Monkeybone

Brendan Fraser plays the best-looking cartoonist you'll ever see in Monkeybone. Stu (Fraser) has created an animated character named Monkeybone, who sprang from his repressed sexual anxieties. He's just sold his animated series to a cable channel, and is being bombarded with proposals for toys and other marketing extravaganzas, when he and his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda) get into a car wreck and Stu falls into a coma. But comas are much more complicated than you might expect: Stu finds himself in Down Town, where lives a mixture of other people in comas and figments of these people's imaginations. Naturally, Monkeybone himself is there, and he and Stu quickly start fighting like cats and dogs. When Stu realizes that his sister, due to a pact they once made, is preparing to pull the plug on him, Stu makes a deal with Hypnos, the god of sleep, to help him steal a golden ticket from Death himself (or herself, as Death is played by Whoopi Goldberg). Sound complicated? Well, from there it only gets more ornate. Monkeybone is a bit of a mess, but it's never boring, and every now and then it roars to amazingly dynamic life. Fraser is excellent, and the strong supporting cast includes Giancarlo Esposito (Do the Right Thing), Rose McGowan (Scream), Dave Foley (Brain Candy), and Saturday Night Live's Chris Kattan as a gymnast with a broken neck who... well, it's a bit complicated to explain. A crazy quilt of a movie, chock-full of delirious ideas and inspired moments. --Bret Fetzer