...in an effort to avoid some of the heat (sweet Freya it is freeking hot!!!!)

1) Lady ... Water (in the? from the?) from M. Night (boom) shacka lacka lacka. Fairy tale told kinda straight, but the people don't act like real people confronted by a fairy tale in real life, so it ruins the believability.

He brutally killed off a movie critic in a not-funny scene. I think he was trying to tell somebody something. Or maybe his sense of humor is stunted at the same level as Oliver Stone's. I kept comparing that scene to the Jurassic park scene where Spielberg killed off the lawyer. Spielberg made it marginally funny (outhouse), and he did more set-up to show that the character was a bad guy (all for profits and would not listen to good advice). And I did not get the idea that he was being killed off because he was a lawyer, necessarily.

Could not figure out why the main character had a stutter. It did not add a darn thing to the story, wasted some time, and annoyed me when some patrons laughed at it.

And he put himself in the story, literally as an actor, and I fear figuratively as well. Figuratively (unless I am missing what he was telling me) he sees himself as a martyr for his art. It gave me that too-much-information feeling. I'd vastly prefer that he just tell a good story.

2) Monster House. Bet it will become a Halloween ritual. Really well-designed and well-acted. Great action scenes. Pretty good creepy story. I was surprised that there were no crying children because there were many in the audience.

I saw it in 3D and those effects were mostly really well done. Noticed a few long-range shots where the background was all 2D, but who am I to nit-pick?