Movie Review of Coraline

By Roger Erbert

The director of "Coraline" has suggested it is for brave children of any age. That's putting it mildly. This is
nightmare fodder for children, however brave, under a certain age. I know kids are exposed to all sorts of
horror films via video, but "Coraline" is disturbing not for gory images but for the story it tells. That's rare
in itself: Lots of movies are good at severing limbs, but few at telling tales that can grab us down inside
where it's dark and scary.
Even more rare is that Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) is not a nice little girl. She's unpleasant,
complains, has an attitude and makes friends reluctantly. Nor does she meet sweet and colorful new pals
in her adventure, which involves the substitution of her parents by ominous doubles with buttons sewn
over their eyes. She is threatened with being trapped in their alternate world, which is reached by an
alarming tunnel behind a painted-over doorway in her own.
Not that Coraline's own parents are all that great. They're busy, distracted, bickering and always hunched
over their computers. They hardly hear her when she talks. That's why she recklessly enters the tunnel
and finds her Other Mother and Other Father waiting with roast chicken and a forced cheerfulness. All
she needs to stay there is to have buttons sewn into her own eye sockets.
"Coraline" is the new film by Henry Selick, who made "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) and
again combines his mastery of stop-motion and other animation with 3-D. The 3-D creates a gloomier
image (take off the glasses and the screen is bright), but then this is a gloomy film with weird characters
doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive.
The ideal audience for this film would be admirers of film art itself, assuming such people exist. Selick
creates an entirely original look and feel, uses the freedom of animation to elongate his characters into
skeletal spectres looming over poor Coraline. Her new friend, Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), is a young
hunchback whose full name is Wyborn, and it doesn't take Coraline long to wonder why his parents
named him that.
The Other Mother and Father (voices of Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman, who are also Father and
Mother) essentially want to steal Coraline from her real but distracted parents and turn her into some
kind of a Stepford daughter. Their house, which looks like Coraline's own, has two old ladies (Jennifer
Saundersand Dawn French) in the basement, boarders who seem in retirement from subtly hinted
careers in the adult-entertainment industry. The upstairs boarder is Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), a
sometime vaudevillian who has a troupe of trained mice. One of the rooms of the house has insects bigger
than Coraline who act as living furniture.
It's more or less impossible for me, anyway, to be scared by 3-D animation. The process always seems to
be signaling, "I'm a process!" I think it's harder to get involved in a story when the process doesn't
become invisible. I hear from parents who say, "My kids didn't even notice the 3-D!" In that case, why
have it in the first place?
Kids who will be scared by the story may not all be happy to attend, 3-D or not. I suspect a lot of lovers of
the film will include admirers of Neil Gaiman, whose Hugo Award-winning novel inspired Selick's
screenplay. Gaiman is a titan of graphic novels, and there's a nice irony that one of his written books has
been adapted as animation.
I admire the film mostly because it is good to look at. Selick is as unconventional in his imagery as Gaiman
is in his writing, and this is a movie for people who know and care about drawing, caricature,
grotesquerie and the far shores of storytelling. In short, you might care little about a fantasy, little indeed
about this story, and still admire the artistry of it all, including an insidious score by Bruno Coulais, which
doesn't pound at us like many horror scores, but gets under our psychic fingernails.
 Movie Review of Train to Busan
By Roger Erbert

Yeon Sang-ho’s “Train to Busan” is the most purely entertaining zombie film in some time, finding echoes
of George Romero’s and Danny Boyle’s work, but delivering something unique for an era in which
kindness to others seems more essential than ever. For decades, movies about the undead have
essentially been built on a foundation of fear of our fellow man—your neighbor may look and sound like
you, but he wants to eat your brain—but “Train to Busan” takes that a step further by building on the idea
that, even in our darkest days, we need to look out for each other, and it is those who climb over the weak
to save themselves who will suffer. Social commentary aside, it’s also just a wildly fun action movie,
beautifully paced and constructed, with just the right amount of character and horror. In many ways, it’s
what “World War Z” should have been—a nightmarish vision of the end of the world, and a provocation
to ask ourselves what it is that really makes us human in the first place.
Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is a divorced workaholic. He lives with his mother and barely spends any time with
his daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an). He’s so distant from her that he buys her a Nintendo Wii for her birthday,
ignoring that she has one already, and that he’s the one who bought it for her for Children’s Day. To make
up for this rather-awkward moment, he agrees to give Su-an what she really wants—a trip to her
mother’s home in Busan, 280 miles away. It’s just an hour train ride from Seoul. What could possibly go
wrong? Even the set-up is a thematic beauty, as this is more than just a train ride for Seok-woo and Su-an
—it’s a journey into the past as a father tries to mend bridges and fix that which may be dead. It’s a
perfect setting for a zombie movie.
Before they even get to their early-morning train ride, Seok-woo and Su-an see a convoy of emergency
vehicles headed into Seoul. When they get to the train, Sang-ho beautifully sets up his cast of characters,
giving us beats with the conductors, a pair of elderly sisters, a husband and his pregnant wife, an
obnoxious businessman (a vision of Seok-woo in a couple decades), and even a baseball team. A woman
who’s clearly not well gets on the train just before it departs, and just as something else disturbing but
generally unseen is happening in the station above the platform. Before you know it, the woman is taking
out the jugular of a conductor, who immediately becomes a similarly mindless killing machine. These are
zombies of the “28 Days Later” variety—fast, focused, and violent. They replicate like a virus, turning
whole cars of the train into dead-eyed flesh-eaters in a matter of seconds. They are rabid dogs. And you
thought your Metra commute was bad.
The claustrophobic tension of “Train to Busan” is amplified after a brilliantly staged sequence in a train
station in which our surviving travelers learn that the entire country has gone brain-hungry. They
discover that the undead can’t quite figure out door handles and are mostly blind, so tunnels and lines of
sight become essential. Sang-ho also keeps up his social commentary, giving us characters who want to
do anything to survive, and others who will do what it takes to save others. Early in the film, Seok-woo
tells his daughter, “At a time like this, only watch out for yourself,” but he learns that this isn’t the advice
we should live by or pass down to our children. Without spoiling anything, the survivors of “Train to
Busan” are only so lucky because of the sacrifice of others. And the film is thematically stronger than your
average zombie flick in the way it captures how panic can make monsters of us all, and it is our
responsibility to overcome that base instinct in times of crisis.
After the near-perfect first hour of “Train to Busan,” the film slows its progress and makes a few stops
that feel repetitive, but the journey recovers nicely for a memorable finale. You could call it “Train of the
Living Dead” or “'Snowpiercer' with Zombies.” Whatever you call it, if it’s playing in your city and you’ve
ever been entertained by a zombie movie, it’s hard to believe you wouldn’t be entertained by this one.