Monthly Archives: February 2009

Need an assassin? They can tailor-make you one. Need a date? They can do that, too. Need a female hostage negotiator to deal off-the-record with the guys who’ve kidnapped your daughter? No problem. The Dollhouse just pours new information and a new personality into Echo’s brain, and she’s ready to rock.

The flaw in this setup, of course, is that’s it’s pointless. As an FBI supervisor points out while grilling his agent who can’t stop chasing leads on the human trafficking scheme he believes the Dollhouse to be, if you’re a billionaire and want an assassin, you hire an assassin. If you want a sushi chef, you hire a sushi chef. Tailor-made people are both prohibitively expensive and redundant, because people with the necessary skill can be had fairly readily and with much less risk.

The pilot script also awkwardly shoehorns in the idea that when the scientists create these personas for their “dolls,” they have to do so from the personalities of already-existing people. This gives Whedon an opportunity to mandate certain built-in flaws in each of Echo’s adopted personas. But obviously, this only makes the show’s premise even less sound — the only reason billionaires would invest in these made-to-order humans at all would be if every human flaw could be eradicated. When Whedon writes into the pilot that that’s not possible, he is of course making a philosophical stand about human nature, but it seems like he’s also painting himself into a corner.

Continue reading →

Henry Selick is a — or maybe the — director of stop-motion animated features. Stop-motion being the labor-intensive process that it is, Selick’s been directing since 1981 and only just completed his fourth feature, Coraline. And if you didn’t catch box-office disaster Monkeybone, chances are the last thing you remember from this guy is 1996’s James And The Giant Peach.

So what does a 13-year wait get you? Quite a lot, as it happens. Horror film producers have been trying to revive 3-D technology for a few years, but the application there is obvious — flying axes and the like. Here, Selick uses the same technology for more playful purposes. Although Coraline — the story of a girl who finds a tiny doorway leading to an alternate universe with seemingly nicer parents — is quite scary, Selick wisely avoids using 3-D for shock effects. 3-D objects don’t leap out like bogeymen — instead the whole texture of the film is crisply three-dimensional, and when objects and characters do occasionally seem to come off the screen — a needle, some papier-mache flying bugs — the effect is more magical than menacing.

Continue reading →

By way of the San Jose Mercury-News, Joaquin Phoenix makes David Letterman do both sides of a Late Night interview: In isolation, this just seems odd and sad. But the Mercury-News points out that Casey Affleck is supposed to be … Continue reading →