Please don't stop reading this blog if I say... I didn't think Coraline was very good.
I haven't read the book, and I plan to; I expect to like it. The movie was very pretty and well-put-together, but I thought the plot development was off--that it took a long time for anything exciting to happen, and then when it did, those scenes went way too fast without enough exposition. And not that this is a question of "good" or not, but I didn't think it was that scary, either--not compared to, say, Sleeping Beauty--and neither did the kids in the theater, as far as I could tell.
I did think Teri Hatcher (whom I have liked ever since I saw her in MacGyver; Love Boat is before my time) was fantastic, and the hands-made-out-of-needles were awesome.
2 comments:
Weird, I would have said the exact same thing. Can I say what my favorite part was? SPOILER ALERT.
It was the part with the engineered smile. Very scary!
You're definitely not alone. I saw it (in 3D!) a couple of weeks ago, and I definitely thought it was lackluster. The pacing was totally weird, and it didn't to pull off the surreal creepiness that the book is so good at. Also, I spent the whole time thinking, "why on earth would she have acted so rudely towards the other kid? I don't remember that!" and "were the parents really so awful? I don't remember that either!" I mean, what new kid in town meets another kid for the first time and is so confident and unnecessarily bitchy? It felt false, like the equivalent of glamour magazines telling women how they should be behaving to be cool, just with kids instead. Very un-Gaiman.
So I re-read the book today, and in fact there *is* no other kid to be rude to AND the parents aren't that awful. It's much, much creepier and the pace is better. The visit to the fake parents happens only once (not three times), the real parents are stolen less than halfway through the book, and the final finding of the souls isn't raced through so easily. It's a page-turner, where I felt the movie was visually impressive but tedious. My partner reminded me that I felt the same way about Mirrormask... though I loved the heck out of Stardust.
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