Chabert Watch: Daddy Day Care (2003)

Watched:  06/11/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steve Carr

Sometimes coming into a movie and seeing it has an extraordinarily low rating sets you up for success.  Daddy Day Care (2003) has a 39 on Metacritic* and a Critics score at RT of 27%.  

Honestly, I thought it was fine.  Not good, but fine.  

It knew what it was - an excuse for kids to be cute and throw in some wholesome jokes.  It was clearly intended to be a family movie, and so I can see how critics decided this was bad, hoping for the Eddie Murphy of the 80's and 90's.  And I don't automatically give Eddie Murphy a pass.  I think I declared Candy Cane Lane the worst movie of 2023.  But as a family movie based on its own merits, sure.  Daddy Day Care (2003) is.. fine.  (I also have seen so many awful movies of late, this feels like Casablanca by comparison)

The movie stars Murphy as a guy trying to run a health food team within a processed food company, who loses his job when his project "Veggie-O's Cereal" bombs.  Coming with him is his side-kick, Jeff Garlin.  They recruit their former mail-boy, Steve Zahn, to work with the kids.  Regina King plays Murphy's wife, who has just started working as an attorney.  Anjelica Huston plays the head of a school/ daycare that's run like an intense prep academy.  Lacey Chabert plays her assistant.  Jonathan Katz plays a City employee keeping tabs on the daycare.  Laura Kightlinger is in there.  Kevin Nealon.  Siobhan Fallon Hogan.  And a very small Elle Fanning is one of the kids.

JLC Watch: Freaky Friday (2003)

Watched:  06/08/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mark Waters

If you weren't an adult in the 00's, it's hard to imagine how easily mainstream media managed to convince the public that completely random people were now the biggest star in the world and we all had to care about them.  This was a result of the fact that the internet had not yet discovered algorithms and was just force-feeding us content, so whether they were pushing someone on teens or the elderly, we all got the same stuff.  

America was in the middle of occupying Iraq, which had begun four months before the release of Freaky Friday (2003), and as a bit of a newshound at the time, I was often trying to find out wtf was happening.  But every time you tried to get online and look at the news, sites were saying "yeah, war in Iraq that could trigger 1000 years of war with the East, but... look at what Lindsay Lohan's mom said today!".  

I have no negative feelings about Lohan, especially as a teen.  She existed.  But I can't say the same for the de-evolution of news at the dawn of the clickbait era and selling us on the antics of certain celebrities.

Lohan is fine in this movie.  Cute, has a pack-a-day-habit voice pioneered by Jodie Foster and carried on to Emma Stone just a few years later, but...  In my book, Jamie Lee Curtis is putting on a comedy clinic.  Lohan's good!  But with JLC playing a surly teen, Lohan doesn't get to do anything as kooky as JLC.  And I am not sure she has the same presence as Foster in the original film, but those may just be fond memories from 1982 or so when I last watched the movie.

I found this version, though, really, really funny - once it gets started.  And it doesn't suffer from meandering in the manner of 70's-era Disney live-action flicks.  The first ten minutes or so are rough as we watch the leads snipe at each other and get all of the set-up in place - including the shitty younger brother.  But, immediately upon the body swap, the movie works.  I was lol'ing.

2025 audiences might shift uncomfortably about the trigger being a magic fortune cookie.  I'll just leave it at that.

My recollection is that the original movie is a bit more even-sided between the kid and mom not understanding each other, but this one really leans into Lohan's character taking it from all sides before the swap, which initially I found odd, but it does give the story plenty to work with as Mom-in-Kid's body navigates her daughter's day, (the unfair English teacher played by Tobolowsky is particularly a good bit).  And I did appreciate that the script's inclusion of a step-father coming into the picture (Mark Harmon) is played so well.

But...  for comedy... JLC mooning over a boy, frustrated with her punk brother..  it's all pretty solid work and she commits to the bit.  I wish they'd done more with the therapy session stuff, but what we got was good.

Tragically, the movie is also from the era of SoCal Pop-Punk being shoved down our throats, and it wasn't enjoyable at the time and has aged like a banana left out for two solid months.  Thus, I wish I enjoyed the rock band numbers more than I did.  But I didn't, minus JLC clearly really knowing how to play the bit her character plays in the film.  That was cool.

I didn't start this post off to drag Lohan - it was just a weird time for how talent was promoted (remember how we were bombarded with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie for way too long?), and she had some hard years transitioning to being a grown-assed adult as a result.  But this movie was a key part in her rise to fame and Disney trying to cash in on her popularity.  And you kind of wonder what would have been if Hollywood weren't so full of toxic monsters.

Fortunately, Lohan and JLC are teaming up for a sequel this summer, so maybe she'll get a second shot.  She's been fine in her Netflix movies.

Chabert Watch: Reach for Me (2008)

Watched:  05/29/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  LeVar Burton

So.  Interesting, small, indie movie with some name talent.  I kept wondering how this was pulled off, and then the movie ended with "Directed by LeVar Burton" and the lightbulb went off.  Who doesn't love LeVar Burton?  And if you don't think he's great, we can't be friends.

And when I say name talent, I mean Chabert, of course.  But also Seymour Cassel, Alfre Woodard, Adrienne Barbeau, Larry Hankin, and Burton himself.  I am not familiar with actor Johnny Whitworth, one of the major leads, but he was good!

The movie is... odd.  It's about Alvin (Seymour Cassel), a patient in hospice who is facing his end.  He loses his roommate (Hankin) who he kind of got along with - but maybe not as well as he believed. Alvin's an old, sad and angry asshole, and a letch who grabs the butts of the volunteers.  He talks about sex like he's in a a dorm trying to impress wide-eyed Freshmen as a Sophomore.  

Chabert Watch: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

Watched:  05/28/2025

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mark Waters

When people ask "why did studios stop spending money on romcoms", I think it's fair to point to movies like this and say "well, this is what they were making, and people didn't like it."  Metacritic has this at a 34, which sounds correct.  

I had not seen this movie, and until I looked it up a week ago to watch it, I thought it was a movie in which Eva Longoria was a ghost hassling her boyfriend.  But that was Over Her Dead Body, which people also didn't like.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) is a movie I may have known existed at one point, but...  in 2025, I just had no memory of it coming out.  I don't know if it met expectations or not, making about $100 million worldwide.  

Chabert Watch: Hello Sister, Goodbye Life (2006)

Watched:  05/27/2025

Format:  YouTube TV on demand

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven Robman

This movie is about a young woman (Chabert, playing a college junior here) with a rocky relationship with her father, who has remarried and has a young daughter (Samantha Hanratty).  When her father and her step-mother die in a car accident, she learns that her father named her custodian of her half-sister.

While attending college, she moves into her father's house and tries to take care of a seven-year-old.  As it turns out, for a hard-partying college girl, this is a change of pace.

Wendie Malick plays Chabert's mother, a woman who also seems like a lot of fun, but who maybe was not a role model for structured parenting, and is more excited to have an adult-aged college daughter she can hang with than she was to raise a young child.

Chabert Watch: Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

Watched:  05/19/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Joel Gallen

I mostly missed the wave of teen movies that arrived in the late 1990's.  And the ones I did see, I only partially remember at this point, and/ or am unsure if I watched them all the way through.

I'm not even sure if Not Another Teen Movie (2001) closed out the cycle or not.  What's curious about this movie is that it kind of helped launch the terrible movie-spoof cycle that would morph into the terrible Scary Movies flicks and other spoofs. 

The 2005 release of Dirty Deeds we watched as part of the Chabert-a-Thon was trying to be one of the comedy teen movies, and I think it must have arrived very late, in retrospect.

Not Another Teen Movie is an interesting artifact for a lot of reasons.  

Chabert Watch! Shadow of Fear (2004)

Watched:  05/17/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Rich Cowan

The cast in this thing is absolutely wild.  James Spader.  Peter Coyote.  Aidan Quinn.  Robin Tunney.  Alice Krige.  Matthew Davis.  and, of course, Lacey Chabert.  

I am guessing this was a straight-to-DVD movie.  It's a kind of throwback to 1940's post-war melodrama that might have been categorized as noir, but does feel decidedly 00's.  And, once again, I see the idea here, even if the execution left me mostly flat.  

I can see all of the casting as being spot on.  But the movie's plot itself is insane and absurd.  Maybe it could have worked with a different director.   Lighting.  Something.  What's weird is - they have the sets, they have the talent (mostly), but it feels like it was shot as a TV movie that happens to contain actors doing a pretty good job with a pretty ridiculous movie.  There's one scene where a guy - I think nameless, but impacted by our villain - is *acting* and I want to be, like, my guy... it's okay.  You can dial it back.  You care more than the director.  And that may be true of everyone in the cast.

Chabert Watch! A New Wave (2006)

Watched:  05/11/2025

Format:  Fawesome

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jason Carvey

I don't know if I've ever experienced second-hand embarrassment for my generation of film dudes this intensely before, but here we are.

I assume the name of the movie is trying to wink at the French New Wave, and the belief that this movie was somehow echoing that well established concept.  But I don't know what the filmmakers meant, and I don't want to come out of the gate too strong with how irritating that is as (a) a joke or, (b) way worse, if it's meant sincerely.  But it is indicative of how bad this movie is with comedy that I don't know their intention.

Arriving probably 7 years after the last time this movie might have been considered hep or cool in any way, like many first-time efforts, A New Wave (2006) doesn't know what it is, cramming in three movies or so here, but it sure is trying to work something out that's best left to therapy sessions for the writer/director and doesn't need to involve me as an audience member.  It's also a great peek at the post-Tarantino fantasies of LA filmmakers who all saw something they liked in Tarantino and thus wanted to put their own brand on lo-fi crime ideas.  By 2006, we're just saying it out loud, I guess.

That's paired with a view of women as "unobtainable, mysterious problems" that seemed to permeate film in both studio and indie flicks in this era.  

And none of it works.

Chabert Watch: The Brooke Ellison Story (2004)

Watched:  05/08/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Christopher Reeve

I'm gonna be straight up with y'all.  I am so grateful for a good movie at this moment in ChabertQuest 2025.  Several of the past few have been making this journey less than ideal.  

The Brooke Ellison Story (2004) is a movie I was aware of in 2004 when it came out, but completely missed as an A&E TV movie that came out during a time when I was working insane hours.  As one can guess it entered my awareness because it was directed by Christopher Reeve, who passed just two weeks before the film aired.

And, of course, once I knew about the real Brooke Ellison the film was based on, when she'd pop up in in the news every once in a while, I was reminded I'd heard of her because of the film.  But because it was a TV movie, once it was gone, it was kind of gone, so I didn't know much about it.  

The film is an adaptation of the book written by the real-life Brooke Ellison and her mother, Jean Ellison.  During her middle-school years, Brooke was hit by a car which left her a quadriplegic and living on a ventilator to survive.  She wound up going to Harvard (the thing I did know).

I didn't know, for example, that the movie stars Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and John Slattery as Brooke's parents.  But, holy smokes, is this one of those places where a movie found the right director and cast.  What could have been a saccharine movie about a family with pluck overcoming adversity manages to work because it's not about a can-do spirit and a song in your heart winning the day.  It's about the million steps you have to overcome, from regulations that make no sense, to insurance shenanigans to those who think they know best - at least at the outset. 

Chabert Watch! Tart (2001)

I don't make the posters, I just post them

Watched:  05/05/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director/ Writer:  Christina Wayne

Watching Tart (2001) feels very much like when you're a middle-class kid with middle-class experiences and you get stuck in a conversation with someone your age who has no idea that they're upper-class.  You mostly sit there in polite silence as they have no idea that every sentence coming out of their mouth is dripping with privilege, classism, and unearned self-pity because Mumsie and Daddy left them behind and went to St. Bart's for two weeks, during which time they were left with a stack of money, a huge house and just the butler and maid, and it was so unfair and they better get to go to (insert place middle class kids never heard of) next year!

Chabert Watch! Dirty Deeds (2005)

greetings ladies and gentlemen - I'll be your unnecessarily smug dope of a lead for the evening

Watched:  05/04/2025

Format:  Legitimately obtained video

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Kendall

I can't think of a movie where I've heard the soundtrack doing more heavy lifting than this weirdly soggy flick from the 90's/00's-era of dude-centric teen comedies that maybe peaked with American Pie.  But I wasn't a teen then, and I didn't watch most of these flicks.  

What's oddest about Dirty Deeds (2005) is that it *should* have been as straightforward as one could be.  It has a boilerplate plot of a guy who has to complete a punchlist of tasks in an academy/ academic setting - and he's a wildcard!  What should be a wacky, charming series of shenanigans with a dollop of heart is, instead, a clutch of unfunny incidents, some of which are straight concerning.  

But, yeah, 

Chabert Watch: Being Michael Madsen (2007)

Watched:  04/29/2025

Format:  Legitimately obtained video

Viewing:  First

Director:  Michael Mongillo

There's nuggets of a couple of ideas in Being Michael Madsen (2007) that are very good ideas.  Unfortunately, this was not the movie to execute on those ideas.  And you know you're in trouble from the very start when the faux-documentary alerts you it will be bleeping out *real* brand names for legal reasons (sigh) and then rolls like three quotes before the first shot of video.  

Yeah, this is a fake documentary - about a documentary that we will never get to see.  Or is it the documentary?  It's not clear.  I do know this movie is also a weird mix of wildly pretentious nonsense that believes it's very clever and maybe poking fun at itself for being pretentious.  But, hoo boy, it's kind of like when someone is being pretentious but isn't quite smart enough to actually pull it off, but they're Dunning-Kruegering their way into believing they're the smartest person in the room.

Chabert Watch! Mean Girls (2004)

Watched:  04/25/2025

Format:  Paramount+

Viewing:  second

Director:  Mark Waters

Back when we were doing the podcast, we should have done this movie as part of our "high school movies series".  Alas, we didn't get to it.  

But if you listened to those episodes, you would have come across my inability to access a lot of high school movies, largely because I felt they offered a false proposition:  that in high school, there existed a clique people aspired to join or who were a group to emulate or who had influence.  And that those people were varying levels of mean.

I have since learned:  no, man, that may have just been you (me).    Maybe because I moved to a new school and no one explained to me who was supposed to be "popular".  And if that was going to shake out at the first high school I attended, I missed it gelling as I moved away after Freshman year.

So, that was my context the first time I watched this.  I've kind of accepted since that some people very much felt in and out of groups in high school, and carry that feeling for life.  I think it's why everyone - if you ask them - will tell you how they were an outsider in high school, but the math doesn't add up.  You can't have 99% outsiders.  And I've never heard anyone say "actually, I was super cool in high school".

Chabert Watch! Fatwa (2006)

love the US flag pine tree deodorizer.  Feels very 00's

Watched:  04/23/2025

Format:  Midnight Pulp

Viewing:  First

Director:  John R. Carter

An absolutely bizarre movie that sees the intersection of 

• the 1990's and 00's-era post Pulp Fiction crime flicks
• the success of shows like 24
• the belief that shooting on consumer video will lend an immediacy to the film (this is not correct)
• a first time director
• established actors
• unyielding pretentiousness

all in one neat package that winds up as one of those 90 minute movies that seems like it's been at least two hours, and so you check, and it's got another 30 minutes to go...  It's also one of those movies where everything seems very disconnected and then wants to make everything tie together in the last 20 minutes or so, but when put together, just starts stretching credulity way past the breaking point.

Fatwa (2006) is a post 9/11,  post fall of Iraq indie thriller/ political commentary.  It follows a desperate would-be terrorist in DC who is planning *something* - it's hinted at early on he's going to make a nuclear device using household objects.  He's specifically targeting a US Senator played by Lauren Holly.  (Holly is also an Executive Producer, but I assume that was her negotiating and more of a ceremonial role.)

Chabert Watch! The Lost (2009)

Watched:  04/11/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bryan Goeres

Here's my theory:  the writers came up with the ending for The Lost (2009), and then had to work backward from there.  Desperate to keep anyone from guessing the ending, they kinda screwed up what you need to do with a mystery, which is leave clues that make you realize "oh, yeah, it was kinda there all along!"  But, nope.  They hid it so well, and the twist is so out of left field, you're just sort of left shrugging.

Not that anyone was invested in the prior 85 or so minutes of the movie before the twist ending.  

This is an oddly misogynistic supernatural thriller/ psychological mystery wherein Lacey Chabert plays a young woman in a Spanish insane asylum.  Three years prior, she seems to have set a mansion on fire as well as someone inside.  As a student, she was living in the guest house.  She looks pale and spooky as she watches it all burn, and maybe has psychic powers.

The movie is kind of badly shot.  The audio is poorly mixed, and not helped by Assante mumbling his way through the dialog so badly we turned on subtitles.  Also, a good portion of the cast is Spanish and not hitting every line in a way you can hear.  So when Dina Meyer shows up enunciating, it's a trip.  

Armand Assante, who I've only ever seen in Judge Dredd, plays a psychiatrist who examined Chabert briefly 3 years ago before saying "she's nuts" and leaving her in the Spanish psych ward.  Why she did not come back stateside, I am unsure.  Chabert's sister is Dina Meyer, who basically blackmails Assante into going to take a look at Chabert again.

Lynch Watch: Inland Empire (2006)

Watched:  03/31/2025 

Format:  Alamo

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Lynch

Something like 6 weeks ago, I agreed to see Inland Empire (2006) with SimonUK.  

Here's what I knew:

• It stars Laura Dern (a huge plus)
• It was a micro-budget film 
• Rabbits?
• Shot on video

Here's what I found out:

• It's 3 hours
• It's maybe a sequel to Mulholland Drive
• Rabbits!
• A greater number of name talent than I was expecting

I will be straight up with y'all and say:  I think I got between 25 and 33 percent of that movie.

I'm not embarrassed.  I think I'm pretty okay at watching movies.  Unpuzzling David Lynch is both fun and hopeless, because he was never going to tell you if you got it, really.  And looking at the critical reception on Wikipedia is just funny.  Everyone has a different opinion of what they just watched - not whether they liked it, but what happened.  

I am aware Inland Empire is a real place outside of Los Angeles, and aside from that, I don't know anything about it.*  Don't know if this has anything to do with the movie other than maybe some stuff was shot there.  And I assume there's something there about interior worlds/ lives.  But WHO KNOWS?  Not me.

It seems to be a spiritual sequel to Mulholland Drive, a film of doubles and other selves, and nightmare visions only Hollywood and dreams spawned by Tinsel Town can create.   In 2006 showing someone dying at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine and all the folks assembled at the corner do is watch is not not saying something specific (spoilers).

The overall plot has to do with a dream within a dream within a dream stack of realities in which an actress who has had issues with her career and husband gets a plumb role, but the story itself is cursed, and we cut between the reality of the actress, the film, events in the past, a Lodge-like zone with Rabbit spirits...

But, yeah, all I knew was Laura Dern was in this, but she's also a producer.  And you can also look for Jeremy Irons, Ian Ambercrombie, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie, Diane Ladd, Julia Ormond, Terry Crews, Mary Steenburgen? and a huge number of Polish actors I do not know.  Why Poland?  Man, I do not know.

There's a Polish curse!  That happens.

But Laura Harring shows up in literally the last minute of the film, and that's my tell that maybe this is a shared story with Mulholland Drive or a more direct sequel continuing to work out Lynch's feelings on Hollywood.

But, yeah, all of this was a lot.  I'm not sure I got it, but I also wasn't having a bad time.  I've been watching Lynch on and off since I was 15, so I'm kind of dialed in for his deal.  But I also know had I not seen this in the theater, it would have paid big dividends to watch this over again *immediately*.  Which at a full 6 hours would be a lot.

Yes, I did watch this in a theater, just a day after my bad theater experience.  And, y'all...  yes, I paid a lot because Alamo**.  But I also sat in a 3 hour movie with a 4/5ths full auditorium, audio that is often non-existent, and you could hear a pin drop through the whole movie.  And this was with people eating dinner at a 6:00 show.

And the bathroom was clean.  

It's the little things, pals.  That said, I think they're now asking for 40% over the price of food and drink.

*how shocked was I to see there is a real City of Industry in LA, and a Klickitat Street in Portland.

**I am still unclear why there's an 18% service charge and a tip option.  My guess is that the servers are getting @#$%ed.

Neo-Noir Watch: Collateral (2004)

Watched:  03/30/2025

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Michael Mann

There's half of an amazing character driven neo-noir in this film, and then half of an okay thriller.

I think it's the schizm of the two that makes for a frustrating viewing experience where one would be a delight and the other a pleasant enough film, but when the film shifts gears back and forth - and I usually don't mind tonal changes - it just feels like there's missed opportunity on that character study and the better film.  Collateral (2004) does get to sail on Michael Mann's slick directing and visuals (look, you can hire whatever DP, but it's Mann), and stellar performances from Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise and a kick-ass set-up that feels rooted in some classic noir.

The movie also co-stars a wide array of names.  Jason Statham appears for about twenty seconds.  Debi Mazar as well (in our book, there's never enough Mazar).  Jada Pinkett-Smith appears.  Mark Ruffalo plays an LA cop uncovering what's going on in real time.  Javier Bardem.  Bruce McGill.  Peter Berg.  

Our set up is that Jamie Fox plays Max, a cabbie, who picks up a fare, who seems like a charming guy but is actually an assassin, Vincent (Tom Cruise) flown in from points unknown to take out a series of people.  Max just wants to squirrel away money for his dream of starting a limo company.

At the first hit, Fox is waiting in his cab for Vincent when he's suddenly involved in the proceedings.  Under threat by Vincent, he begins driving him from hit-to-hit.  And that could have been enough.  The relationship building between the two could have made for a taught thriller driven by the desires and motives of each - and the movie plays with that as they reveal more about themselves and get real about the weaknesses of the other.  

Disney Watch: Atlantis - The Lost Empire (2001)

Watched:  03/16/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

I vaguely remember this one coming out, but didn't see it.  No recollection of why.

I did get the feeling that this movie was not great, and over time it hasn't really had any kind of reconsideration.  Yeah, there's folks online who loved it as kids, and maintain that love now.  And, bully for them.

There's a lot going on in this movie.  It's also trying to fill a gap I was aware of from my days working at the Disney Store in summers from 1993-1995 - that Disney didn't know how to reach the audience they'd associated with young boys, something we struggled with as we were often asked to make recommendations to folks coming into the store shopping for boy's stuff for kids over, say, seven.  So why not make some movies that could spawn merch and serve those kids as much as the kids who wanted Princess dresses?

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) wasn't completely panned when it came out, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire - right now it's sitting at a 52 on Metacritic.  For comparison, Lilo & Stitch was a 74.  Beauty and the Beast from 1991 was a 95 and got a Best Picture nomination.  

Disney Watch: Lilo & Stitch (2002)

Watched:  03/13/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing;  First

Directors:  Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders

No, I'd never seen Lilo & Stitch (2002).  It came out about three weeks after I moved to Phoenix back in 2002, and I guess we didn't get around to it at the time, or in the ensuing 23 years.

The movie is kind of the last gasp of Disney's 2D efforts as the annual summer release schedule was apparently taxing the creative teams and leading to less and less enthusiasm for each year's release.  And looking at the Disney Animation Studios output of 2D movies in the 00's, you can see this is the second-to-last film of the 2D movies anyone really talks about - the final being The Princess and the Frog.  

Spoiler - I liked this movie a lot!  The animation is fun and really well executed, but the story about being a terror goblin who doesn't even know what a family is and then learns that he wants one?  I found it shockingly effective and moving.  

When you want to know what sticks with people, its never the 3D or some animation sequence, it's how they felt, and I'll remember this one for a while.  That said - *how* they get you to feel any specific way is tied to those technical achievements, direction, art and story writing, and it's surprising to see a movie about a less-than-perfect family unit containing a kid who is acting out in the wake of the loss of her parents and her older, barely-an-adult sister, who is trying to keep it together.  Add in an alien-prison-escapee-genetically-created-space-WMD and it's a ride.  

But, yeah, Disney is at its best when it taps into those core universal emotions, that kids and adults can tap into, but when they come in at an oblique angle.  Do I spend time thinking I do not know who I am and if I have a family?  No.  But all of us can sympathize if not empathize with not feeling like we know how to fit in like Lilo, or that no one told us the basics, like Stitch - and reach for a place to belong.  

Voice talent on this thing is interesting, with Tia Carrere, David Ogden Stiers, KITH alumnus Kevin McDonald, Ving Rhames, Zoe Caldwell and a young Daveigh Chase as Lilo.  

The character animation is top flight, much as Princess and the Frog will make you a little sad that so much of what 2D did so well was really hitting on all cylinders just as Disney pivoted to 3D.   From both the first space sequences and the introduction to our out-of-the-way Hawaiian town, you can tell Disney's animators were leaning in hard.  There's a lot of motion-capture that makes the action fluid but still fun in a way I think we're kind of forgetting, as well as layered work that's just fantastic.

And the story is kind of daring in having both a little kid who maybe isn't a precious angel and her far worse alien pal - and you genuinely can buy that they help each other be better.  That's some solid writing.  We're a pretty far cry from Belle being an oddball for being nice and reading books as Lilo smacks around her classmate.  And, yet, I pull for Lilo - and holy cow, does it land as I look at my own niece and nephew puzzling through their younger years.

Anyhoo, I finally caught up on this one, and will certainly watch the live action remake.  It looks really fun.

Holiday Horror Watch: Black Christmas (2006)

Watched:  12/20/2024

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Glen Morgan

I watched this movie because last weekend, Brandon Z told me that he'd watched all three version of Black Christmas (I did not know there were three) and that the 2006 edition featured Mary Elizabeth Winstead (always great) and our Christmas Queen, Lacey Chabert.  He did not endorse this version - just let me know: it exists.

Well, this is the opposite of a Hallmark movie, but if it has Chabert, and it's Christmas, who am I to not watch this movie?

A few years ago I watched the 1974 original version of Black Christmas (2006) and it scared the bejeezus out of me.  THAT is a horror film.  It leaves us with unknowns, an uncaught murderer who we never fully see, no motivation...  it's just... people getting popped off one-by-one and because of how college worked in a pre-internet/ pre-cell-phone era, when people weren't around, you just assumed they were okay until you heard otherwise.

This movie is bad.  It feels like it has no idea what worked in the original film, and made it smaller and less believable and went for gore over the terror of a guy slowly picking off unsuspecting sorority girls.  It changes it into a Halloween movie, but if Michael Meyers' thing was being mistaken for a banana.*  It even ends like Halloween 2 instead of leaving us with the absolute spine chiller of the original's conclusion.

Full stop - I am well known for face blindness with young Hollywood talent, male and female.  There was a hot minute where I thought Eva Green and Emily Blunt were the same person circa 2006.  So throw a sorority house full of girls at me who have no discernible personalities, different wardrobes or even really have blemishes, and my only hope for knowing who they are is "that one wears glasses" and that one is "MEW".  But I literally couldn't tell you how many girls were in the house, who they were, what their stories were, etc...  But, yes, I did look at IMDB and vaguely remember Michelle Trachtenberg.  But if they're all the same person, plus Andrea Martin, it makes it hard to care about anyone but Andrea Martin.  

And... look, MEW wasn't quite a thing yet in 2006, but Chabert kind of was.  So it's weird she has like 10 lines and is shoved in the background.  She's kind of funny in this.

As mentioned - awesomely, this movie *does* have Andrea Martin in it as a new character - the house mother.  And we love Andrea Martin.  Glad to see her.  And - because it's the writer/ director's wife, we also have Kristen Cloake, who is not a bad actor, btw, but it seems like she's hung up her acting guns.

This movie isn't scary.  1974's Black Christmas is so spooky, it's going to take some effort for me to watch it again.  This one is what you always see me complain about - jump scares in place of scares.  There's no real mood.  The backstory is just dumb and in no way an improvement - especially the post-Scream two-killer reveal (whoops, spoilers).  And the last act in the hospital just sucks.

I don't know why this exists.  And I don't blame the talent.  The people I do know in this are fine actors, so it's not them.  A quick look at wikipedia shows the problem was likely The Weinsteins.  So.  There you go.  Something else they made horrible.

I do not think I will watch the 2019 version unless there's a very pressing reason to do so.

*there's some liver problem we're told he has, and that it makes him yellow.  It looks *ridiculous*