Word: casper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...strategy has a sort of kamikaze logic. Since there are more big movies than early-summer weekends, most films--even the hits--will be seven-day wonders. So it has been, with few exceptions, this season. Crimson Tide gives way to Die Hard with a Vengeance is vaporized by Casper gets eaten by Congo is beaten by Batman Forever gets a poke in the eye from Pocahontas. Hey, it's a jungle out there. One weekend you're the lion king; the next, you're vulture chow...
...film, written by Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver, has the cartoons' familiar plot: Casper searches for a friend and finds one in Kat (Christina Ricci), a lonely girl now in residence at sepulchral Whipstaff Manor. Among the contenders for possession of this dark old house, which looks like a tyrant's wedding cake that has started to melt, are a venal heiress (the ripely funny Cathy Moriarty) and her sidekick (Eric Idle); Casper's uncles, three ectoplasmic boors named Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie; and Kat's klutzy dad (crinkly Bill Pullman...
...they can rest in peace. The sensible Kat is automatically spooky because she is played by Ricci, the Addams Family daughter. With her wide eyes and genius-size forehead, Ricci now officially assumes the mantle of death-driven teen that Winona Ryder once wore so becomingly. She is Casper's perfect human soul mate...
...expert computer animation by Dennis Muren and his fellow effects wizards at ILM, Casper is cute and pudgy -- a Pillsbury ghost boy. Yet he is also a dead child speaking from an unquiet grave. Poaching on her father's turf, Kat serves as Casper's therapist and helps him remember his life and early death. "What's it like to die?" Kat asks eagerly, and Casper replies, "Like being born-only backwards." Before long, Kat is forced to decide who lives and who dies-her father or her new best friend...
This is the primal theme -- rying to bring the dead back to life- - that has preoccupied Casper's executive producer, Steven Spielberg, in E.T. and Poltergeist, Always and Jurassic Park. The new film is sprightly enough to conceal its subtext from censorious politicians. But children, who dwell in fear at least as much as in innocence, may get the message: that it would be cool, bitchin', totally awesome to join the Dead Kids Society...