Review - Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (2007)

by Mr. Blunderson

written & directed by Zach Helm

After Stranger Than Fiction, people were already comparing Zach Helm to Charlie Kaufman. Now that I've seen his most recent effort I doubt there is enough positive energy in the universe to prevent one of my "I told you so" tirades. Let time be the judge, folks. Take some Valium, relax, and wait for several decades before we start saying things like that.

As for Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (ow, finger cramp!) it is best summed up by my 5 year old son who said "that was silly," and he didn't mean that as a compliment. As for me, I thought it was light and goofy, but it really sagged any time Dustin Hoffman wasn't on screen. Mind you, I'm not saying it was great while he was there... only better.

The resolution was too predictable thus yawn inducing, and the story left a number of lose ends that only served to further annoy me. Add to that the fact that Natalie Portman plays a young woman who is supposedly brilliant at playing piano (even runs her fingers playing notes in the air as a "cute" little thing she does) yet demonstrates horrible, horrible hand position technique. I took piano formally for eight years and even the nicest and sweetest of my teachers (I was among her last students as she was quite old at the time) would have whacked me across the knuckles with a steel plated ruler and told me to take up the kazoo for holding my hands like that...

But I digress.

There were some good ideas, there were some scattered moments, and Dustin Hoffman was the heavy lifter but even then it's hard to gauge how good he was (better than nearly everything else in the movie), although I did enjoy the fact that Jason Bateman's character never even batted an eye each time he was referred to as "mutant." But moments and an academy award winning actor do not a movie make. Let's keep our fingers crossed that Zach Helm can return to his Stranger Than Fiction form in his future projects, keeping in mind that Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium scores a "meh" on the Mr. Blunderson scale.