| Bilgi : It's beginning to look like Robert Zemeckis
wants to make a motion-capture cartoon for every season,
though his timing seems a little off. First, he directed
The Polar Express, which came out in early November two
years ago and, despite an initially lukewarm reception, picked
up steam at the box office as Christmas itself came into view.
Now, he is one of several producers (Steven Spielberg is
another) behind Monster House, which takes place before
and during Halloween—but the film is coming out in mid-July,
more than three months before the "holiday" in question. There
are precedents for releasing a film out of season, as it were
(the first two Die Hard movies take place on Christmas
Eve but came out in July), but this is still a little odd.
What's next, a tribute to the Fourth of July on Groundhog
Day?
Jenny (Spencer Locke), DJ
(Mitchel Musso) and Chowder (Sam Lerner) are a bit
concerned about the house across the street
 |
Timing of another sort turns out to be a key
issue for the main characters in Monster House, too.
That is, the story concerns two boys who are in the early
stages of puberty—voices cracking, and so on—and they wonder
if they have already become too old to trick-or-treat. Will
this be the first year that they are obliged to skip out on
all the free candy, or is there still time for one last
hurrah?
But first, they have to figure out what to do
about that old, dilapidated house across the street. An old
man named Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) lives there, and he
terrorizes every child who steps on his lawn, chasing them
away and hoarding their kites and tricycles. But when DJ
(Mitchel Musso) and his chubby friend Chowder (Sam Lerner) try
to retrieve a stray basketball from Nebbercracker's lawn, the
old man gets so worked up about it that he falls to the
ground, apparently dead—an incident that we see in extreme
close-up, from DJ's point of view, after the man grabs him and
looks straight into his eyes, and thus straight into ours.
DJ, Jenny, and Chowder want to
get a closer look
|
And then, no sooner has the ambulance taken
the old man away than the house itself begins to act kind of
strange. A fireplace self-ignites, cracks runs through its
windows, and the lawn swallows objects that have been left
lying in the grass. And that's before the house and the trees
around it begin lashing out at people.
Convinced that Nebbercracker's spirit has
possessed the house, DJ and Chowder spy on the building from
DJ's bedroom and ponder what to do. They also zip across the
street to rescue Jenny (Spencer Locke), a bright and
entrepreneurial young girl who, while going door-to-door
selling last-minute supplies of candy, innocently steps within
range of the house and its clutches. Together, and with a bit
of advice from the local video-game addict (Napoleon
Dynamite's Jon Heder), the kids then set out to defeat the
house before it can do any harm to that evening's
trick-or-treaters.
With Halloween as its setting, the movie
nicely captures that ambiguous point in life when children
realize that growing up means losing something that is
valuable to them. Most of the time, if children think about
what they might lose by growing up, they look forward to
losing the burdens of childhood—bossy parents, going to
school, not being allowed to stay home on their own without a
babysitter. Growing up means independence and freedom from all
that. But whereas some customs, like Christmas presents,
follow us into adulthood, the ritual of trick-or-treating is
specific to childhood—and because it happens only once a year,
and because the years seem so long when you're a child, it can
be a bit startling for a child on the cusp of maturity to
suddenly realize that he or she is no longer one of
those kids.
Chowder, Jenny, and DJ, making their
move
|
And speaking of age-appropriateness,
Monster House may look like the sort of movie that is
more or less safe for little kids, but the humour gets a
little crude in places. Chowder becomes so obsessed with the
possessed house that, when he sleeps over at DJ's place, he
never leaves the bedroom to go to the bathroom—so he pees in a
bottle instead, a fact that grosses out both Jenny and the
babysitter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) when they discover the object.
In a later scene, the children finally go inside the
house, and they find that it is shaped like the inside of a
mouth. Jenny points to an object hanging from the ceiling and
says, "That must be the uvula," to which Chowder replies, "Oh,
so it's a girl house." Jenny immediately corrects him,
but you have to wonder how many kids will ask their parents to
explain the joke—and how many parents would rather not have to
field such questions.
The monster house gives DJ the
evil
eye
|
More troubling is how the film—directed by
novice Gil Kenan from a screenplay credited to Corpse
Bride's Pamela Pettler and Jack Black veterans Dan Harmon
and Rob Schrab—ultimately resolves the question of the house
and its identity. Without giving too much away, hopefully,
suffice to say that the film shows a remarkable lack of
sympathy for the marginalized outsider, plus it is a little
unnerving to see a children's film in which one character
celebrates the violent end of a bad marriage, and the children
go on to hope that this character will find someone nicer,
now.
It all makes for a striking contrast with a
film like, say, Zathura, where the gradual destruction
of the house worked on one level as a metaphor for the end of
a marriage and the crumbling apart of the larger family. In
that film, the literal and metaphorical destruction was
something to be resisted, even reversed if possible—but
Monster House positively revels in it. That's not
exactly a healthy or mature message to send to kids, no matter
how much growing up they've done.
|
