Belated Summer Movie Review

Over the summer I saw a bunch of movies with the kids and here are my reviews of them:

Prince Caspian
A movie with no plot, no substance, just lots of fighting. To give you idea of how violent the movie is, whenever I asked the kids what they were watching on TV they would reply, "Don't worry, it's not as violent as Prince Caspian."

I think the movie can be summed up as follows:

Susan: (Examining the ruins of Narnia) "What happened here?"
Peter: "I don't know, but lets go thump something"
Lucy: "Shouldn't we wait for Aslan?"
Peter: "Aslan's not coming. Let's go thump something."

(One epic battle gone wrong, a macho hand-to-hand battle gone well for the hero, and in the midst of another epic battle going wrong, Lucy comes across Aslan.)

Aslan: "Why didn't you wait for me?"

(Lucy looks shamefaced.)

Aslan: (Laughing) "Ok, let's go find your friends and help them thump someone."

The movie was easily 30-45 minutes to-o-o-o-o-o long.

I give it 2 out of 5. Pity, because I did enjoy the first one.

Speed Racer
Ok, not my choice in a movie. I was expecting a mindless racing movie with testosterone pumped men, well, doing mindless racing because "that's what we do."

It was actually a lot of fun. Its primary emphasis was on doing what is right in the face of everyone else telling you not to do it. Great cinematography, wonderful colours. I really enjoyed this one. The trailer for it does not do it the least bit of justice.

I give it 4 out of 5.

Kung Fu Panda
Pretty silly. Light movie going fare. The kids enjoyed it. What kid doesn’t like slapstick cartoon humour?

I give it 3 out of 5.

Get Smart
This was pretty disappointing. Not as funny or silly as the original. I found most of the jokes fell flat. Though it was nice to see McGill University used as one of the sets (I believe they were using the Redpath Museum as Control HQ. Also had a shot of Bernie Kopell just outside the main gates of the university).

I give it 2 out of 5.

Journey to the Center of the Earth
I saw this in 3D. This is not a retelling of the Jules Verne story, but rather it treats the original story as historical fact and follows our heroes as they make a parallel journey, using the book as a guide. It was fairly entertaining. Took the kids, my goddaughter and her brother to see it. They all enjoyed it. Compared to Beowulf, this is 3D light. Beowulf was shot in a way to make keep it constantly in your face - which made it a bit tiring.

I give it 3.5 out of 5.

Missed seeing Ironman, which a friend told me was very good. Said it reminded her of Ultraman.

On a personal note: busy learning out to set up a website. I am very, very disappointed in the available tools for doing so. You would think that by now we would have really good, easy to use tools for this. I have not found Kompozer, Amaya, nor Visual Web Developer (all free) to be satisfactory. Page layout is a real pain. Visual Web Developer does work more the way I would expect a website builder to work, but it is far too much overkill for my needs. Seems I am going to have to handcraft it using a normal editor (Notepad++).