Tag: art

Mini Monster Movie Review + Sketches: “Goosebumps” (2015) vs “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween” (2018)

Posted on by Carrie Cuinn

FX played both movies last night, so I watched them both and sketched my favorite creatures from both. I’m reviewing them together because I’d seen the first Goosebumps before but not the sequel, which means only Haunted Halloween is new to me. And looking at the movies together, it’s easy to see a distinct difference between them…

I’m a sucker for gnomes

Both movies have similar budgets/number of monsters (lots), and design; in that way, they’re pretty similar. If you only have time to watch one, you’re left to choose entirely based on the plot. In each one, author R.L. Stine (played by Jack Black) has to face his own demons when the monsters he created in his novels come to life. Each movie has individual kid vs monster fight scenes, each has parents/adults who don’t believe something is wrong in their little town until it’s too late, and each has awkward teens standing up to the monsters to help Stine save the day. It’s how the characters interact that makes the first Goosebumps the superior movie.

In Goosebumps, Stine is present from the very beginning, as the reclusive neighbor raising his teenage daughter in a small town, when a new boy moves in next door. In Haunted Halloween he only shows up at the very end to quip a few one-liners after the kids already solved their own problems. You might think that’s growth; probably, it was meant to be a “passing the torch” sort of thing, but Jack Black is such a presence that putting him in for just a few minutes means you miss him the rest of the movie, especially if you’re watching Haunted Halloween right after Goosebumps ends. But it’s more than that. In HH, the kids are siblings and though they end up sort of working as a team by the end, mostly the older sister treats her younger brother the same way their mom treats them both: she’s dismissive of the supernatural problem until she’s forced to believe in it, then takes over and orders everyone around for the next 90 minutes.

In G1, the kids are a team from the very beginning. New kid meets Stine’s daughter right away, and she’s the one who takes him out of his comfort zone to see the town he’s just moved to. He makes a new friend at school right away too, and the three of them work together to fight the first major monster. The moms in both movies are single moms, but in G1 she’s a widow trying to move on while taking a job as the school’s vice principal, supportive and loving her son even when she doesn’t know why weird things are happening around her… vs HH, where the mom is an overworked caregiver at a nursing home, expecting her teenage daughter to take on a lot of parenting, and blithely dismissing pretty much everything her kids try to tell her. In G1, Mom sees her son for who he is – a good kid who’s grieving the loss of his father but has a good heart – whereas in HH, Mom sees her kids as problems she has to deal with. Sure, she loves them – she even compliments her daughter once, right before telling her to watch the younger kids for the weekend – but it’s clear from the dialog that HH’s Mom just wishes they’d stop requiring so much of her time and attention.

Haunted Halloween isn’t the worst movie I’ll see this month. It just isn’t much fun to watch. Spend those two hours watching the first Goosebumps instead.

Probably the best moment from Haunted Halloween…

Mini Monster Movie Review + Sketch: “Love and Monsters” (2020)

Posted on by Carrie Cuinn

I’ve been doing this thing lately where I watch a movie and do a little sketch of something that stood out to me from the movie. Since it’s October, I thought I’d share some of the monster-related ones I’ve seen (and drawn) lately. First up is last year’s adorable post apocalyptic adventure, Love and Monsters.

Boulder Snail, from Love and Monsters (2020)

Seriously, this movie is adorable. If you’re looking for a Halloween/monster movie that’s cute and fun with gorgeously rendered monsters, this is the one. There’s a small amount of violence, with non-gory deaths at the very beginning and very end, but mostly it’s the story of a guy (played by Dylan O’Brien) who really needed to get out of his shell, then found some friends to help him do that. The creature effects are wonderful — you know they’re not real because they’re wildly mutated animals that don’t exist in our world, but they look real. They fit the world they’re in. Our hero is a little insecure, but he’s open to learning new things. His friends are a little sarcastic (the movie has Micheal Rooker in it, y’all) but kind. You can care about the people in this movie because deep down, they’re all decent. With the exception of some obvious villains toward the end, they’re all trying to do their best. It’s the story about folks coming together at the end of the world. Don’t we need more of those stories?

I missed Love and Monsters when it came out but rediscovered it this week, and I’ve already watched it twice. I’ll probably watch it again before the month is over. It’s the kind of movie that feels much quicker than 1hr 48 minutes because the plot is straight-forward, there are quiet moments to breath between each of the monster encounters, and the hero is focused on a single goal. You could put it on in the background while you do other things, but I’d suggest that you turn everything else off and just enjoy this movie for a few hours. Life’s hard enough. You deserve some fun.

  • Spoilers/Warnings: The dog does not die. In fact, no one you really care about dies. You can watch this movie confident that you won’t be too scared or too sad when it’s over.

Here’s the trailer:

Weeknotes 4.1 (Apr 8, 2020)

Posted on by Carrie Cuinn
Quarantine squirrel is watching you.

If you’re not staying home as much as possible, wearing a mask or face covering when you go out, and generally trying to keep us all safe by flattening the curve, what the fuck is wrong with you?

I’m tired of the people who look at the state of the world and choose to spend their time and energy spinning conspiracy theories, selling snake oil, or snarking at those trying to be as safe as they can. I give up on y’all. I wish you well, I hope you stay healthy despite your own actions, and that’s the best I can do anymore.

Last week’s note would have posted April 1, but I wasn’t in the mood.

Despite that I am, mostly, finding my way through all this, and most of the time, happy. I’ve cleared out a space for a tiny “corner” office (as in, it’s a corner of another room), and I’m getting things done. Drawing daily, blog posts, even working on a novel once in a while. My son is fed, my cats are snuggly, and my pandemic haircut is extremely cute.

Watching:

I reviewed Stray Dog on the 1st; you can read that here. I also posted a reprint review of Were the World Mine on Monday; if you haven’t seen it before, you can read it here.

Also, Tales From the Loop dropped on Amazon Prime this week and I’m not done with it, but if you like slow, atmospheric anthology series with weird physics and robots, you’ll love this.

I got into Simon Stålenhag’s art years ago – his rustic futurism is grounded in nostalgia for a world a lot like the one I imagined as a kid, but we never actually got. He built a game called Tales from the Loop based on his art, where kids solve Mysteries in their own hometowns, and that inspired the series. I love the game, which reminds me of both Shadowrun and Stranger Things, while remaining uniquely its own thing. If you haven’t seen his art or played the game, I recommend them both.

Reading:

My comics re-read continued with DMZ. I also read the first two collected books of Matt Kindt’s MIND MGMT; I wrote about “The Manager” here, and “The Futurist” review goes up Friday.

Extra Bits:

Daily warmup sketch, April 3, 2020

I’m posting my daily warmup drawings for April over on my Instagram. They’re not great, not my best work, but they’re fun. I’m sharing them because a) it’s good for me to get over feeling like everything has to be perfect before I show anyone, and b) it’s good for me to have this daily drawing practice, and remembering that I promise to post them helps me allow myself to make time for it.

Notes and References:

Stay home, and stay safe.

Weeknotes 3.3 (March 25, 2020)

Posted on by Carrie Cuinn
Various hands, March 2020

Still drawing when I can, which is more than nothing, but not nearly as much as I want. Making progress, though.

Having everyone here, staying at home, staying in place, isn’t much different from my life before, except there’s no opting out. My son’s not going to school. My partner isn’t leaving for work or going out to do his own thing. I don’t have the uninterrupted hours I had before to do my own work. I can’t even run errands to get out of the apartment by myself.

But I like these people, my cats, my little home. We already split our time together on the weekends between actually being together and doing our own activities by ourselves in separate corners of the apartment. We’re still doing that, but for more days at a time. I cook more, because three people x three meals a day, and clean more, and I’m keeping my son on a loose schedule that has us doing art and schoolwork all throughout the day, but in between, we have chunks of time for ourselves. My son plays games or watches videos, and I spend a little time on my computer, or – whenever possible – draw. An hour later we’re doing the next activity together.

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