And does it ever work. Exterior steel panels slide up and down, revealing glass container cages inside that hold the twelve invisible ghosts, which Cyrus needed in order to … oh, never mind. What intrigues me is that this house—its shrieks of terror and its moving walls—attracts no attention at all from the neighbors, even late in the film when truly alarming things are happening. Maybe the neighbors read the screenplay.
The shatterproof glass cages, we learn, are engraved with “containment spells” that keep the ghosts inside. You can see the ghosts with special glasses, which the cast is issued; when they see them, we see them, usually in shots so maddeningly brief we don’t get a good look. Our consolation, I guess, is that the cast has the glasses but we will have the Pause button when 13 Ghosts comes out on DVD. The only button this movie needs more than Pause is Delete.
The house, Kalina explains, is really an infernal device: “We are in the middle of a machine designed by the devil and powered by the dead.” Gears grind and levers smash up and down, looking really neat, and wheels turn within wheels as it’s revealed that the purpose of this machine is to open the “Oculorus Infernum.” When a character asks, “What’s that?” the answer is not helpfuclass="underline" “It’s Latin.” Later we learn it is the Eye of Hell, and … oh, never mind.
If there are twelve ghosts there must, I suppose, be twelve containment cages, and yet when little Bobby wanders off to the subterranean area with the cages, he gets lost, and his father, sister, the nanny, the psychic, and the ghostbuster wander endlessly up and down what must be the same few corridors, shouting “Bobby! Bobby?” so very, very, very many times that I wanted to cheer when Rafkin finally said what we had all been thinking: “Screw the kid! We gotta get out of this basement!”
The production is first-rate; the executives included Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis. The physical look of the picture is splendid. The screenplay is dead on arrival. The noise level is torture. I hope 13 Ghosts plays mostly at multiplexes, because it’s the kind of movie you want to watch from the next theater.
Thomas and the Magic Railroad
(DIRECTED BY BRITT ALLCROFT; STARRING ALEC BALDWIN, PETER FONDA; 2000)
Very early in Thomas and the Magic Railroad, Thomas the Tank Engine and another locomotive are having a conversation. Their eyes roll and we hear their voices—but their mouths do not move. No, not at all. This is such an odd effect that I could think of little else during their conversation. In an era when animated dinosaurs roam the Earth, ships climb two-hundred-foot walls of water, and Eddie Murphy can play five people in the same scene, is it too much to ask a tank engine to move its lips while speaking?
I think not. Either their mouths should move or their eyes should not roll. Take your pick. I felt like a grinch as I arrived at this conclusion, for Thomas was a cute tank engine and he steamed through a fanciful model countryside that was, as these things go, nice to look at. I was still filled with goodwill toward Thomas and his movie. That was before I met Burnett Stone.
He is the character played by Peter Fonda, and he spends much of his time in a cave deep within Muffle Mountain with Lady, a tank engine he has been trying to repair for years, but without luck: “I’ve never been able to bring her to life,” he complains. “To make her steam.” Fonda is so depressed by this failure that he mopes through the entire role, stoop-shouldered, eyes downcast, step faltering, voice sad, as if he had taken the screenplay too literally (“Burnett is depressed because he cannot get Lady to run”) and did not realize that, hey, this is a kiddie movie!
Other actors are likewise adrift in the film. A few years ago Alec Baldwin was delivering the electrifying monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross. Now he is Mr. Conductor, about twelve inches tall, materializing in a cloud of sparkle dust in a geranium basket. I do not blame him for taking a role in a children’s movie, not even a role twelve inches high. I do question his judgment in getting into this one.
Thomas and the Magic Railroad is an inept assembly of ill-matched plot points, meandering through a production that has attractive art direction (despite the immobile mouths). Many of the frames would make cheerful stills. Thomas and his fellow trains, even Evil Diesel, have a jolly energy to them, and I like the landscapes and trees and hamlets.
But what a lugubrious plot! What endless trips back and forth between the Isle of Sodor and the full-sized town of Shining Time! What inexplicable characters, such as Billy Twofeathers (Russell Means), who appear and disappear senselessly. What a slow, wordy, earnest enterprise this is, when it should be quick and sprightly.
That Thomas and the Magic Railroad made it into theaters at all is something of a mystery. This is a production with “straight to video” written all over it. Kids who like the Thomas books might—might—kinda like it. Especially younger kids. Real younger kids. Otherwise, no. Perhaps the success of the Harry Potter books has inspired hope that Thomas, also a British children’s icon, will do some business. Not a chance. And in an age when even the cheapest Saturday morning cartoons find a way to make the lips move, what, oh what, was the reasoning behind Thomas’s painted-on grin?
Thunderbirds
(DIRECTED BY JONATHAN FRAKES; STARRING BILL PAXTON, BEN KINGLSEY; 2004)
I run into Bill Paxton and Ben Kingsley occasionally, and have found them to be nice people. As actors they are in the first rank. It’s easy to talk to them, and so the next time I run into one of them I think I’ll just go ahead and ask what in the he-double-hockey-sticks they were thinking when they signed up for Thunderbirds. My bet is that Paxton will grin sheepishly and Kingsley will twinkle knowingly, and they’ll both say the movie looked like fun, and gently steer the conversation toward other titles. A Simple Plan, say, or House of Sand and Fog.
This is a movie made for an audience that does not exist, at least in the land of North American multiplexes: fans of a British TV puppet show that ran from 1964 to 1966. “While its failure to secure a U.S. network sale caused the show to be canceled after thirty-two episodes, writes David Rooney in Variety, the ‘Supermarionation’ series still endures in reruns and on DVD for funky sci-fi geeks and pop culture nostalgists.” I quote Rooney because I had never heard of the series and, let’s face it, never have you. Still, I doubt that “funky” describes the subset of geeks and nostalgists who like it. The word “kooky” comes to mind, as in “kooky yo-yos.”
Thunderbirds is to Spy Kids as Austin Powers is to James Bond. It recycles the formula in a campy 1960s send-up that is supposed to be funny. But how many members of the preteen audience for this PG movie are knowledgeable about the 1960s Formica and polyester look? How many care? If the film resembles anything in their universe, it may be the Jetsons.
A solemn narrator sets the scene. The Thunderbirds, we learn, are in real life the Tracy family. Dad is Jeff Tracy (Paxton), a billionaire who has built his “secret” headquarters on a South Pacific island, where his secret is safe because no one would notice spaceships taking off. His kids are named after astronauts: Scott, John, Virgil, and Gordon, and the youngest, Alan (Brady Corbet), who is the hero and thinks he is old enough to be trusted with the keys to the family rocket. His best friend, Fermat (Soren Fulton), is named after the theorem, but I am not sure if their best friend, Tin-Tin (Vanessa Anne Hudgens), is named after the French comic book hero or after another Tin-Tin. It’s a common name.