So any of you who actually read my blog may be wondering where the heck I’ve been last week. There are no blog entries. What happened? Well, I’ll tell you what happened.
We live in such a wonderful world full of modern knowledge and science. We can send monkeys into space. We can send people to the moon. We can send cute little rovers to Mars … and most of them even survive their landing and go on to collect data far longer than their planned lifespan. (Yes Brits, that’s a cheap shot at you.) We can create artificial hearts. We can cure diseases that wiped out whole populations in our history.
But we can’t seem to teach people who work at fairly well todo restaurants how to freaking cook some gosh darn freaking food with proper freaking hygiene!
Yes, that’s right, I’ve been laid out by food poisoning.
I’m told there’s also a flu going around. So maybe the food poisoning wasn’t E. coli. Maybe it was influenza or freaking Godzilla shrunk down to nanite size by a raygun! I don’t know. I don’t care what it was. All I know is that I was exploding at both ends and probably should have gone to a hospital it was that bad. The only reason I didn’t is because I really don’t like hospitals and I knew if it got any worse my hun would find my rotting bloated carcass and call 911 so that the hospital would then save me. It was just a simple matter of needing rehydration and possibly antibiotics. But the human body, you see, is an incredibly resilient machine, so I wasn’t entirely worried. Plus I wasn’t exactly in my right mind. I was dehydrated and fevered after all.
So yes, last week I was mostly struggling to put fluids back into myself at a pace hopefully close at least to the rate at which they were leaving me. Thank Us for Gatorade!
And I was watching in despair as my hun came down with a milder version of the same bug.
And watching a lot of TV.
Including two movies.
All I have to say is, thank goodness for yet one more of man’s modern technological wonders: On Demand television. Can’t find anything on TV? Browse through a million lame and pathetic movies that no one in their right mind would pay for but will watch because they’re free. It makes both no sense and perfect sense at the same time. If the prices of the pay-for ones were more akin to that of normal movie rentals one might almost even consider the pay-for ones. But they’re not. So we don’t.
Now, I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret. One of my guilty pleasures is kid’s fantasy/sci-fi movies. I grew up in the age of movies like The Dark Crystal, The Neverending Story, Willow, et cetera. I mean you couldn’t throw a dead cat at the ’80s without hitting a good family-safe fantasy movie. Is it any wonder I played Dungeons and Dragons and to this day still want to become a fantasy/sci-fi author?
At this point you may be wondering if I still have that fever. No no. Bear with me. This private internationalized web confession has a point. While I was sick I watched yet another two out of date movies to further my collection of movie reviews that no one cares about. I watched Bridge to Terabithia and The Last Mimzy. And here are my thoughts on them:
What can I say about Bridge to Terabithia? I seem to recall thinking from the commercials that it was going to be about two kids making up their own strange world. I figured it’d be the perfect escape movie for folks who have done the Harry Potter thing enough by now to have paid enough for tuition to Hogwarts. And maybe it’d even bring an element of imagination back into children’s fantasy movies. (Since, you know, Harry and Co. seem to import their fantasy elements from the same old Tired Fantasies R Us company that Tolkien founded. He at least did a much better job of it.)
But alas, no. Bridge to Terabithia is not a movie about children creating a fantasy world. You might think it at first glance, but you’ll make a grave mistake when you take your kids to it. No. It’s a rather dull tale about a girl with a mental defect, making her seemingly unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. (Okay, so she’s “pretending”, but really it’s written so poorly that you do kind of wonder some times if she’s a bit touched in the head.) Reluctantly by her side is a boy who’s father brow-beats reality into him. I’m surprised there was no belting. Seriously. The fantasy world comprises about fifteen percent of the movie, at most. The rest are simple emotional turmoils of youth in this imperfect world especially with us career-driven money-obsessed adults that no longer have time for our kids. Culminated by even more trauma and drama. And topped off with a very bittersweet ending. I’m trying not to give away the whole plot for you on the off chance that you actually do see this movie. But if you take your kids to it, be prepared for traumatized kids and tough actual answers that exceed the usual parent answers of “babies come from storks”, “he’s in doggy heaven”, “I ran into a doorknob”, and the ever famous, “because I said so.” If you dare bring kids to this movie, you will need to be ready to give them real answers.
And in that, I almost feel like this movie should involve beating everyone who was involved in making and advertising it with a big foam cluebat. They tease you in with one candy-coated fantasy and then traumatize you with serious issues. I didn’t pay for that. Okay, so I didn’t pay at all, but still… Geeze!
Alright. Next movie. The Last Mimzy? Yeah. Thank goodness it’s the last one too. Another Mimzy might drive people to suicide.
So I don’t know what I was thinking. I was expecting some kind of kid’s adventure story. Lots of weird wild things that us stuffy old adults supposedly find nonsense. (Well, except for me because I watch kid’s fantasy movies.) So was it that? Umm … kind of. But not much. As an adventure movie goes, it was actually rather lacking in adventure. I’m hoping there’s a lot of this movie left on the cutting room floor, because otherwise the screenwriter(s) really suck at writing an adventure.
What I also wasn’t expecting was an extremely over-the-top preachy soapbox drama on how humanity is destroying ourselves. And I’m the kind of person who is standing in the choir! I mean heck, I’m not only a geeky science-loving technology maven, I’m also a wannabe-hippie tree-hugging Prius-driving recycle-box-filling home-gardening Wiccan. I mean geeze. I get it and I thought it was over the top. I can’t even imagine what John and Jane Doe off the street are going to think of how overdone that message was.
But so basically, The Last Mimzy is a boring lack-of-adventure story where two kids find artifacts sent back from the future necessary to save the future from the ravages our modern selves are doing to humanity and the world and stuff like that. And it adds in some Buddhism for wisdom. Or something. Blah.
Is that the whole story? Pretty much, yeah. I try not to ruin the endings of these things for you on the off chance you haven’t seen them and want to. But this movie is so lacking in every way that there’s really no way to tell you about it without giving most of it away. Sorry. There are some kind of neat special effects. Every once in a while.
If I didn’t know better I’d say a hippie wrote it to try and snap the message at parents more than to entertain kids.
Should you see The Last Mimzy? Will your kids be entertained? Let’s put it this way. Once upon a time I found The Smurfs and The Gummi Bears enthralling. To this day I can’t understand what I saw in those shows back then. If I had to watch hours of them today I’d probably hang myself. But back then they were exciting! A child in a similar age of innocence will probably be equally fascinated by The Last Mimzy. You? You will probably want to hang yourself. Don’t expect grown kids to sit still through this one.
So, thus ends my Sickie Vacation Movie Review. Sadly, I just can’t find a modern fantasy movie with the same awe and wonder of the 80s. I can’t help but feel sorry for our children. Thank Us for DVDs! Wouldn’t it be nice to see The Dark Crystal on Blu-Ray?
