Night of the living pets

Frankenweenie

(2012)

The first experiment goes perfectly, as Victor sparks his beloved mutt Sparky, killed by a car, back to life. The next experiment, performed with less pure motives, is more spectacular but ultimately less successful, and once every kid in the neighborhood gets hold of the secret, and science loses all connection with the heart, mistakes are made. Fierce and outsized mistakes, a dead turtle becoming Gamara-like, sea monkeys becoming Gremlinesque, and a cat named Mr. Whiskers, just as annoying in life as the name suggests, morphing into a fanged, batwinged harpy.

It's a pleasant enough flick, but I feel sorry for all the little kids who saw this and then were crushed to know that their own dead Spunkies and Tiges are staying dead for the duration, and hooking them up to car batteries is, at best, going to have no effect whatever. What a ripoff.

My favorite part of the movie, I think, was the Karen O song in the end credits, at the same time an original piece of ear candy and an hommage to the Mickey and Sylvia classic "Love Is Strange."

Aren't you relieved to know you're not a golem?

Stranger than Fiction

(2006)

Yes, it's just as I thought when I saw this seven years ago: it's a film that's smart and slapdash in equal parts but could have been pathbreakingly brilliant in the hands of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. Or maybe Zoe Kazan and Dayton & Faris, who have since done the living fictional creation thing much better. This will always have a place in my heart, though, for giving me the happiest musical surprise of my moviegoing career in the part-of-my-early-'80s-West Virginia-life song (which I recognized the first time at the first chord change) that Harold (Will Ferrell) plays and sings for Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Moneyball

(2011)

It's a double-trick question, of course. The answer is that you can't if you care at all. Hell, the reason I watched this tonight is that I was all gaga about the Mets' first spring training game of the year, and about the great work by our latest pitching prospect--chockablock, in short, with that hope that springs eternal, regardless of logic and evidence. But the other half of the trick is that counting on "baseball people" thinking with their sentiment is what makes moneyball work.

Also, how can you not be romantic about daddy-daughter stories, especially when the daughter is not only adorable but also artistic?

OK, now I have a decision to make, that doesn't really have anything to do with Brad Pitt, no matter how it seems: do I now finish watching the film I started last night before going comatose?

Legs

Men in Black

(1997)

Free sample of Starz made it possible to see Tommy Lee Jones as a cop for the 2nd night in a row. Funny, but not as funny as I remembered; fun, but not as fun as I remembered. One cool unremembered things: Mets center fielder Bernard Gilkey as himself. One cool thing I never would have noticed before: John Cameron, executive producer of Friday Night Lights, the final episode of which I watched the other night, was first assistant director. Oh, and one indication that my ear has become sensitized to certain tropes: I guessed within seconds of the opening that the music was by Danny Elfman.