Dan's Webpage: Because everyone loves a farce: Movies

I made decent progress on my reading list over the past few months, so lately I've been trying to make progress on my movies list instead.

Last weekend I watched Ratatouille and The Darjeeling Limited. The former movie was very good, so much so that I'm contemplating making another attempt to watch Cars, but I'm not sure where it fits in my personal Pixar rankings. Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are still my favorites, but was it better than Wall-E?

The Darjeeling Limited was well-shot (except for one unfortunate CGI animal), but I didn't care about the characters at all, so the artificial dialogue really got on my nerves and a lot of the deep moments seemed forced. Meh.

(It should come as no surprise that ultimately, the only Wes Anderson movie I really like is the wonderfully modernist The Royal Tenenbaums.)

Then on Thursday my brother Matt and I watched Be Kind Rewind, which started strong but essentially wasted a good premise. There were some laughs, but it wasn't at all what we were expecting.

Finally, I've still got Planet Terror, which I should have watched last night. Zombies!

Cars is really good, you just have to get past the first 10 or 15 minutes where you think you've entered animated Nascar hell.

The thing about Cars is you've heard the story before in some form or another. You could probably say that for any entertainment, but its Pixar's biggest sin: keeping this a by the numbers -anthropomorphic item- learns the value of -moral lesson- animated tale. And its really good at that, all things considered.

I remembered reading this review (http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2006/06/cars_review.html), which hits pretty much everything I disliked about Cars.