shouganai

This was a cute and enjoyable movie. I liked the choice of voices for the characters, especially Wallace Shawn for the timid T Rex, and of course Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as Woody and Buzz Lightyear. I wasn't blown away by anything in particular, but I liked it.

Finally got to see the end of this series! Of course, by now, I've forgotten pretty much everything that went before, but it was still very intense and moving to see the final fates of all the characters. I'm just as glad I never got the chance to get attached to anyone, though, considering the scorched earth ending. It was strangely hopeful, though. Everything comes full circle in the end.

Another Disney animal film. Thomasina is an orange kitty owned by the daughter of a country vet, played by Patrick McGoohan. Mary is devastated when Thomasina is injured and her father orders the cat to be put down. But an animal-loving "witch" who lives in the glen finds Thomasina and nurses her back to health.

I could have used more of the cat and less of the people, but it was sweet and had lots of cute stuff in it. I liked the characters, especially Lori, the woman in the glen, and the three boys who were Mary's friends. It was a very pleasant hour and a half, with the requisite happily-ever-after ending.

I'm sure I saw this movie back when it first came out—like most kids at that time, I was a big fan of Hayley Mills, and probably saw all of her movies. I expect I loved it then, and I loved it when I saw it again!

First of all, the cat was great! D.C. (short for Darn Cat) was a gorgeous applehead Siamese, and I was happy just to watch him run around the neighborhood, stealing food from the dog next door, begging treats from the deli, and meeting his "girlfriend," a long-haired tabby. The cat (or cats) were great actors: I especially loved the scene where they were trying to get D.C. to stand up for a photo, but he just sank bonelessly down onto the bed every time he was lifted up.

The human characters were also excellent, and there were many of my childhood favorites: besides Hayley Mills as the younger Randall sister and D.C.'s owner, there was Dorothy Provine as her older sister; Roddy McDowell as Provine's fussy suitor; Elsa Lanchester and William Demarest as the nosy next-door neighbor and her long-suffering husband; Dean Jones as the young FBI agent; Frank Gorshin and Neville Brand as the kidnapping bank robbers (I had kind of a thing for Neville Brand as a child. No one, least of all me, knows why); Grayson Hall (Julia on Dark Shadows!) as the kidnapped bank teller. They were all terrific, and the story was quick and silly and fun and had some real tension and excitement, as well as some good laughs. Two paws up!

Was mostly curious about this movie, after seeing "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. I'd heard that the new version was closer to the book than the earlier one, but they both seemed pretty similar to me. Except for the singing, of course. I haven't read the book.

It was fun, and I like Gene Wilder, but Johnny Depp was way creepier.

Kid goes to China to visit his father, head of a panda sanctuary, and gets involved in trying to rescue a baby panda from poachers. The pandas were adorable, the Chinese scenery was gorgeous, the acting was lame and the story was moderately interesting. Not great, but not a bad way to while away an afternoon.

And I finished Season 1 of Beast Wars. Great series! There were some really excellent episodes in the last half of the season, especially the last few. Except it ended on a cliffhanger! And who knows how long it will take me to get Season 2! Oh well, it was fun, I'm glad I watched it.

Beast Wars S1 has been in my BBOnline queue forever, with "Very Long Wait" on it. I'd pretty much lost interest and was intending to delete it, or at least delete the rest of the season and just try out disc one. But I never got around to it, and finally, BBOnline sent me the first disc. And then the second. And then the third, which I haven't had a chance to watch yet.

I'm glad I didn't delete it! I'm really enjoying this series. The stories are good, and the characters are fun. It's a bit weird, having only Optimus Primal and Megatron to connect it to the old series, but I'm enjoying the new characters. The CG animation is strange and off-putting, but not enough to spoil the show. I don't like the beast Transformers as well as vehicle Tranformers, but I don't mind them. Optimus as a gorilla, meh. I do like Megatron as a T Rex, especially the way he waves his tiny little arms around. His robot form is kind of ooky, though, with the T Rex head on his arm.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching Disc 3, and probably the rest of the series now that I've gotten started. Apparently, it was only Disc 1 that had the "Very Long Wait," because they've been sending me the rest of the season one after the other now.

I'd heard lots of good things about this movie, and it was lots of fun! The first part, about the superhero family trying to live as a "normal" family, was amusing, but the real fun started when Mr. Incredible went back to superhero work in secret. The action sequences were great, taking advantage of the animated format to do some really wild things. I do think the first part could have been trimmed a bit. But then, I'm all about the action!

Another excellent animal movie, this time about a grizzly bear and an orphan cub, and their fight for survival against a couple of hunters. The bears were great (and got top billing, heh), the mountain scenery was gorgeous, and the story was very moving. Thumbs up!

I really liked this movie, it was a lot more exciting than Ark of Truth. I'm not generally a big fan of time-travel stories, but their biggest advantage is that, if all goes well, you get a reset at the end of the story, so you can do lots of things you wouldn't otherwise do, killing people off and turning good guys into bad guys and destroying whole worlds and so on. But they also take a lot of care to get the timelines to line up properly. I can think of a couple of things that might be problematic in this one... but I'm too lazy to think it through and decide if it all works out properly or not. It was a good story, anyway.

I read the book when I was a kid and loved it, but it was so long ago, I barely remembered anything except that there was a stallion (black) and a boy. As I watched the movie, bits of the story came back to me, so I had a vague sense of what was going to happen, but nothing specific.

I remember when the movie came out (I didn't see it then) that the reviews were basically "beautiful to look at, not much story." And that's about right. But OMG the sheer gorgeousness of it more than makes up for the simplicity of the plot! The horse was so magnificent, and the scenes of the boy and the stallion playing on the beach were breathtaking.

I did think it was maybe a tad long. A full two hours for a plot that can be summed up in a sentence tends to lag a bit. But not much.

The last movie I got from BBOnline was The Devil's Rejects, but I didn't finish it. Meh. It stopped working about half-way through, and I wasn't really enjoying it, so, rather than try one of the other DVD players, I just gave up on it.

This week's movie was Serenity. I enjoyed it. I was never a big Firefly fan, although I watched it off and on while it was on. I felt the same way about the movie. It had an interesting plot, but I didn't really like any of the characters well enough to get invested in them.

I actually went to see a movie in the theater! I saw the previews for this at Fangoria this year, and it looked great, and I really liked the first Hellboy movie, so I was all excited to see this one, so I hied myself off to the local multiplex and watched it at the first showing. It was a lot of fun! Hellboy was his usually fun cigar-smoking, kitty-loving self, Abe was adorable, and there were Elves! I like Elves. Lots of good effects and battles and some funny stuff, too, like Abe and Hellboy ( tiny spoiler ). Two thumbs up!

When I was a kid, I adored Peter Pan. I remember watching the TV version of the play every year, and reading the book, and wishing so hard that I could go to Neverland. So I was really interested in seeing this movie about how the play came to be written. I wasn't expecting it to be so sad! But it was sad in a good way, very sweet and magical and uplifting. Johnny Depp gave his usual intent performance, Kate Winslet was luminous, and the boys—especially the one who played Peter—were fabulous. I have the book of Peter Pan around here somewhere, now I want to read it again.

Woo hoo! Excellent movie! I really enjoyed it, it had a great story and good characters and lots of zombies!

I think I had this one confused with Day of the Dead—I'd thought I'd seen bits of it before, but this one was all new to me. It reminded me a lot of Stephen King's Cell a bit, with the "walkers" taking over towns and developing the ability to work together and use tools. I liked the head zombie guy, he actually had a bit of personality. It was fun seeing Tom Savini's cameo as a zombie, too.

All in all, a very enjoyable hour and a half.

::deep breath::

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

Adorable movie. I wasn't too sure about it at first, but once it got going, I loved it. A coming-of-age story about a young girl, it wasn't terribly original—apart from the girl being a witch, complete with black cat and broomstick—but it was well done, with lots of charming little touches that made it very engaging. I enjoyed it a lot.

My BBOnline queue seems to consist of mostly of cute animal flix and horror movies. Heh. This week's DVD was one of the animal movies. The two brothers in the title are tiger cubs, separated at a young age and taken by different people. It's set in the early 20s, I think, in Viet Nam or Cambodia, there's some gorgeous scenery in the jungles with old abandoned temples full of stone statuary.

Despite its PG rating, the movie isn't a sanitized Disney-type flick. It might be distressing for younger kids; heck, it was distressing to me to see the tigers hunted and taken from their family and "tamed." One of the brothers in particular has an unhappy life as a circus performer until he's sold. Fortunately, it did have a happy ending, and I was quite satisfied with the way it all turned out.

This has always been my favorite Dario Argento film. I love the stylized dream sequences, the insects, the weird plot. Plus, any movie with Donald Pleasence in it has got to be good. This one has Donald Pleasence in a wheelchair! With a wacky Scottish accent! And a chimpanzee!

I also love Jennifer Connolly as the American schoolgirl with a strange affinity for insects, who has been sent to Switzerland to attend a private girls' school that just happens to have a grotesque serial killer on the loose nearby.

I bought a used copy of Phenomena on DVD a long time ago. The first DVD I bought didn't play right, but it didn't cost much, so I didn't bother to send it back, I just bought another copy. And kept them both. And, while I was going through my DVDs and tapes this past weekend, I found them and decided to scan through them to figure out which one was the bad one and toss it. But I put it in the player and started watching it and ended up just sitting through the whole movie.

The first DVD I watched played through without any problems. So I scanned the second disc, and it played okay, too. Hm. I guess I'm going to have to play the second disc all the way through. If there's nothing wrong with it, well, I guess I have a spare copy to give away. But I think I'll wait a bit before watching it again.

That rocked! If the whole series had been this good, I would have watched SG1 more often. Very satisfying conclusion to the whole Ori thing, with lots of good action and threats to everybody all at once. It was a bit strange to have Sam back with the SG1 team all of a sudden, with no explanation of why she'd been called back from Atlantis. Or does SG1 run on a different timeline? They did mention that Woolsey had gone to Atlantis. Hm. Anyway, I enjoyed the few Atlantis mentions.