Sunday, February 24, 2008

MOVIE: The Spiderwick Chronicles

A rare treat to find a movie aimed at children that holds my attention throughout the whole thing. But The Spiderwick Chronicles did just that.

It is based on the series by Holly Black and Tony diTerlizzi. Featuring Freddie Highmore as Simon and Jared Grace, Sarah Bolger as their older sister Mallory, Mary-Louise Parker as their mom, Nick Nolte as Mulgarath, and David Strathairn as Arthur Spiderwick.

It's about Jared's adventures following in the wake of his Great Uncle, Arthur Spiderwick. A clever tale full of Celtic legend and Irish mythos. Truly enjoyable as long as it is taken for what it is: an escapist movie designed to entertain young audiences, to keep their minds wondering, and their hearts lightly racing. If that's all you expect of the movie, you'll get exactly what you signed up for.

When I was younger, I was fascinated by the lore of faeries and bean sidhe. And I'd covertly work that into my fiction and my role playing games.

It continues to intrigue me because our ancestors were using their myths to explain how their world worked. And today we do the same thing, but we use terms like Higgs Boson particles, Planck units, pions, quantum entanglement, and strangelets.

And while our ancestors had their myths and we have our science, neither of us are any closer to really knowing anything other than that's in front of our noses. And a century from now, our descendants will consider all of our finest sciences to be 21st century folklore.

Anyway, today Liam and I enjoyed Spiderwick. Good entertainment. Won't win any Oscars, but it was worth the price of admission. And I'd certainly recommend it for other parents and their kids.

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