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This Weeks Movie Reviews: Wordplay Directed by Patrick Creadon. Written by Patrick Creadon and Christine O'Malley. Cinematography, Patrick Creadon. Music, Vic Fleming and Peter Golub. Featuring Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, Neal Conan, Bob Dole, Liane Hansen, Mike Mussina, Amy Ray, Emily Saliers and Jon Stewart. IFC Films, 2006. PG. 94 minutes. Part of the pleasure of the new film Wordplay is how it manages to make something as trivial as crossword puzzles seem profoundly important to our lives and our culture. Along the way, Wordplay doesn't condescend or proselytize. It doesn't try to convince you that crosswords will save your life, your marriage or your bank account. Instead, Wordplay does what all great documentaries do: It connects us to people or things we've overlooked and in the process shows us who we are. In the sense that it examines a fanatical, grammatical subculture, Wordplay is not unlike a Spellbound (2003) for adults. It's a small masterpiece. Read more...
Monster House Directed by Gil Kenan. Screenplay by Dan Harmon, Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler. Executive producers, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. With the voices of Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner, Spencer Locke, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jon Heder, Steve Buscemi, Jason Lee and Kathleen Turner. Columbia Pictures, 2006. PG. 91 minutes. It's hard not to wonder who decided Monster House should be a summer movie. It begins the day before Halloween, with a deliciously crisp shot that follows a single leaf's descent onto the clipped lawn of a ramshackle house. Created with motion capture, a combination of live action and computer animation, the movie is bright but shadowed, rich with the colors of fall and ripe with the haunting notions kids get about the creepy house down the street. But here we are in the middle of summer, and seasonal incongruity isn't Monster House's only weakness. Read more...
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