Coraline

The thing that instantly blew me away about Coraline (in 3D) was the depth of the world created by Henry Selick. Coraline is the demented spiritual cousin of The Nightmare Before Christmas (also directed by Selick) with traces of Being John Malkovich and Spirited Away in the bloodline.
i would've sworn the film was CGI even though I am aware of Selick's stop motion work (Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach) because the animated movement was so smooth and in tune with Coraline's world. in an interview Selick stated that there is some digital manipulation of the image but it is def stop motion. For instance they would use two parts for the head, a top eye expression and the bottom mouth, and then digitally erase the horizontal crease in the middle. For the cool 3D effect Selick stated that in order to capture Coraline's point of view he had to photograph the right and then left view because the space between her eyes wasn't wide enough to fit the lenses next to each other at the same time. Whatever the reasons Coraline visually stuns, especially in a sequence where all the color drains from the screen and the already multi-dimensional Coraline now exists in a nether region not unlike a particular incident in a Daffy Duck cartoon.
Coraline is a young girl who finds a secret passageway in the new house into which her parents have moved. Once through the looking glass Coraline discovers an alternative universe with really cool parents, the kind of place a kid wants to stay forever. There's just one catch. In order to stay you have to have buttons sewn into your eyes. At this point whatever idyllic visions Coraline has conjured are merged with that moment in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where Bauby has one of his eyes sewn shut.
Coraline has great creepy moments for adults and yet retains an innocent charm for all ages. Puppetry for the digital age is Selick's bag. Dakota Fanning who voices Coraline has a double double as she also debuts this weekend in the sci-fi thriller Push.

Fanboys

There are great films that you might not like because of the density of subject matter. And then there are bad films that you do like because they're just darn entertaining. Fanboys has so much to impart about the Star Wars phenom and American pop culture in general that it's impossible to pass up.
The story, set prior to The Phantom Menace release in 1998, revolves around Star Wars geeks who decide to drive across the country and get an advance screening of the film by breaking into the Skywalker Ranch. Of the gang one member has cancer and will probably not be alive by the time the film actually opens. Supposedly, which is akin to the Berg lowering his standards to Fox News style reportage, the film was assembled a couple of years ago, George Lucas saw a cut, the film got extra funding to shoot additional scenes, a different director shot some of those scenes, and the film even went through a new edit not involving the cancer plot. Who knows how much of that is true? The Fanboys I saw did have the original story intact, although in Fanboys' epilogue, set during the weekend The Phantom Menace opened, the character in question is absent.
The story moves in the realm of the early Internet. There are no text messages although Ethan Suplee plays Harry Knowles in what has to be one of Fanboys' near classic bits of comic mayhem. Another hilarious scene includes a diversion to the hometown of William Shatner where the fanboys rumble with Star Trek devotees dressed in Federation regalia and speaking Klingon.
Dan Fogler certainly isn't a common name (he hasn't been in any good films really) but this Tony winning actor propels the comedy with deft moves and wacky line readings. Joining Fogler in the jocularity are Kristen Bell (the tiniest fanboy) and Jay Baruchel who was so funny in Tropic Thunder. Chris Marquette and Sam Huntington are the straight laced fanboys and there's a slew of insider type cameos best discovered while the film unwinds.

Button your eyes

http://coraline.com/buttoneyes/

The Uninvited

The Uninvited evokes the recent film The Unborn but they have as much in common as a Mustang and a BMW. They're both movies and they each fall into the horror genre but they only have similar sounding titles. Unborn, while hokey to the max, had Gary Oldman hamming it up while conducting a Kabbalah style exorcism. By contrast The Uninvited tells a ghost story in a linear manner.
The Uninvited pits newcomer Emily Browning (Australian actress) as Anna against Elizabeth Banks (almost overexposed in movies at this point) here playing the evil stepmother. Also debuting are the directors, the Guard Brothers. Minimum results but nicely put together package will pass the muster for genre fans and drift like a ghost unnoticed by movie goers at large.
Anna starts the film in an asylum for attempted suicide. Her wrist scars are horizontal rather than vertical, showing that she's not exactly a perfectionist. David Straithairn plays the Dad and his performance in particular seems phoned in. The Uniinvited is a remake of a Korean film but in reality it's just a remake of endless ghost stories with scary things hiding, waiting to pop forth from underneath.

Taken

Taken is a formula genre thing that goes from 0 to 60 in 20-minutes. Plenty of build up to the point where the film performs, at least to a modicum, as its trailer suggests it's capable. Liam Neeson lives in an obscure apartment in L.A. and dotes on his daughter (Maggie Grace) when his visitation allows. He's ex-CIA and his former work buddies want him to re-up, so to speak.
Taken has played out in Europe and opens domestically briefly, if not spectacularly, on its way to disc sales. We truly live in a time where our cultural benchmarks can be summed up succinctly with phrases such as it doesn't suck. Taken doesn't quite suck.
The whole affair is one of those Luc Besson written and produced dealios that resembles the Transporter series but with a smidgen of character development.
Neeson veers slightly into Man on Fire (the Scott Glenn and or Denzel Washington version) territory and it's not too late for Besson and company to put Neeson and Jason Statham in a movie together immediately.
Set mainly in Paris, the mayhem occurs in small rooms as well as boats on the Seine. At one point I thought Neeson was going to drive a car off a bridge and onto a huge boat. Oh contraire, he stops and parks the car and jumps onto the boat as it sails underneath the bridge. And of course he punches everybody on board to death. Taken provides the requisite thrills the situation demands, and that includes the down time at the beginning. When the bad guys run an Albanian white slave trade the less character back story the better. Don't miss the part where Neeson shoots a colleague's wife in the shoulder. "It's a flesh wound," he sneers.