Haven't seen a lot of these, haven't heard of some of them, and I'll try to get several of them them in front of the kid. That being said, this paragraph in the very first entry made me think the whole thing was a parody for a while.
Get Santa arrived in British cinemas to do battle with Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey? It duly got trounced. And what a pity, too. Whereas Nativity 3 is only redeemed by not being quite as much as a chore as Nativity 2 was, Get Santa is really rather good.
I've seen two of those (Parent Trap, George of the Jungle), both good.
oh thank you! will pass this along to several friends with young kids ...
ours is moving out sometime over the next week, test results allowing. it is so strange to be doing this during a pandemic!!! it came together suddenly, he and a v close friend have the opportunity to room together out in the avenues in a small house owned by the mum of another friend, for nominal rent, while remotely attending uni at berkeley (him) and paris (her). nearly 21 years of togetherness (bc i definitely count gestation, god i adore my kid but damn that was a fucking slog ugh) and sometime over the next week it's going to be weekly, distanced walks in gg park ... there are boxes in the hallway, we're all constantly adding to, crossing off from and checking lists, and then he's going to be ... not here. not playing the piano between classes, not voice texting his friends and fellow activists while breezing through the kitchen, not leaving his dishes piled up at the sink, not hugging me when he gets up ... he's ready, it's a great generous opportunity, but i'm going to miss him so.
at any rate, i'm extremely glad he didn't go to cambridge my god what a (worse) nightmare the past year would have been!
I loved Monster House, more for the writing and structure than the way the film looked.
I just watched Paddington 2, which was quite good overall. But a key piece was IMO simply lifted from a superior predecessor, Babe, Pig in the City (the chase followed by a character change). Paddington 2 is overall a much looser movie, structural inadequacies compensated for by great performances, unlike Miller's masterpiece which doesn't have extra parts bolted on. Am I crazy for seeing this (the borrowing/retread, that is)?
Barta's Pied Piper and Zeman's Munchausen film are both favorites of mine, probably not really kids movies. Zeman's films have a look that's something else.
I think there's plenty of room in this world for both Babe and Paddington. My kids are now deeply into the MCU and Jurassic Park; whimsy needs to be pressed upon them. They loved the slapstick in Home Alone, so I've been struggling to think of more movies with that live action Looney Tunes vibe. Mousehunt from the list is a good lead.
I've never seen Monster House but I have read this so I feel a little cognitive dissonance whenever I see it recommended.
Don't stay stuck in the last 20 years, show your kids some classics, the original Willy Wonka, just about all the Miyazaki, etc.,
9: we've done all those! It's been a long pandemic!
I watched Howl's Moving Castle for the first time last night, and was surprised how disjointed it seemed - I couldn't tell what was motivating Howl at virtually any point. However I might not have been paying attention at at some key points.
around the world in 80 days is wonderfully bonkers but reading the book with the kid was better bc the money laundering grift-as-mcguffin is so delightful, pure and wonderfully done dismantlement of the english gentleman. also the trip to the moon book is wonderful with the chickens in space etc.
the three musketeers movie with raquel welch a great one, she was such a great physical comedienne. unintentional hilarity for the parents every time they engineer michael york being shirtless for the hubba hubba oh-my-beating-heart moments his torso is so scrawny by today's pharmaceutically inflated standards, how quaint.
I've left Aardman's Arthur Christmas off this list, given that it's an Aardman release that hit big in the UK, and is starting to get a regular airing - deservedly so - every Christmas. But The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists followed Arthur Christmas into cinemas by a few months, and didn't quite get the same hold. A real pity too, because it's a wonderful, witty, hand-crafted piece of work.
This seems weird to me. I've never heard of Arthur Christmas, but I remember The Pirates as being pretty big at the time. And it still has its own meme gif.
This argues that the near-textual moral of Sky High is "love your genetic inheritance" (content warning: 34-min video essay).
Also not sure you really say The Iron Giant is underappreciated these days. It's become one of the most appreciated films of all time. Definitely agree with The Emperor's New Groove, though. Saw it recently on a free trial of Disney+ and enjoyed it more than any non-Pixar Disney film since I was a child.
The now 15-year lod retreads of Scooby Doo are pretty good-- Aloha Scooby Doo especially.
Has anybody tried Midnight Gospel, Pendleton Ward's post- Adventure Time work?
Ancillary category-- best spinoff tchotchkes!!!
this one or this one?
I adore The Iron Giant. It's such a well done film.
16.3. We have a Peppermint Butler figure that lives on a shelf on our living room book case. We blame him for not doing his job when the house gets messy.
15:. I remember that I enjoyed The Emperor's New Groove when I first saw it with my wife and stepdaughter in the theater. But then my stepdaughter became obsessed with Cuzco as a llama, and didn't talk about anything else for months, and so I started to hate anything to do with that movie.
Mercifully, my kids don't watch things over and over, so they never ruin anything. The only thing my son has been watching repeatedly lately is the prison break two-parter from Last Airbender. But that one's my favorite.
"around the world in 80 days is wonderfully bonkers but reading the book with the kid was better bc the money laundering grift-as-mcguffin is so delightful,"
Is this the film? I don't remember it from the book
it's the book - i don't know about it in english, but in french it is clear from the beginning that the bet is solely a means to launder money from a massive heist, and that it works bc of the ginormous black hole-esque blind spot that derives from the belief that an english gentleman would not do such a thing. it's hilarious.
Really? I swear that's not in the English translation I read at all.
I just looked up a plot summary, and I didn't remember it as well as I thought I did -- hadn't read it since I was twelve or so. I'd forgotten the police detective trailing him around the world because he thinks Fogg is a criminal. But I still don't remember anything suggesting that the detective was right.
That's because you've known too much about how the police use unfounded accusation to bolster their power.
Tonight we did Treasure Planet. It was great.
26:. Was the real treasure the friends you made along the way?
No, of course not. But the treasure ends up not working out as planned, so you'd think the journey would be a big waste of time, but it turned out that the main characters formed these unexpectedly deep, meaningful bonds, and grew as people as a result of the bonds with each other.
So, it's like that other thread in which we determined that bonds were the best investment
Exactly. The real treasure is the longterm financial planning you made for your retirement. Along the way.
"in french it is clear from the beginning that the bet is solely a means to launder money from a massive heist"
This is really pretty startling. I remember nothing like this - and I've read it (in English) more than once. I'm going to go and check.
Unless they changed it a lot in translation, Fogg is suspected of a bank robbery but is explicitly not the robber.
Speaking of things that were or weren't in the book, what do people think about the rock band in the Earwig and the Witch movie? I get that they had to add something to make a full-length movie out of such a short book, but I thought it would have been better if they'd done more with the Twelve Witches mentioned at the beginning.
When UNG remarried a decade ago, Rory started referring to the Hausfrau as her "Other Mother." It bugged the crap out of me. Then we saw Coraline.
who suspects him vs who could not conceive of him being the culprit is the joke.
That's really weird. Is there anything you're aware of about this getting written out of the English translations?
lol
isn't this the thread about kid-directed entertainment that adults can also enjoy due to the jokes that fly over the heads of the kids?
We are losing our minds down here with how cold it is getting. Possibly having rolling blackouts due to wind turbines being frozen.
Apparently it hit -2 back in 1949, and 17 in 2010. We've been below freezing since Friday. I have never had consecutive days below freezing in the 20 years I've lived here, and tomorrow is supposed to be the coldest of the whole thing. Single digit lows.
I mean, I find extreme weather kind of exciting, but I know people are dangerously unprepared for it. We're having problems keeping our pipes from freezing, despite the dripping and everything.
But enough about me. Let's talk about Illinois.
Perfectly balmy 0 degrees where I am right now. Haven't seen the twenties in a couple of weeks, but I never leave the house, so it's all good.
You're not going to drive out to Ottawa, Illinois to meet me?
Way snowier month than usual in Maryland and Pennsylvania (last 10 years as baseline) but the temperatures are fine. Sorry to the middle of the country.
Possibly having rolling blackouts due to wind turbines being frozen.
Making the blades black helps prevent this.
interesting!
Anyway, rolling blackouts have begun. One toilet and one bathtub with frozen pipes so far.
One extremely snotty kid in my bed, probably allergies because cold snaps make cedar pollen release.
Unseasonably warm winter here. No snow sticking until last week. Now we have less than a foot, or less than an inch where it's particularly windy. I see water dripping from the roof so it's already above freezing today.
Ice cover in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is less than 1% which is way lower than normal and much lower than the lowest recorded so far. Our area should be frozen offshore but not even the harbour is fully frozen.
Let the record reflect that Illinois and Iowa both have turbines with white blades that are spinning in below zero.
Lots of cars and trucks in the ditch in Iowa.
One of the 5 districts of the Illinois appellate court is there. Beautiful court. Admittedly, not much else. I used to get breakfast at the McDonald's on Rt. 6 before Rory read the Omnivore's Dilemma
It's great if the snow slows you down and you realize you're too tired to make Moline.
Moline, Moline, Moline, Moline,
Please don't take my man.
36: in the original French version it is also made explicitly clear that Fogg is not the bank robber. Ch xxxvi. No idea where this is coming from.
It would be a fun rewrite, though. In the final chapter Fogg has it pointed out to him that he's won the bet, but he spent about that much travelling around the world anyway, so what did he actually gain from it? And if the answer is that he gained a good excuse for having twenty grand, viz. he won it in a bet, rather than having an inexplicable twenty grand which he stole from a bank (actually £55,000 but one assumes he would split it with his confederates)...