Coraline

Drew's Thoughts:
I was looking forward to seeing this because Henry Selick wrote, directed and produced it. Selick directed The Nightmare Before Christmas which is one of my favorite animated movies, and one of my favorite Christmas movies too. Anyway, I didn't really know much about the movie but I expected it to be pretty good.
I was pretty much wrong though. The story is ludicrous. The heroine, Coraline, finds a small door that leads to a portal, not into John Malkovich's mind, but into a much more boring alternate world of button-eyed people. There isn't much more to it than that, Coraline ends up needing to rescue her parents from Teri Hatcher who wants to sew buttons to her face and free the souls of these ghost children (who remind me of the ghosts in the Lemmiwinks South Park episode) which are trapped in marbles or something. I'm guessing maybe Neil Gaiman, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, is to blame for this crap?
Selick doesn't escape blame either though. Besides the flimsy story and bad dialogue, Selick gets atrocious performances out of his two main actors Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher. It's a bad move to cast them anyway, but apparently Selick paid no attention to actually directing their voice performances. All Fanning can do is sneer stupid, cliched lines like a prepubescent Juno (though thankfully not quite as annoying as that sounds) and all Hatcher can do is pretend to cackle maniacally and sound like Lois Lane. The guy that played the boy kid sounds exactly like Scott Tenorman too causing me to wonder if South Park was actually a big influence on the film.
The animation was pretty cool but I mean, there's just no saving the rest of the movie. I wish Selick had stuck with working on The Fantastic Mr. Fox instead of leaving to make this piece of crap.
Full disclosure though: I fell sleep for a significant portion of time in the middle of the movie, in which case it's possible that Coraline triumphantly achieved cinematic greatness that far surpasses Citizen Kane and The Godfather but there's no way I'm gonna go back to find out.