I gave myself a blast from the past yesterday when I managed to find “Puff the Magic Dragon” on the internet.  Not the song, but the movie based on the song.  I remember it being really sad and that I cried every time I saw it way back when they were showing it on TV.  When I watched it this time, I found the colors to be dull and I wanted to skip parts becasue I was bored, but  I can see how my mind was caught up in it as a child since it’s scary to think the boy’s parents could be so worried.   I remember thinking he was dying.

Have a look and see what you think of it.

What fun – I just went and saw Astro Boy in one of those cheap for kids summer specials and was pretty surprised by how good it was.  I skipped it because it looked silly when it was first run – the hero is way more cartoonish looking than the other characters – and it still had some really ridiculous flaws in the story line (Why does a half decent dad just go along with starting a war?  Why would a smart kid go along with a dad who goes along with starting a war?).

My kids were totally sucked into it though and I enjoyed the long list of voices that I could recognize (I usually prefer unknowns for voice roles).

But by far the best part of the whole thing were the 3 free tickets a total stranger gave us at the door.  WOO HOO and THANK YOU total stranger!  I’ll get the popcorn.

I’m waiting with baited breath for the summer movie season to start. I saw Iron Man and was adequately satisfied but now have to wait a couple weeks before the next movie I want to see comes out. I can remember years ago (in the year of Die Hard 3 and ID4) that EVERY week there was at least one movie I wanted to see and at least one more that I was willing to give a try. Now I don’t get that. And believe me I haven’t gotten more choosy – I’ve gotten considerable less so. It is getting to be that I think I might branch out into Bollywood.

There’s a new movie coming out – a documentary – called Babies. Someone gave it a tagline of “If you liked March of the Penguins, get ready to fall in love with Babies.” Now as a parent I know that the perfect audience for ANY movie about babies is babies themselves. For some strange reason, that’s not the target audience and this thing is rated PG! I’m shocked at them and their lack of what must be my money making foresight.

Or I was until I read that the babies crawl unsupervised through herds of cow. Then I understood it a little better – this is a horror flick.

I recently introduced my kids to the joys of ‘Annie’. I tried to explain ‘orphan’ to one of them and that led to me thinking of the most famous orphan of all and since I’ve got Netflix (this is not a paid endorsement unless you count the fact that I pay them) and it’s currently a ‘play instantly’ movie, I just pulled it up on the old blue screen (my nickname for my computer) and let them immerse themselves in an American classic.

Did I mention that they lvoed it?

My wife insists that I’m just getting older and grouchier in my opinions of movies nowadays. I think that it’s fairly sad that I can’t think of a movie in the past few years that I have liked unconditionally. There have been many that could have been better (Star Wars), a few that have been very good with minor problems (Dark Knight), and some that should have been awesome but ended up being stupid (Avatar; Indiana Jones).

With the technology to make movies into anything that the mind can imagine, and prices shooting past ten bucks to go watch a flick, why can’t more of these movies be awesome? Am I being too picky? Is it wrong to expect better from movies? I know that in Hollywood they make dozens of crappy flicks, and scores of remakes just because they’re guaranteed to make some cash. I’m just hoping for a couple of movies a year that are genuinely awesome.

I’ve just started watching ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’ and with the blue faces and the yelling, it kinda reminds me of ‘Braveheart’. It is still very early in the movie and I expect the two to diverge pretty quickly but it’s kinda fun to see that kind of similarity.