GhostbustersIi Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Just like any other genre, the Christmas movie relies on a laundry list of tried and true formulas to get you into the theater, and some of them are becoming a bit tiresome. If you want to avoid getting suckered into watching the same old holiday schmalz-fest this year that you've seen the last ten years prior, and you're not sure how to go about it, take this list as my gift to you.

It Tries to Make the Nativity Dramatic

Movies that try to make a compelling drama out of the birth of Jesus Christ often hit a brick wall when they realize that there's really no story there. Sure, if you're a Christian the birth itself is a compelling moment -- key word being moment -- but there's nothing before or after that lends itself to the structure of modern drama. Witness the recent live-action drama, The Nativity Story, a horrid film that resorted to making Three Stooges of the Three Wise Men and creating entire absurd subplots about astrophysics in order to get around the fact that there's about five minutes worth of compelling material here to work with. Hopefully it will be a long, long time -- never, please -- before anyone makes this mistake again.

It's Called 'Jingle all the Way'

Seriously, let's all just agree on this one. There are many things that Arnold Schwarzenegger is suited for -- or was suited for around 1987 -- but one of them is not showering an audience with holiday merriment. The other day I was at Best Buy and the guy behind the counter actually tried to convince me that Jingle all the Way was a beloved classic that belonged in my DVD library. That's when I put on my glasses and took a closer look -- turns out the guy behind the counter was Sinbad. Enough said. Let's also point out that Turbo-Man seemed like just about the lamest toy since Tom Hanks trotted out that keyboard in Big that you had to play by dancing on the keys.

If you've ever seen a film at NYC's Angelika Film Center, you know the auditoriums are in its building's basement, down where you can feel and hear the 6 train beneath you. But what you probably didn't see -- unless you worked there like I did -- is the hallway that leads from the basement lobby to the concession stockrooms and beyond, to the secret passageway that leads to an underground world. OK, I don't know where the passageway really continued; it likely could take you to the subway tracks, but with my imagination and my intrigue for NYC folklore, I assumed it led to the mythically legendary subterranean community. Maybe I read too many X-Men comics, or saw Ghostbusters II (no community, but there are secret tunnels of goo!) too many times. Surprisingly, I still haven't yet seen Dark Days, the documentary about NYC's underground squatters.

Anyway, I would love to go on and on speculating about who or what might be living far beneath the sidewalks, but instead I'll tell you what got me all excited about the topic: The Night Tourist, a young adult book that Universal has just bought the rights to. Written by Katherine Marsh and released last month, the book is about a ninth-grade prodigy from Connecticut who, during a visit to the city to see a doctor, is introduced to an underground world beneath Manhattan, which is reached by way of Grand Central Station. From what I can gather, the dwellers of this underground place are the ghosts of all the city's dead, including the kid's mother. According to Variety, The Night Tourist will be produced by Universal's new animation and family banner, which plans to make two to three animated and live-action films a year. However, the trade doesn't specify in which medium this adaptation will be. Either way, the most important issue is whether or it will have to compete with the in-works adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere?