disturbed him so much the first time, and promptly relocated to another part of the house. (He had his Minecraft so he didn't really care.)

It turns out the younger one is made of tougher stuff (no offense, older one). He didn't cop to being afraid at any point of the movie, and he asked questions that I thought were useful rather than bizarrely fixated on unimportant details. My baby's all grownsed up!

The older one also returned for the end, and didn't seem too concerned with it at that point either. Then again, their aunt just showed them Jurassic Park the other night, knowing the younger one's love of dinosaurs, so I guess they've had their skin toughened recently.

Trick r' Treat is a movie I had never credited with much more than "anonymous horror movie" status until I started to hear it spoken of in really glowing terms over the past few years. In fact, such is the regard for it that it was eligible to be chosen in this movie challenge I'm doing in my Flickcharters group on Facebook. Each month you are randomly paired with another person in the challenge, and you are assigned the highest ranked movie on their chart that you haven't seen yet. Trick r' Treat was somebody's #31, and that somebody commiserated with me the poor timing of not drawing his name a month earlier.

Although there is a lot to recommend in Trick r' Treat, I suppose I was expecting something a bit more sublime for a movie that was this guy's #31, and highly ranked by others in the group as well. It's reasonably clever in its intertwining of four stories that take place on one Halloween night, each of which has a surprising reveal and each of which kind of involves this guy you see in the poster above. But I find it more of a solid entertainment than something sublime that either clearly rises above its brethren or falls into the category of outlandish camp. I guess solid genre fare is worth celebrating in its own right.

Happy Halloween, even though it is no longer Halloween even in the most far-flung of time zones.

The regrettably brief prime of Kathleen Turner

Few actresses can have Meryl Streep's career. Streep is not only an outlier by continuing to work regularly and prominently for nearly 40 years, she's a significant outlier. It's a lot more common for an actress to rule the roost for no more than 10 or 15 years. Hollywood is just not kind to most actresses once they hit their 40s. It chews them up and spits them out.

There may be no better example of this than Kathleen Turner, who came on the scene, climbed to the top very quickly ... and then was gone.

Actually, not gone -- not for good, anyway. But her current incarnation is an unfortunate illustration of the major differences between an aging male star and an aging female one.

I was always aware that Turner was an actress of great beauty and great charisma. I mean, she had charisma with a capital C. She was genuinely spunky. It wasn't until I saw Body Heat on Thursday night, though, that I realized she also possessed a huge amount of sex appeal. Next to the word "sultry" in the dictionary, a picture of Turner in Body Heat appears. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's this picture:

After creating such an impression with her first starring role, Turner quickly made the world her oyster, starring in her most recongizable role in 1984's Romaning the Stone, then adding Peggy Sue Got Married and the sequel to Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile. The Accidental Tourist and The War of the Roses soon followed, and she also iconically voiced Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 

The kind of stardom Turner was bound for seemed sustainable. It really felt like she could do no wrong. But around the time V.I. Warshawski came out in 1991, Kathleen Turner was over. The Kathleen Turner we knew previously, who was one of the hottest commodities of the 1980s, was over, in any case. She was only 37 at that point, but that was kind of it.

By the time she materialized in Serial Mom in 1994, I remember the sensation of having already kind of forgotten about and her and been surprised to see her turn up. And here she was being used to satirize the kind of wholesomeness which she had (at times) represented in her career (when she wasn't playing the femme fatale in Body Heat or a prostitute in Crimes of Passion, that is).

But what happened next with Turner was perhaps more unexpected. She started taking roles that played up the huskiness of her voice and some increasingly mannish qualities that were probably exacerbated by the fact that she stopped paying such close attention to maintaining her figure. I guess some of that is on Turner -- I mean, you have to keep going to the gym if you want any hope of sustained viability in Hollywood -- but what seemed unfortunate was that the industry began collectively thinking of her as some kind of monster, some kind of freak.

She kept appearing through the rest of the 1990s in increasingly more obscure roles, occasionally popping up in an arthouse movie (The Virgin Suicides) or an awful cash grab (Baby Geniuses). But it was around the turn of the century that things really changed for her. In 2001 she took the semi-recurring role of Chandler Bing's father on Friends. That's right, his father -- who had undergone a sex change into a woman.

Suddenly this was now how people saw Turner -- a gender-confused figure of fun. After Friends, she was off the scene entirely for five years before doing more voice work in 2006. But no longer was she doing the sexy rabbit. Now she was voicing an oversized circus freak in the animated film Monster House, who looked like this:

She had more TV in her future on Californication, but here again she was presented as repulsive. She played a character whose voracious sexual advances on Evan Handler's Charlie were always unwanted, and not just because she was his boss. She disgusted him, which is no surprise, because Turner was required to play the part over the top, emphasizing the character's basest and most raunchy instincts.

Twenty fourteen found Turner again being cast as a middle-aged woman who is supposed to be gross compared to her former self. She plays the grown-up slut Freda Felcher in Dumb and Dumber To -- a character both Harry and Lloyd lusted after when they were younger, yet whom they greet with looks of revulsion when they meet her again, 20 years later. We aren't supposed to be taken aback by this, because the last 15 years have asked us to adjust our perspective on Turner so that we think of her like they do: an abomination of a human being. At least Dumb and Dumber To doesn't overplay her outrageous behavior in an attempt to turn us even further against her -- more than anything, she just plays the part as exhausted, which may be how Turner really feels at this point. Except for the unfeminine plaid shirt, the following picture is even almost complimentary:

However, let's also not forget that the Farrelly brothers have been known for putting "freaks" in their films, like the character in Shallow Hal who has spina bifida. Is Kathleen Turner just another one of these freaks?

Look, fame is a two-way street. If Turner wanted to extend her prime, she knew what she probably had to do. She had to get work done, and she had to stay in shape. She could have gotten the 25 years that Julia Roberts has gotten, even if she couldn't have gotten Streep's 40. It was her choice to accept the roles offered to her where her curdled femininity was the point being emphasized.

It's just a shame that it had to be this way. If Turner were a man, she could have survived fluctuations in her weight. She could have kept getting cast in lead roles, because stories are written about middle-aged men. They aren't so much written about middle-aged women.

If I'm going to end more positively -- and with someone like Turner, I'd really like to -- I might say that Turner should earn our respect for being a Hollywood survivor. No, she's no longer glamorous, no longer young, no longer sultry. But she's still showing up on screen. She's still on our radar.

She's just working with what she's got. That's what she did when she had the looks and the figure, and that's what she's doing now that she doesn't.

And we should just be grateful that she didn't have the kind of work done that would have turned her into a true monster. At least she's still employable ... which cannot be said for someone like Meg Ryan.

Combo pack strikeout

My son has so many different ways he can get entertainment content delivered to him, I haven't been so worried lately about keeping our video library populated.

However, a three-disc combo pack of kids movies recently made me reconsider, and since I saw it during my Christmas shopping season, I gave it to him as a Christmas present.

The trick with these combo packs is to like all three of the movies. Since they are often thrown together somewhat randomly -- by studio, or by theme, but only generally -- it's no easy task. You might love two of them, but a rotten third spoils the whole basket.

So it was the unique combination of three worthy kids movies -- ones we didn't already own, at that -- that caused me to pull the trigger here.

As you have certainly divined from the art to this post, the three in this particular pack were Open Season, Surf's Up and Monster House. I like all three of these movies, and on a good day, I might almost say I love them.

Finding three movies you like is just the first part, though. The price also has to be right. At $13, the price was about as right as it gets in Australia.

Since my son watched the entirety of The Pirates! Band of Misfits on Christmas day, I was all the more heartened about a potential Boxing Day viewing of one of these other three. So when he tired of the normal Thursday morning repertoire on ABC 4 Kids, I was there at the ready.

My first mistake was letting him choose which one to watch.

At this point I should probably tell you that although I do like all three of these movies, that's quite a different thing from thinking they're all appropriate for a kid who just turned three years and four months on Christmas.

The one I had my doubts about was Monster House. It's animated alright, but it's pretty intense for kids. I remembered the titular house contorting itself into all kinds of menacing shapes, its front door a gaping maw ready to eat little children.

My son falls into the category of "little children."

Needless to say, that was the one he chose.

"This is a scary one," he said, before anything scary had even happened.

Uh oh.

"Should we watch something else?"

"No?"

My son doesn't have an Australian accent yet, but he has started saying the word "no" as if it were a question. And though the tone may sound uncertain, the meaning is anything but. He liked the fact that it was a little bit scary.

Then, actual scary things started happening. I remembered the house, but I had forgotten that a creepy neighbor, voiced by Steve Buscemi, is also in this movie. And he's not a fake creepy neighbor, like the creepy neighbor with a heart of gold in Home Alone (which my wife and I watched on Christmas night, her for the first time). He's the real McCoy. In the first three minutes of the movie, he screams at a little girl and rips her tricycle in half with his bare hands. He's not fucking around.

Again I asked my son if he wanted to watch the one with the penguins instead. Again came the questioning statement "no."

The next time the neighbor shows up, he holds the lead character (a little boy) up in the air and shakes him, then dies of what would seem to be a heart attack. "This is getting worse every minute," I thought. I already envisioned where this movie would go once the house itself -- something inanimate, inhuman, and therefore much more frightening -- started acting up. I was just asking for three weeks worth of nightmares.

We were just tiptoeing up to the edge of that kind of stuff -- I believe it was the scene where the house's front lawn "consumes" an empty beer bottle -- when my son said "I think we need to watch the penguin one now."

Whew.

So in went Surf's Up. In the clear, right?

No. See, surfing is scary ... didn't you know?

I don't know whether it was residual fear from Monster House, or whether my son was thrown by the faux documentary style of this movie, or because the movie's initial surfing takes place in the blue darkness of Antarctica, but Surf's Up was now pronounced to be scary as well.

"Okay, how about this one?" I indicated to the third picture on the package, which showed forest animals looking terrified -- but in a way I assumed would translate as funny to my son.

He nodded.

Of course, one of the first things that happens in Open Season is that a bear (voice of Martin Lawrence) tries (in vain) to scare a park ranger. Then my wife waking up distracted my son, and after an exchange with her, he told her that he didn't want to watch this scary movie.

Strike three.

It makes a certain sense. He knows that the movie that scared him is inside this case, the same case as the other two. He may not understand, therefore, that the one with the surfing penguins or the one with the flooming bear are actually different movies.

So in the end, it was not the perfect three-pack combo -- Monster House, the one that interested him the most, was also the rotten apple that spoiled the rest of the barrel.

Well, we'll always have The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

******************

I was all set to leave things there, but I have to come clean and admit that it's now December 27th, and my son is watching Surf's Up in the other room. 

I've also figured out what two of the three movies have in common, in two different ways. Surf's Up and Open Season are both from Sony Pictures Animation, and Surf's Up and Monster House both feature animated characters voiced by Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder.

I don't know what Monster House and Open Season have in common.