Celluloid Heroes

Looks like you got a pretty serious Zorgon problem there.

You know, when I was six-and-three-quarters, if I’d gotten the family home sucked into space and nearly blown up by robots and flesh-eating alien lizards, not to mention flash-freezing my sister, I would have been grounded for, oh, at least a week.

Zathura is an adaptation of a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, who also wrote the books for Jumanji and The Polar Express. As a story, Zathura is similar to Jumanji, in that a game plunges a family into in adventure that seems to take over their house. As a movie, I enjoyed it far more than Polar Express. The young heroes in this movie are much less passive and lacked the creepy thousand-yard stares of Express’s computer-generated characters.

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Will somebody show this poor asshole the way out of town?

The Frisco Kid is a genial comedy desperately in search of a narrative thread. This story of a hapless Polish rabbi (Gene Wilder) finding his way across the American Old West with the help of a genial bank robber (Harrison Ford) has a good heart and some funny moments, but no sense of direction. It hits the high points of western clichés, like train robbers, Chinese railroad workers, a hanging posses, horse being spooked by a rattlesnake and a climatic showdown on a dusty street. The real problem is that the central relationship, between Wilder’s Rabbi Avram Belinski and Ford’s Tommy Lillard, has no story arc. They meet, they bicker, they reach San Francisco.

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