Movie – Disney’s A Christmas Carol

by Carol8 Comments
Disney's A Christmas Carol I truly enjoyed this re-imagining of Dicken's classic story. We all know the basic plot. Scrooge is a bitter old man, with no joy or charity in his heart. He is visited by three "spirits," the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, who convince him that he needs to change his ways. I read the story a couple of years ago, but from what I remember, the script stayed very close to the original, with some added flying and chase scenes to make full use of the 3D. The 3-D, by the way, was very well done. Sometimes I get tired of all the 3-D movies that have been coming out lately, but I thought it worked nicely in this case. This was the creepiest version of the story I've seen, but I mean that in a good way. The ghosts could be downright scary at times. I was thankful that we were seeing it in the middle...
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Movie- Inkheart

by Carol8 Comments
I talked about the Where Wild Things Are movie yesterday and I guess I'm still stewing it over in my mind a little. Maybe part of the problem was that the book was fresh in my mind. I had just reread it a week or so beforehand and I could remember every little piece of it. It's a classic childrens story and the movie obviously had to add more, just to fill the time allotted. David, Amber (9) and I watched Inkheart (PG) on DVD last week and we all really enjoyed it. It had adventure and action, fantasy creatures and people with amazing gifts. It's all about the power of the written word. Mo and his daughter, Meggie, share a passion for books. What they also share is an extraordinary gift for bringing characters from books to life when they read aloud. But there is a danger: when a character is brought to life from a book, a real person disappears...
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Movie – Where the Wild Things Are

by Carol14 Comments
Amber (9), my mom and I went to see Where The Wild Things Are this weekend. I wanted to love this movie. I ended up with mixed feelings. I suppose that's not surprising, considering they took a story that was truly only nine or ten sentences long and transformed it into a whole movie. Amber enjoyed it a lot. She went home and told David all about Max standing on the counter shouting for his dinner and about the Wild Things. She even made a picture of her own Wild Thing, a wolf-dragon mixture. She noticed that some scenes were exactly like ones in the book, but her question was how did Max know which way to sail the boat. See, that's the problem. At heart, I don't know if this is a kids' movie. Max's relationship with his mom, who is single and dating someone, and sister, who of course has her own friends, is echoed in his friendships with the...
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Movie- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

by Carol7 Comments
So, we went to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs this past weekend. It was a cute movie and Amber,9, loved it. The gross-out factor was a little high for me, though, and I'm tired of 3-D. I mentioned a while ago that the book the movie is "based on" is a favorite at our house. The movie, though, had little to do with the story itself. I understand that they have to add a lot to make a short picture book into a full-length story, but changing it from a bed-time story to a sci-fi adventure takes away something. There were several scenes that were taken straight from the book, like the tomato tornado and the pancake falling on the school, but overall there was little similarity, aside form the falling food. Don't get me wrong, go see the movie, but realize that reading the book is an entirely different experience. By the way, if you're thinking ahead for Christmas...
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