journal features

movie review - Coraline

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.02.07

This is a stop-motion animated movie done in a perfect style in which two realities are tenuously connected through various cat-flaps in an old house. In one reality (presumably ours) the heroine is a young girl with distracted parents who let her slide more or less headlong into a reality where buttons are sewn into ones eyes and everyone is a macabre version of their real selves. The plot revolves around the girl's struggles in both worlds, which dovetail more-or-less with her need for parenting.

It's beautifully made and the story rides a knife's edge between gripping and "too far" for almost the entirety of its run-time.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton