A Trio of Movie Reviews

Hey folks,

I know its been over a month. Sorry for that. We're in a bit of transition here at the house...mostly due to expecting a second child sometime in late May/early June. There have been a few other things as well, but I'll get to them in due time.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving in the meantime. We had a nice small one (the three of us, my parents and my Uncle). Grilled the turkey on the Komodo Kamado Ceramic Grill we bought at the beginning of the summer. Yum! With the rest of the menu, I think we've found one that can work with minor alterations in subsequent years.

Anyway...we had the opportunity to see Across The Universe a few weeks ago in the theaters. Good movie, not great. I was expecting to either love it or hate it...but I just liked it. Thought it was audacious of Julie Taymor to even tackle something that could remotely resemble Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Fortunately, it didn't fall into the "so bad, its good" category. If you like musicals or Beatles tunes or even off-beat filmmaking, you should catch this film at some point.

Meet the Robinsons from Disney is a funny, cute and touching story about an orphan who is looking for his place in the world. Louis is something of a child prodigy who likes to invent things and one day at his school's science fair, he is approached by another boy claiming he needs to stop the man in the Bowler Hat and that he's from the future. To say any more would ruin the twists and turns this film does have. Let's just say a good chunk of it will have you saying "they must have rewatched Back to the Future one too many times while high". Not your "typical" Disney animated feature (do they even still make those anymore?), but a lot of fun regardless.

Ratatouille is Pixar's new entry for the year (although we could just say its Disney's second entry for the year and be done with it). The film concerns a rat named Remy who is a bit of a gourmand. When Remy gets separated from his family he winds up teaming up with a dorky young kid and helps him become the next "Iron Chef" (just kidding, but you get the point). Funny and charming, this is pretty much what you'd expect from a Pixar film at this point (just remove Randy Newman from the equation). Definitely worth seeing.

Two minor complaints about both films being released on DVD. It seems that Disney has abandoned their old philosophy of releasing both a standard single disc DVD and a Two Disc Special Edition set at the same time. Now while I don't expect Meet the Robinsons will ever get a special edition beyond the few extras on this current release, the BluRay release of Ratatouille (and Cars) has me thinking that there will be something later. The BluRay versions have many more extras than the standard DVDs. If this is a ploy to get people to jump to the HD format, I don't see it working. The only thing that will make anyone jump to either HD disc format is to end the fucking format war. HD-DVD (a stupid mouthful that should have been called HDVD or something else entirely) and BluRay are quickly consigning themselves to a niche smaller than LaserDisc before we are forced to buy/rent downloads by the studios (which gives them more control and us a lot less...if Amazon's Kindle gets popular for books in any meaningful way, you can pretty much kiss the concept of consumer "ownership" goodbye).

Anyway...that's all for now. Hope to be back sooner rather than later. I've got some pointed comments of the two current entertainment strikes going on that I'll eventually post and since the new Futurama movie hits this week, I'm sure I'll want to yak about that.

Be seeing you.