Casper lookin’ for some morning glory. (Kids, don’t ask.)

Ghostly Brio.

He’s the friendliest ghost you know. No, not Patrick Swayze – Casper, The Friendly Ghost. Though grownups might / Look at him with fright / The children all love him so.

After innumerable comics, television shows and theater shorts, Casper makes the spirited leap to full-length feature film in CASPER, a live-action adventure melded with excellent 3D animation.

Bill Pullman is Dr. Harvey, a paranormal expert, hired by Cathy Moriarty to exorcise a mansion she has just inherited. Dr. Harvey and his teen-demographic daughter Kat (Christina Ricci) move in, and soon discover three mischievous ghosts – The Ghostly Trio: Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso (voiced by Joe Nipote, Joe Alaskey and Brad Garrett), and their round-headed nephew Casper (voiced by Malachi Pearson), who wants to be their pal. The ghost effects are very well realized: they are three-dimensional yet see-through, and the filmmakers have captured well the form and personality of the Ghostly Trio; they’ve even found a perfect effeminate yet not-gay voice for Casper, and – like SPIDER-MAN – his head roundness is Just Right.

Hijinks ensue, with lots of slapstick, lightning-fast sight gags, and questionable eye-lines. Ricci and Pullman (and other humans, whom the ghosts call “fleshies”) are really onscreen, but all the ghosts are CGI, while the physical environment (curtains, doors, bedposts, paintings, food, glass, etc.) is a combination of CGI and practical effects. It’s an entertaining diversion, and should keep the kiddie demo happy through your afternoon nap.

Since his creation by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in the 1945 cartoon THE FRIENDLY GHOST, Casper’s whole gig has been to seek out a friend who is not terrified by his ghostliness. Nothing’s changed, as Kat arcs toward trusting and loving Casper. And maybe even… desiring him? [Get your mind out of the graveyard gutter, Poffy!]

As with all ghost stories, rules bend, time warps, madness… takes control…

For example, the ghosts can touch physical objects when they want to, and can be affected by physical objects like plungers, doors and vacuum cleaners, can eat food (which goes directly through them and falls to the floor), or can choose to become incorporeal enough to float through everything. Casper can carry plates, cook breakfast, open doors, pull levers forcefully, become a cushion beneath Kat’s fall, yet when he wants to touch her in that way, his hand melts through hers. Oh, tragic!… Hey ghost, use that same willpower you use to pull levers and you’ll be honking those hooters in no time! (Oh, are the kids still here? I just meant playing choo-choo with her, kids!)

Why does Casper want to bed her anyway? Are you telling us, Movie, that his ghost form is producing spermatozoa that seeks release into a uterus? Maybe the movie is telling you that it’s time to have THAT Talk…

The funniest sequence by far is a cannonade of cameos, when Pullman looks into a mirror and sees – Clint Eastwood looking back (who satirizes his recent UNFORGIVEN by threatening, “I’m gonna kill you, your mama, and all her bridge-playin’ friends!”), who morphs into Rodney Dangerfield wisecracking, and then into Mel Gibson, who says nothing, just admires his pretty mug. Not all the cameos are commendable, as Eric Idle makes a fool of himself in a small role; it’s nowhere near horrible, but it’s nowhere near Python.

Throughout his history in media, the question of Casper’s death was swept under the carpet, considered too morbid a subject for his young audience. Here, writers Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver (and director Brad Silberling) create a pre-death history for “Casper McFadden,” so that he can desire to be his real self once more to touch Kat in that way, who by now is creaming her teen jeans aching for his ectoplasmic sheet-flute. (Kids, don’t ask your parents about what I just said.)

If you contemplate some of the life/death events here, you realize how morbid this topic can be for youngsters. (Or maybe the movie is suggesting that now might be a good time to talk to your kids about grandma’s imminent demise?…) Cathy Moriarty dies and comes back as a ghost, until she is tricked into “crossing over” to the other side. “What is ‘other side’?” ask the muslim children. Then Dr. Harvey dies, comes back as a cartoony ghost, and is resurrected by Casper’s Lazarus Machine, which he was going to use to turn himself into a real boy to touch Kat in that way. That’s downright horrifying! Where’s his physical body going to come from? The grave? Decomposed and worm-ridden? I mean, we’re talking zombies here, mormon children! I guess it’s no more horrifying than the story of Jesus, the second resurrected christian zombie (after the actual Lazarus).

Dr. Harvey’s dead wife (Amy Brenneman) also visits as a ghost in the finale. (We wonder why she appears in human form, and not cartoony, like every other ghost. Oh, it’s because she’s an angel! “That’s how we want grandma to be!” chime the evangelical children. What are the rules again? Don’t have any. Uh, okay, onward.) For sacrificing his chance to be alive by resurrecting Dr. Harvey, his wife grants Casper the wish to be human – only until ten o’clock. It’s a gruesome fate, probably more painful than not turning real at all. And then Casper blows it by getting just one timid kiss in. (And by the way – how does Dr. Harvey’s wife have the power over life and death?! Isn’t that God’s provenance? ask the christian children.)

A more suitable denouement might have been: let Dr. Harvey remain dead! He could have been with his wife! Then Casper could have become a real boy, as he and Kat have their lives ahead of them. It’s win-win! By now there’s so much living and dying going on, I’ve lost track of the zombie-muslim-scientology-pagan message. I guess they wanted to meld Pinocchio and Cinderella, and then make sure there was a curfew, so that all good teen ghosts tuck it back in their sheets.

END

Soft-Porn Groan.

Green Cucumber Wheeeee

BLACK SNAKE MOAN is almost as confused as its lead character, Rae.

Christina Ricci is Rae, all skin and bone-able, portrayed as a nymphomaniac. But she’s not really. She’s also supposedly an alcoholic. But she’s not really. She is also painted as a pill-popper, but again – well, let’s go deeper than the junkets…

The junkets would have us believe that this southern story (not southern-fried, more like “half-baked”) is about a nympho who is molested and left for dead, then found by old black bluesman, Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), who ties her to his house radiator with a heavy chain to “cure her” of her condition. That’s where the press leaves it. (Rightfully so, as most movie buzz these days gives away who did it, how they did it and how many explosions and car stunts it took to do it. Too much information, Studio Marketing Dummies.)

But there’s not much more than the chain thing. Written poorly and directed adequately and somewhat perversely by Craig Brewer, BLACK SNAKE MOAN is thinly-disguised soft porn. Which makes it – like SILK STALKINGS and other cable titty fare – a waste of a man’s time. A wind-up. If you really want a porno, watch a porno. Yet pornography (albeit heavily diluted) is this film’s only selling point, for when Ricci is offscreen, not showing off her rounded ta-tas and tight-pantied pubis, we’re not really interested in much else.

All the scandal and controversy surrounding this picture is hot air. Rae gets all squirmy whenever her boyfriend, Ronnie (Justin Timberlake, playing a weak-willed ponce who cries at the first sign of conflict – basically just playing himself) is not around, tapping the town populace and popping pills profligately. She also drinks – but only when Ronnie is not there to curb her alcoholism and teen lust. But if she only screws around and misbehaves when Ronnie is absent, she’s not really a nympho – she’s just a plain good old-fashioned SLUT.

Does writhing in faux-orgasmic “movie” heat and popping a few pills on a binge night qualify as a technical definition of nymphomania or alcoholism – or are we watching an undiagnosed mental condition that the film-makers are not bothering to explore for the sexy rusted links around Rae’s slim and luscious, sweaty, milk-pale waist?

I think the latter.

In its defense, the film gives Rae a child-abusive backstory, which accounts for her mental unbalance – but then, it should not be considered nymphomania; although, to be fair again, the movie never mentions the word, the only character that alludes to her sexual profligacy calling it an “itch.”

But viewers are gonna call it “nymphomania” anyway. Sells tickets.

Those of us who have had experience with people killing themselves on drugs, alcohol and nymphomania know that Lazarus’s method might curb the immediate drug and alcohol intake, but does nothing to address the mental problems (read as “weakness”) associated with those cravings, or the sociological situation that led her there. And nymphomania will not be curbed at all – it’s internal. And Lazarus’s illegal methodology is quite brazen for someone living in a town where his run-ins with the law were “just for being black and nearby.” But hold on a minute… maybe Tom Cruise is right. Maybe therapy and psychoanalysts and medication aren’t really necessary. All you need to cure mental problems, childhood trauma, financial disparity and white trashiness is a Good Solid Iron Chain.

Therapeutic? No. Hot? Oh yes.

But the movie’s running time cannot sustain the heat. Lazarus’s gig at a drunken blues soiree, with Rae sensually body-rubbing around the dance-floor in aching sweat (and Jackson doing a reasonable miming guitar job and sporting adequately pained blues vocals), doesn’t so much raise the heat as promise a gang-bang that will never materialize. It gets cold fast down south.

But when Ronnie brings the sexy back, returning to town unexpectedly after being dishonorably discharged, and finds Rae with Lazarus, things get… mildly louder. To find Rae, Ronnie beats the info out of his dishonorable buddy (the last guy to see Rae, who beat her and left her for dead), and all I could think was: It must be embarrassing to take a bitch-beating from Justin Timberlake.

Doe-eyed, taut-breasted Ricci has come a long, lecherous way from Wednesday (way back in the dark ages of 1991’s THE ADDAMS FAMILY); it’s hard to envision her frumpy man-body in THE OPPOSITE OF SEX (1998), or her WASP-syrup smile gracing the cover of PUMPKIN (2002); bikini-waxed so low she might as well be – oh, I guess she is – it’s enough to make any man’s black snake moan.

With a down home soundtrack, a preacher who doesn’t really give us any insight into anything (John Cothran, who brings the “nice” back), a hesitant courting between Lazarus and a pharmacist, Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson, who brings the GOOD TIMES mother look back), and non-sequitur incidents pertaining to Rae’s condition, it’s hard to see this movie as a study in redemption. But I’m sure that’s what Brewer was aiming for, as the final scenes hitch Rae and Ronnie and tell us that everything is now gonna be allllriiiight – once again, a mediocre film preaching that Marriage (after a good, solid chaining) is the panacea for absolutely anything.

During the ceremony, Ronnie gives Rae – in an almost interesting twist – a slut belly chain instead of a ring. Now that’s bringing the sexy back.

END