So let’s credit John Krasinski for not taking the easy way out. Writing and directing his new kid’s movie, “IF,” Krasinski is doing his darndest to craft a story that works organically no matter the age, with universal themes — imagination, fear, memory — that just hit different depending on who you are.

Or maybe sometimes, they hit the same — because Krasinski, who wanted to make a movie his kids could watch , is also telling us that sometimes, we adults are more connected to our childhood minds than we think. A brief late scene that actually doesn’t include children at all is one of the most moving moments of the film – but I guess I would say that, being an adult and all.

There’s only one conundrum: “IF,” a story about imaginary friends that blends live action with digital creatures and some wonderful visual effects , has almost too many riches at its disposal. And we’re not even talking about the Who’s Who of Hollywood figures voicing whimsical creatures: Steve Carell, Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper, Jon Stewart, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Maya Rudolph, Emily Blunt, Sam Rockwell, and the late Louis Gosset Jr. are just a few who join live stars Ryan Reynolds and Cailey Fleming. Imagining a table read makes the head spin.

The issue is simply that with all the artistic resources and refreshing ideas here, there’s a fuzziness to the storytelling itself. Just who is actually doing what and why they’re doing it — what are the actual mechanics of this half-human, half-digital world? — occasionally gets lost in the razzle-dazzle.

But, still, everything looks so darned lovely, starting with the pretty, brownstone-lined streets of Brooklyn Heights in New York City, where our story is chiefly set. We begin in flashback, with happy scenes of main character Bea as a little girl, playing with her funloving parents . But soon we’re sensing Mom may be sick — she’s wearing telltale headscarves and hats — and it becomes clear what’s happening.

Bea is 12 when she arrives with a suitcase at her grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment, filled with her old paint sets and toys. Grandma offers the art supplies, but Bea tells her: “I don’t really do that anymore.”

She says something similar to her father, visiting him in the hospital He tells Bea he’s not sick, just broken, and needs to be fixed. Hoping to keep her sense of fun alive, he jokes around, but she says sternly: “Life doesn’t always have to be fun.”

And then the creatures start appearing, visible only to Bea.

We first meet a huge roly-poly bundle of purple fur called “Blue” Yes, we said he was purple. The kid who named him was color-blind. These, we soon understand, are IFs —imaginary friends — who’ve been cut loose, no longer needed. There’s also a graceful butterfly called Blossom who resembles Betty Boop . A winsome unicorn . A smooth-voiced elderly teddy bear We’ll meet many more.

Supervising all of them is Cal An ornery type, at least to begin with, he’s feeling rather overworked, trying to find new kids for these IFs. But now that Bea has found Cal living atop her grandmother’s apartment building, she’s the chosen helper.

The pair — Reynolds and the sweetly serious Fleming have a winning chemistry — head to Coney Island on the subway, where Cal shows Bea the IF “retirement home.” This is, hands down, the most delightful part of the movie. Filmed at an actual former retirement residence, the scene has the look down pat: generic wall-to-wall carpeting, activity rooms for CG-creature group therapy sessions, the nail salon. And then the nonagenarian teddy bear gives Bea a key bit of advice: all she need do is use her imagination to transform the place. And she does, introducing everything from a spiffy new floor to a swimming pool with Esther Williams-style dancers to a rock concert with Tina Turner.

The movie moves on to Bea’s matchmaking efforts. A tough nut to crack is Benjamin , an adorable boy in the hospital who favors screens and seems to have trouble charging his own imagination .

There are segments here that feel like they go on far too long, particularly when Bea, Cal and Blue track down Blue’s now-adult “kid” , now nervously preparing for a professional presentation.

Still, the idea that adults could still make use of their old “IFs” at difficult times — and, to broaden the thought, summon their dormant sense of whimsy, as a closing scene captures nicely — is a worthwhile one. And by movie’s end, one can imagine more than one adult in the multiplex running home, checking under the bed, hoping to find a trusted old friend.

“IF,” a Paramount release, has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association “for thematic elements and mild language.” Running time: 104 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.

Twenty-one years ago, Ben Gibbard’s life changed twice in the span of eight months.

In February 2003, the frontman of Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie released “Give Up,” the first (and only) album by his electro-pop side project the Postal Service; it went on to become an indie blockbuster, selling more than a million copies and spawning swoony millennial anthems like “Such Great Heights.” Gibbard doubled down in October of that year with Death Cab’s even swoonier “Transatlanticism,” which led to the band’s appearance on the hit teen soap “The O.C.” and a major-label deal with Atlantic Records.

Last fall, Death Cab and the Postal Service marked the 20th anniversary of both LPs with a tour on which each act performed its signature work from beginning to end. (Gibbard, an experienced long-distance runner, has joked about the no-big-deal endurance required to play two 45-minute albums in one evening.) Like “Give Up” and “Transatlanticism,” the road show was a hit, filling arenas and amphitheaters including Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl. Now the groups are set to take a victory lap with performances at Saturday’s Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena.

For Gibbard, 47, the show marks a return to familiar ground: He formed the Postal Service with a pair of Angelenos: producer Jimmy Tamborello and singer Jenny Lewis of L.A.’s Rilo Kiley. “Transatlanticism,” meanwhile, describes a fling with a woman in Silver Lake and followed Death Cab’s 2001 “The Photo Album,” on which Gibbard asks someone why they’d want to live in a town that “smells like an airport runway.” (The frontman later moved to L.A. during his three-year marriage to actor Zooey Deschanel, whom he divorced in 2012.)

Gibbard talked to The Times about the albums — as well as the state of indie rock and his friendship with former Death Cab guitarist Chris Walla, who quit the band in 2014 — before a gig last week in Kansas City, where he’d just spent the day visiting the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum. “There’s only so many Ernest movies you can watch on tour,” he said with a laugh of the cultural enrichment. “At a certain point you gotta up it a bit.”

Is the relationship you’re singing about in Death Cab’s “Tiny Vessels” — the girl in Silver Lake with the light brown streaks in her hair — the same relationship that had earlier inspired “Why You’d Want to Live Here”?
No. “Why You’d Want to Live Here” is kind of a stand-alone piece of fiction. And the mentions of Silver Lake on “Transatlanticism” are specific to a relationship that’s not really central to the album.

So why identify Silver Lake by name?
Well, “Transatlanticism” wasn’t conceived as a concept record — it wasn’t written about one person, despite the legend that’s kind of grown up around it. The songs span from like August 2001 to the spring of 2003, and there was a lot happening in my life at that point: I’d moved to Seattle to live with someone in my first real adult relationship, and then that person moved back to the East Coast and I was kind of floating for a year and a half through false starts of relationships — just feeling that general mid-20s malaise, trying to figure my s— out. But I’d rather allow people their fantasies than go song by song telling them they’re wrong.

Rolling Stone described “Transatlanticism” in 2003 as “11 indie lullabies … ostensibly about a long distance relationship.”
I think a lot of it has to do with Chris’ production. Because we’ve been playing the record in order with the transitions and everything, I’ve really been living with it for the first time in 20 years. And there’s this three-song sequence — “Tiny Vessels” into “Transatlanticism” into “Passenger Seat” — where Chris did such a brilliant job of sonically connecting them that it kind of gives the listener the impression that the subject matter is related to the same person or the same situation.

“Give Up” was framed with this idea that you and Jimmy were sending music back and forth through the mail. But how significant was the time you spent working on the album in L.A.?
Crucial. L.A.’s where I first met Jenny Lewis. I just emailed her out of the blue because Rilo Kiley was on [Death Cab’s label] Barsuk and I liked her voice. She picked me up at the Burbank airport and we got Mexican food and then went to Jimmy’s house and started making the record. It feels like the kind of thing that would never happen today. But in your 20s you’re like, “Something’s going on? I’ll do it. I don’t need to know if there’s parking.”

You sing about L.A. in a pretty negative way on Death Cab’s “Kintsugi,” which followed your divorce.
“Kintsugi” is not necessarily an indictment of L.A. — it’s an indictment of the entertainment industry that I’d found myself rubbing up against. Whereas my experience making “Give Up” with Jimmy and Jenny was hanging out with their friends and recognizing that there were a lot of really interesting creative people doing cool things in the underground that weren’t directly tied to Hollywood. Los Angeles has been a character in so much of my music because I’m both attracted and repulsed by it.

Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard at the Los Angeles premiere of “(500) Days Of Summer” at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in 2009.

(Gregg DeGuire / FilmMagic / Getty Images)

Where in town did you and your ex-wife live?
We lived initially in a duplex a couple blocks off La Brea — the Orthodox part of Hancock Park before it starts getting really fancy. Then we bought a house in the Cahuenga Pass, which looking back wasn’t somewhere I particularly liked living. As people do in relationships, I made a very hasty leap not only into that relationship but into a totally different city that I didn’t know. When I moved back to Seattle, kind of battered with my tail between my legs, I was like, “I’m never f—ing leaving this place ever again.”

Are there certain areas here that you avoid now?
There aren’t really. When we were rehearsing for this tour [in L.A.] last August, I went on a run one day and took this big loop through Hancock Park. My path went by our old place, and it was just: “Ah, I used to live there. Moving on.”

How big had “Give Up” become by the time “Transatlanticism” came out?
I don’t know how many copies it had sold but I think it was over 100 or 200,000. That was a fairly tense time because this little side project had completely outsold “The Photo Album” like three to four times over. I’m not sitting here 20 years later saying I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much I wanted to — nobody in Death Cab made me feel that way. But it was weird for the other guys: We’re going out on tour, and people are yelling Postal Service songs at us because at that point the Postal Service was bigger than Death Cab for Cutie.

In a sense that’s still true. The Postal Service is billed higher than Death Cab at Just Like Heaven.
As well it should be. It’s an issue of scarcity: When the Pixies came back after not playing a show for 10 or 15 years, they were playing venues way bigger than the places they played when they were actually a band. So of course the Postal Service is gonna headline the show. We sold 13,000 seats in Toronto a couple nights ago. The last time Death Cab played Toronto, we played Massey Hall, which is like 2,800 people. We all know what’s driving these tickets.

Nick Harmer, left, Chris Walla, Jason McGerr and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie in 2008.

(Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times)

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Has the strong reception made you think about what audiences are responding to?
Absolutely. Music is a time machine — more than any other art form, it has this ability to take us back to a time in our lives. I remember coming home from college and my dad was playing me some records. He played “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and it got to “Girl From the North Country” and he had his hand over his face — I knew he was listening to this song, thinking about a woman that wasn’t my mom. That’s just what music does.

So when I had the idea to do this tour, I felt like we almost had an obligation to do it because of how much these two records mean to people. And because there’s not another artist or band or collection of people that could. I don’t mean that in a self-aggrandizing way. If you can name another artist who had two records like this in the course of one calendar year, by all means tell me.

Even so, has the reaction surprised you?
It was the additional nights that were humbling: adding a second Hollywood Bowl, a third Hollywood Bowl, a second Madison Square Garden. I knew that people had relationships with these records, but I had no idea that this many people did.

This tour’s really changed me as far as how I move forward, not necessarily as a writer but as a performer. Before this tour, my performances were physical but kind of internal — I’m up there playing my guitar, I’m talking a bit, but I’ve never performed to the crowd. Now, for whatever reason — maybe because I’m standing next to Jenny Lewis, who’s one of the most amazing performers we have — it’s given me the confidence to look people in the eyes, to move toward the front of the stage rather than staying toward the back. A little less Stephen Malkmus, a little more Bono.

Jenny Lewis and Ben Gibbard perform with the Postal Service at Coachella in 2013.

(C Flanigan / FilmMagic / Getty Images)

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At some point before the tour you got a real glow-up of a haircut.
I went to the woman who cuts my hair and said, “I’ve had bangs for 25 years — I gotta make a change.” But there might be something to not performing with a mess of hair in my face all the time. It’s nice when you have friends text you photos or Twitter posts saying nice things about how you look — certainly helps build your confidence.

Your voice in these shows is almost eerily unchanged from the records. It doesn’t sound like you’re having much trouble singing this old music.
I’ve been blessed with pretty good genetics. But I’ve spent the better part of the last 15 years being very cognizant of what I put in my body. Knock on wood that it remains so, but if you’re not smoking or drinking, and you’re physically fit, it’s actually easier now.

You ever worry that the boyishness of your voice will start to feel emotionally inappropriate for your age?
There’s the tone of the voice and then what the voice is singing, right? Playing songs you wrote when you were 21 or 22 when you’re 47 or 50 — there’s a lot of life between those ages. But I think as a concertgoer you just kind of know that’s the case. I saw the Cure last year — one of my top three bands of all time — and there’s Robert Smith singing “Boys Don’t Cry.” I think I’d feel more self-conscious about it if I wasn’t also writing songs from the perspective of a 47-year-old man.

As far as the tone goes, I’m a little cringey when I hear how boyish I sound on the old records. No one’s ever gonna consider my voice masculine, but it has a little bit of a patina on it now — a little bit grittier, a little more heft to it.

How would you describe your relationship with Chris Walla at the moment?
We just texted yesterday about Steve Albini. Chris and I had some rough patches after he left — he was very upset about some things I said specifically to you. And, you know, I stand by what I was trying to say, though I probably could have said it better. But he’s in Norway with his wife and a kid, and he’s making records and living the life he wants to live. His influence on my life, both as a human being and as a creative person, can’t be overstated. But sometimes what’s best for somebody you love is not necessarily for them to stay with you.

Was Albini important to you?
I think he was important to everybody in our world. But for Chris specifically, I remember he had this Shellac 7-inch where the insert was like their recording setup, with a drawing of every microphone and every compressor. The takeaway was: Get this stuff, and you can do this too. That was such an important message to receive, certainly for Chris — the idea that you don’t have to wait around for a major label to find you and put you in the studio. You can just start making recordings yourself. All of the schematics and photos that Albini was willingly putting out in the world, not caring whether anybody was gonna quote-unquote steal his sound — that was part of the DNA of our first few albums.

The era of those albums — the era this tour looks back on — was a fruitful one for white dudes writing indie rock songs. Two decades later, most of the energy in indie rock is with young women.
White male voices dominated rock ’n’ roll from the jump until, like, five years ago. We had a pretty good run [Laughs]. No one is sitting here saying, “I really want to know what a 25-year-old white guy has to say on this topic.” We already know! I think one of the wonderful things about the world we’re living in these days — and contrary to popular belief, there are some wonderful things — is that voices that maybe once were very much kept to the fringe are now finding an audience.

I’m gonna go off on this for a bit, if you don’t mind. Basically, in the early aughts, with the rise of indie rock, there were a lot of straight white men who were making music that was fine — not unique, not particularly interesting, but it was fine. And I’ve seen a number of people — my friends — who’ve kind of fallen on hard times. And while I feel bad for them, I’d rather live in a world where being a straight white guy is not enough. You actually have to be really f—ing talented.

I feel horrible saying this. But people don’t have to listen to you anymore. They can find something that speaks to them as a queer person or as a person of color. We’ve experienced this ourselves with putting out new records. We put out records and they don’t have the impact they once had for a number of reasons. But one of them, which is entirely justifiable, is that people have more options now. They don’t need my perspective on things.

With that in mind: Drake or Kendrick Lamar?
Oh, Kendrick all the way. You gotta be out of your damn mind to go toe to toe with that guy.

NEW YORK (OSV News) – What’s on the cards for viewers of the horror flick “Tarot” (Screen Gems)? As it turns out, not much. While the bloodletting on display in this inept production is relatively restrained, the characters are cardboard and the mythos explaining their bedevilment lame.

To celebrate a friend’s birthday, a group of college students have rented a house at which they drink the night away. Belatedly discovering that they’re out of liquor, they scour the dwelling for alcohol. In lieu of booze, they discover a wooden box containing a pack of tarot cards and, for a lark, decide to have a group reading.

This is facilitated by the fact that one of their number, Haley (Harriet Slater), is well versed in such matters. What slender strands of a background story are on offer concern the untimely death of Haley’s mother, her resulting conviction that fate is inescapable and her recent breakup with her boyfriend, Grant (Adain Bradley).

Returning to campus, the amigos gradually discover that their dabbling in divination has left them cursed. Each is haunted by the predominant figure in the hand he or she was dealt, and nasty (though mostly unseen) deaths ensue.

Among those thus targeted is good-time-Charlie Paxton (Jacob Batalon), a disheveled slacker whose skewed outlook on life is intended to provide comic relief. Third-act elucidations of the ensemble’s predicament are provided by white-haired witchy woman Alma (Olwen Fouéré).

Such is the sum and substance of co-writers and directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s screen version of Nicholas Adams’ 1992 novel “Horoscope.” It’s an eminently forgettable experience that, while unlikely to frighten or offend grown moviegoers, will probably leave them longing for a reshuffle.

The film contains occult themes, several gory images, a fleeting reference to drug use, a couple of profanities, frequent milder oaths, at least one rough term and much crude language. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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