The Monster Squad

The Monster Squad, a tween horror-comedy from the ‘80s, can’t settle on an appropriate tone.  Going from silly to cruel and back again, the film keeps its audience wondering whether it’s supposed to be fun or horrific.

Here’s the setup: Dracula comes to what appears to be San Dimas, bringing all his friends from the Universal Monsters catalog with him.  He wants to take over the world, and it’s up to a bunch of junior high schoolers, The Monster Squad, to save the day.  Sounds like fun, right?  Work in some sight gags, put the gang in a little peril, finish with a stake in the heart, and roll the credits.  But then the kids get help from a Holocaust survivor who reflects that he knows what real monsters look like, and we’re shocked out of the comfortable universe of the Universal Monsters and back into our (decidedly less comfortable) own.  Before we know it, some monsters are comic relief, others are murderers, and the film can’t seem to figure out how it feels about any of it.

Adding insult to injury, The Monster Squad lacks internal coherence.  It’s as if the Universal went with the first draft that didn’t feature Fred Grandy and never even bothered to send for a more polished product.  There’s a bunch of stuff about a vortex and a rite that’ll do away with monsters once and for all, but the film’s prologue shows us an earlier generation conducting the same rite and creating the same vortex, apparently to no avail.  This leaves the adults in the audience spending the picture’s running time asking, “So what?” Forget about the film’s disregard for human life, its cavalier attitude toward early sexuality, and even its silly anachronisms.  This movie just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m addending my 10-year-old son’s impressions, so you can see I’m not alone.  If you’re looking for kid-friendly, monsterrific fun, skip The Monster Squad and just see the original Universal monster movies again.  They’re better in every imaginable way.
===
I liked the movie the first time I watched it, But the second time, I noticed disturbing elements. Some innocent cops got sucked into the vortex that was meant for evil monsters to be sucked in. Some people even died.  So with the deaths, they went from “cheesy non-threatening monsters" to "serious no kidding people-are-dying threatening monsters."
     
Well, it wasn’t all bad.  There were friendly parts. One character was dressing up Frankenstein’s Monster in girl clothes, And the Werewolf mask was cheesy lookin’. Cheesy is good, Because it looks very non-threatening, so it’s “Spooky” not “Scary.” The Mummy and Gill-Man also looked fake and fun.

It’s got elements I liked, & scenes I disliked. Then again, I still could just skip the parts I don’t like. No wait, That wouldn’t work, because that would annoy the people I’m watching it with. Guess I’m still waiting for the perfect movie I’m going to like completely.

Jefferson in Paris

Jefferson in Paris takes one of the brightest, most scintillating intellects of his generation and turns him into a crashing bore.

The film begins in 1784, with Jefferson arriving in Paris to relieve Benjamin Franklin of his duties as ambassador to the court of Louis XVI.  The film doesn’t show us the turnover – I imagine it would have been impossible to make Franklin, the greatest intellect of the previous generation, dull enough to fit into this picture.  So here we are: a charismatic genius dropped into the ferment of pre-revolutionary France, trying to carry on Franklin’s mission of getting Louis to spend less time talking about helping the Americans and more time actually helping them.  He and Franklin were wildly successful, of course: all that French military and economic assistance eventually bankrupted the state and directly contributed to the fall of the monarchy.  This is fascinating stuff, but does the film show us any of it?  No.  What does the film show us?  Jefferson’s love affairs.

Big deal.  If Merchant Ivory Productions had wanted to do a picture about love and sex in fin de siècle France, it should’ve gone with the Franklin years.  They were more interesting.  Jefferson had an (apparently chaste) affair with a well known English artist and may have begun his lifelong relationship with Sally Hemings in Paris, but Franklin - well, this is a family blog.  Look it up for yourself.

Nick Nolte, as Jefferson, does the character no favors.  He comes across as a passionless man even when (supposedly) in the throes of great passion.  It’s as if screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala crafted his voice from the formalized writing style of the time, coming up with something that feels more like a historical reenactment than a dramatic film.

So here we are, with a dull Jefferson in a melodramatic film that turns a fascinating man and time into 139 minutes of tedium.  Give it a pass.

The Social Network

The Social Network is a movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome.  As with many “aspies,” he’s a genius.  Also, as with all aspies, he’s a social incompetent (I’m not casting aspersions.  While genius is a possible side effect of Asperger’s Syndrome, social incompetence is a core symptom.).  He’s smart enough to know that relationships matter and driven enough to pantomime what he perceives to be appropriate behaviors, but he can’t quite get it.  This makes him feel powerless, envious, and angry – why can’t he intuitively do this social interaction stuff that the idiots around him handle so effortlessly?

The guy’s name is Mark Zuckerberg, and he invents Facebook.  Marrying his outsider’s near-clinical observations of how people interact with his genius for computer programming, he figures out how to take the social experience of college and put it on line.  If he can put his thumb in the eyes of those he envies, so much the better.*

But he’s an aspie.  He can’t intuit whether or not someone’s a fraud.  He can’t intuit who his real friends are.  He can’t intuit how to run a relationship, much less a business, because people and their natural social organizations don’t work with the clear, understandable, and unerring precision of computer code.  He can only learn the way you might learn how to do something for which you have no talent: by flailing around until he gets it right.  When he flails around, people get hurt.  When people get hurt and realize he’s now a very wealthy man, they sue.

That’s the core of the movie, and it’s the core of the tragedy of the character of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.  To get us there, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin captures the rhythm of Asperger’s conversation and the calculating, intellectualized nature of Asperger’s interaction.  Jesse Eisenberg, playing Zuckerberg under David Fincher’s direction, redefines his career with this performance.  Together, they capture the singlemindedness of Asperger’s; the sublimated rage of disability; and the helplessness of a young man who’s too smart to realize that, in some ways, he isn’t smart at all.

The Social Network itself seems a bit cold, a bit clinical.  It thinks too much and feels not nearly enough.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?  The Social Network is unblinking in its perception and devastating in its conclusions.  I can’t wait to discuss it with my friends.

*There’s a catch, and you need to know this.  I have it on very good authority that the book upon which this film is based is poorly researched claptrap.  The character of “Mark Zuckerberg,” as depicted in the film, may not reflect the actual guy.