The Spiderwick Chronicles

I wanted to like this but, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into it. It’s based on a series of children’s books, and I might check one out, but faeries and goblins are not really my thing. It didn’t give me time to get into its world; before I knew it I was being overwhelmed by CGI critters that weren’t all that interesting. (Nick Nolte as the Big Bad Goblin might have been scarier if they’d animated his drunk-driving booking photo that’s had such exposure on the Net.) For me, but apparently not for today’s audiences, just shoveling more effects into the hopper and grinding out some more CGI-animated sausage is not the formula for a good movie. And I have to be honest here, more and more I’m finding movie children, from ages about 8 to 16, to be a real pain in the ass. Is this just because I’m an old fart now, and can’t abide their problems? This is entirely possible, I admit it. These days the chances that kids are from what we used to call a “broken home” are about 50/50. They have “issues,” and they aren’t shy about expressing them … and I get real tired of it as a story device. Call me insensitive, I don’t care. Lee and I were bored.