Growing up, there were times I felt like the black sheep of the family, at least when it came to music. Sure, I played the tuba and performed in the pit and all those other necessary high school activities, but it was never my passion. I couldn’t list off the names of every member of the original London cast of Les Miserable, I didn’t keep…
We’re very much in the children’s movie phase of our lives, so we end up watching nearly everything that scores higher than “total crap” on the Rotten Tomato meter. If a movie looks like weird and plotless garble, we may not watch it until we get it free on our T-Mobile Tuesday or as part of our Netflix subscription, but we will end up watching…
Even though we technically have a cable box hooked up in a remote corner of our house next to the dresser that leads to Narnia, our family has long ago cut the cable cord. Amy and I were streaming shows when Netflix only offered Red Dwarf and whatever Stephen King movie featured the young Drew Barrymore, and we haven’t looked back since. This last week, though,…
Turns out I hate myself. Or at least I’m a wanton for emotional punishment. Maybe the two are one in the same. Earlier this year, I found The Little Prince next to our computer and decided to read it to my kids. I knew it was a classic in the Mark Twain sense of being a book much praised but never read (well, at least by…
First, a heresy: Finding Nemo is not my favorite Pixar movie. Not even close. When I first discovered that everyone else in the world not only loved it, they considered it one of the best animated movies of all time, it was like someone had told me the ocean wasn’t wet. I mean, yeah, it was okay, but I didn’t love it. It wasn’t until…
As the throwback book closed on the movie just like in the original cartoon, I couldn’t help but think that Rudyard Kipling would have liked Disney’s latest version of The Jungle Book. I remember reading a while ago (and confirmed today on Wikipedia, so it must be true) that Walt Disney wasn’t happy with the first draft of The Jungle Book. The screenwriters had stuck too closely…
I’m trying out a new title for this series, at least for the non-Disney films. I’m not in love with it, but I am a fan of alliterations. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated. Anyway, today I wanted to talk about the very un-Disney Irish animated film Song of the Sea. It was a bit of a struggle tracking the movie down, since it has…
Since I originally watched The Good Dinosaur before resuming this blog in earnest, I hadn’t considered writing a treatise on the moral implications it has on the behaviors of the young (please submit the exhibit to left as evidence to my lack of humor). We saw it while my wife was off gallivanting with her friends, so she didn’t see it until much later when it came to the local…
When the early reviews for Zootopia poured in, I was a bit worried. Sure, they all claimed it was one of the greatest Disney movies ever created. They claimed that Disney had done something new with anthropomorphic animals, a well most of them had assumed dried up around the time of Aesop. Considering that my film repertoire consists almost entirely of animated anthropomorphic animals and singing…
When I was a kid, I never saw the hidden meaning to the shows that would run on our basic cable subscription (Captain Planet is trying to indoctrinate us to donate to the Sierra Club and hate corporations? What? I thought it was just about a creepy looking X-Men reject). But now that I’m older and have kids of my own, I’ve realized that everyone one…