Cranky Curmudgeon: “The Spiderwick Chronicles”

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The Spiderwick Chronicles Roku channel poster

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Years ago I watched a kid movie by this name. It was so good that I totally forgot about it until looking up the television series I’m writing about now. I resisted watching the series because it looked very CW Network to me, and I haven’t liked anything about the CW since they started, including the last two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But CFR is waiting at her laptop for me to pop over this week’s review and I am, as always, totally fair in my choices for reviewing. (/bad joke)

This is another Roku original, like Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic Story, which I didn’t hate but wished mightily was a lot better than it turned out. From the opening moments, with a title card that reads “This is a dark fantasy tale” to which I answered, “Duh!” I felt the lack of originality and treating the audience as kinda dumb. Okay, I was expecting something dumb because CW look, but that was a little too over the top. As I watched the first five minutes or so I scribbled furiously in my notebook, about things like the oversaturated color and flat focus and all the pretty people and the basic sound scheme. Once I had determined I was right about the show looking like a CW clone I put down my pen and just watched.

There is an African-American family moving from the mean streets to bucolic Michigan because one of the teen twin boys is “a handful”, aka known as a conniving and kinda mean little jerk. Their mom grew up near the rundown “big piece of Victorian crap” house called Spiderwick, with a live tree growing in the palatial foyer (that somehow has lived there for years without being watered in the abandoned house) and a billion huge rooms in a building that is somehow still okay to live in despite the neglect. Gonna be away a few decades? Just throw a white sheet over the furniture to catch the dust. *rolling my eyes* Even dark fantasy works better if you make the mundane things, like decaying houses, more realistic. Just thrown in, oh I dunno, a nutsy old lady hired by the realtor to take care of things. It could enhance the plot and make things more believable so the fantasy stuff becomes more jarring.

I would say the show works its way up to finding out who the bad buy is and what he wants and how that might affect the family, but that’s covered in those first five minutes with a ton of exposition and some not-at-all-scary bad guy effects. Like the CW baddies. They talk a lot and let the audience know everything about how much they’re gonna mess people up bwahahaha. This is supposed to give us an edge of the seat thrill, but all it does is make their appearance later when the rest of the story is getting laboriously off the ground a bit of a disappointment. We know they’re bad, the good guys don’t know they’re bad. Yawn. It’s been done so many times, like another major trope of the show that anyone who has read male written science fiction has been inundated with repeatedly.

That would be the Chosen One thing that has starred enough teenage boys over the years to fill an NFL roster. On both sides of the gridiron. This “evil” twin is charismatic, and in true CW fashion, very pretty, but why does the show have to so totally follow the well worn Chosen One path? Paired with that is the No One Believes What The Crazy People See trope. Using tired old story lines is fine if the makers can infuse something interesting into it, but simply turning the original white family black isn’t enough.

I almost feel bad dunking on the show. Almost. The story is, by necessity, drawn out and drawn out because it’s a tv series instead of a movie. But I just didn’t care to continue watching it because there are plenty of pretty people on tv so that’s not enough to keep my interest. Nothing is a surprise, except maybe the teenagers sneaking a kiss out back at the party are both girls. It would have been nice to find a hidden gem but I did not here. Because you’re not cranky like me you might like it. Let me know in the comments below.

LINKS:

CFR: In Addition

Well huh. Roku has a channel?

I read The Spiderwick Chronicles a few years ago and liked them. I am a fan of the co-author Holly Black. I thought the books were fun and I enjoyed them. My hubby and I went to see the movie and it was ok. I was impressed that they crammed several books worth of story into one movie. Then again, they were shorter books. I do want to see this version. I love that the cast is black! Yay! And Christian Slater is hot no matter his age and yes I wrote that and yes I mean it.

So I will watch this – OMG scheduling! Might also reread the books. At the least I will enjoy watching Christian Slater.

Oh and GREAT News! You can watch it following this link: The Spiderwick Chronicles.

Oh and I didn’t like the Weird Al movie either. Sigh.

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