Cinemonkey

It's Still the Same Old Story

The latest Spy Kids film, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D, is exactly that, a film for kids about spies. A film for kids in which the kids are spies. A film for kids in which the parents are painted as glamourous and active people who eventually reveal hidden powers. This is a common fantasy for both adults and kids, as in the Hackman-Dillon thriller Target and in the Harry Potter films. This entry in the series also features an actor in dual roles whose tricks would only fools kids, though the kids I know show unbridled savvy.

Spy Kids is an unusual franchise. The movies make a lot of money but are unusually expensive for something more or less shot in front of a green screen. Worse, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World looks it. The cast often appears to be posing in front of something that doesn't exist as they look at something they can't see.

All the Time in the World has a premise that draws upon the outer reaches of conspiracy theory. In certain pockets of speculation some people believe that time is speeding up at the behest of the world government in collusion with aliens and the technology they bring to earth. Thus the natural sensation we have of time speeding up as our minds mature is turned into yet another plot beyond our control. I am surprised that The X-Files never tackled the theme. But as a resident of Austin, the Vatican of conspiritology, Robert Rodriguez got there first in this film for which he takes sole credit for practicallly every fact; Not only did he write and direct the film, he shot and edited it and wrote the music. I am reasonably sure that many of his family members contributed to the enterprise.

Family is a theme or at least setting of the Spy Kids series. In the Rodriguez world view, though perhaps not in the Rodriguez world, family is sacrosanct, loyalty to one's family is paramount, and family ultimately is one's only true friend. Mr. Rodriguez could have directed The Godfather without missing a beat.

Even the villain has a family of sorts to which he must be loyal. TV's Jeremy Piven plays multiple parts all keyed to the idea of time and time passing. Rodriguez has woven numerous references to time and many puns on timekeeping into the script, and the aging actors from the early films return to remind us, as the Potter movies do, that time waits for no kid. In this story, there is a new family with young kids who are tangentially related to the family of the first films. There is a "wicked stepmother" (Jessica Alba) to the "adorable" children, and a new baby on the way as issue of her union with their father, a TV show producer named Wilbur (TV's Joel McHale).

All this family feeling hobbles the film, however. The villain isn't really scary. The kids are never in real danger. Resolutions come in happy threes. Family triumphs over all, and the world moves on, united. It turns out that there is something to be said for the dark threats beneath the surface of Disney's animated features. Joel McHale says it all – not as Wilbur, but as Jeff Winger in TV's Community (season two, episode two): "I used to run full speed through the boundless wilderness and now I'm in the zoo. Where the horizon is wallpaper and the air is stale and nothing is ever at stake." Here he indirectly speaks for a film that is assembled from unreal digital parts, one that lacks weight and suspense.

Dork Shadows

What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. … He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women.


– Aaron Altman, Broadcast News


When the Albert Brooks character in Broadcast News tries to convince a woman that his rival for her affections is evil he admits or asserts that he is "semi-serious." But it is hard to convince a woman in the throes of lust that the object of her affection is up to no good. Or a teenager to convince adult authorities that a blob from outer space has landed in the countryside, that there are ghosts in the TV, or that the new neighbor is a vampire.

Here is how the IMDB summarizes the plot of Fright Night: "A teenager suspects that his new neighbor is a vampire." That's high concept but proves to be slightly inaccurate. It is not Charley Brewster  (Anton Yelchin) who suspects that Jerry Dandrige (Colin Farrell) is a vampire, it is Charley's childhood friend Ed (Superbad's Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Charley and Ed have had a falling out. Ed is a glasses-wearing nerd. Charley has graduated to semi-adult hood, or at least the high school version of it. He has a hot girlfriend, Amy (Imogen Poots) and a group of cool friends who police each other's clothes and speech and manners for signs of the un-cool. Charley has left Ed behind, but while Charley's new cool friends detect that Ed is suspiciously close to Charley, Ed suspects that the new neighbor in Charley's Vegas tract-house neighborhood is a member of the living dead. Ed has good evidence for this. Videotapes of the new resident can't capture the man on film, and he only goes out at night. Unfortunately Ed has to die for Charley to awaken to the validity of Ed's suspicions, especially when Ed, like so many other students of the school, fails to show up one day for roll call.


Fright Night touches on something difficult here: the way that people outgrow each other, also captured in the Thomas Hardy poem about his friend Horace Moule, "Standing by the Mantelpiece," subtitled "H.M.M., 1873," in which Hardy seems to be lamenting his inability to fully embrace the woes of his friend (who was later to commit suicide). As Martin Seymour-Smith notes in his biography of Hardy, this is an example of Hardy's ability to confront hard truths that until then found no home in poetry, in this case how we sometimes recoil from our friends, as if awakening from a dream.


But this segment of Fright Night is only the platform to the larger plot of Jerry and his attempts to insinuate himself into the Brewster household, where he can then claim Charley, Amy, and Mrs. Brewster (TV's Toni Collette). It turns out that a few of the rules guiding vampire conduct as enunciated by Bram Stoker still hold true – vamps can't enter a house unless invited, and are burned up by the sun.


These laws have been forsaken in modern vampire movies since about the time of Near Dark. Recent lovesick vampire chronicles for teens emphasize the dark romanticism of the creatures or make them victims of discrimination or both. Fright Night has the virtue of returning evil to the vampire template. Jerry is not a nice guy, and is not conventionally attractive to an audience that is always presumed in critical cliché to "like" the villains more than the heroes because, if nothing else, they are more interesting.


In fact, Jerry seems to be the devil. This is such an obvious observation that someone has to have made it before but obviously the vampire in lore is clearly a stand in for Satan. As Aaron Altman says in Broadcast News, the devil won't look evil, in fact he will seem nice and helpful. And he will get all the girls, as Jerry does, at one point even necking with Amy while Charley looks on helplessly. Jerry's method of getting girls, like any vampire's, is to lure them into his den then bite them into submission, "turning" them into bloodsuckers themselves and thus forever beholden to him. Farrell's performance in this film is remarkable, and he walks a fine line among a network of tones including greed, cynicism, contempt for the merely human, charm, and lust. In some cases he seems to dance through the part, especially in a scene where he has asked Charley for the loan of a beer, but can't enter the house and must flit back and forth before the open door, attempting to hypnotize Charley with his grin, his eyes, and even his Bogdan-sized eyebrows.


Fright Night is directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Woman) and credited to screenwriter Marti Noxon (I Am Number Four) and they do a fine job, giving a realistic Spielbergian suburbia feel to the layout and the school stuff, but of course the source is Tom Holland's great original from 1985, when Chris Sarandon was the charming new neighbor (he has a cameo here) and the late Roddy McDowall  was Peter Vincent the vampire slayer.  Cleverly, in this version the Van Helsing is a louche Vegas showman played by TV's Dr. Who, David Tennant. Yes, the movie ultimately descends into a long battle sequence between teens and titans, but until then Fright Night is a horror film with an unusual amount of nuance, and a whole lot of sorely missed evil.