Reviews and More

Now that my son is old enough to follow the basic plots of children’s movies, I find myself watching these things with him more and more. Before, he was content just to have Finding Nemo or whatever on as background noise while he played with his toys in the living room. But now he actually has questions about why the characters do things and what’s going on, so I have to pay attention in order to answer those questions.

Anyway, we just got done watching Stuart Little 2 (he didn’t see the first one, but I did). In this movie, Stuart the talking, driving, clothes-wearing mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox is now a full-blown member of the Little family. He’s referred to as a “son” and a “brother,” which is weird for adults, but my child didn’t even notice.

Stuart is feeling left out because his mom (Geena Davis) is too overprotective and his brother (Jonathan Lipnicki) doesn’t hang out with him as much anymore. But then Stuart finds a new friend, a little bird named Margalo (voiced by Melanie Griffith). It turns out that Margalo isn’t all she’s cracked up to be, and Stuart finds himself in a couple of dangerous situations before the movie ends.

Overall, I thought this was just an ok movie. It’s not something I would ever have sat through on my own, but it seemed to hold my son’s attention just fine. It’s only an hour and 10 minutes long, so he didn’t have much of a chance to get bored by it. I think it would be good choice as a rental, but there’s no need to add Stuart Little 2 to your DVD collection.

Read Roger Ebert’s review of Stuart Little 2.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for awhile knows that I don’t often sing the praises of specific companies. So when I do, you can be sure that there’s a good reason for it! I’ve got some friends who have been looking for a new place in Raleigh for quite some time, but haven’t had any luck finding the right house at the right price. It was getting to be a very frustrating situation for them, so they decided to switch realty firms to see if that would change anything.

They went to a company called ListWise Realty Services and soon were paired up with a fantastic Raleigh real estate agent who really took the time to listen to their wants and needs. In a little over a week, he was able to locate several properties that would suit my friends perfectly. So now the biggest problem they’re facing is trying to decide which of those great new houses to make their next home!

The bottom line here is if you want results, you need the right agents. Check out ListWise Realty Services today!

On the Road by Jack Kerouac largely based on the fact that most people absolutely rave about it. It’s also on this list of the “100 Greatest Novels of All Time” which is certainly high praise.

But for some reason, I think it’s one of the most boring, pointless books I’ve ever read! I always feel a little apprehensive going against the grain because it makes me feel like I maybe just didn’t “get it” or understand the bigger picture. But I can’t even pretend that I liked On the Road. It’s very long, poorly written, and nothing even happens in it.

The narrator, Sal Paradise, takes four cross-country road trips with his drunken drunken friends in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. They don’t do anything except drink, smoke pot, and drive seventy miles per hour. Big deal. This was supposed to be groundbreaking stuff? I don’t think so!

Skip it!!!

I think I’m beginning to get too disillusioned with Prison Break as a whole to view each episode objectively. They all just seem so contrived now.

Anyway, this week’s offering deals mostly with Michael and Linc’s impending transfer back to the Joliet pen in Illinois. Of course, Mahone and Kellerman have a plan in mind and allow the two brothers to escape from the Border Patrol so the feds would have an excuse to kill them. Turns out that one of the two agents is ready to start playing for the other side, though, so the brothers are once again on the run.

In other happenings:

• Bellick is now in Joliet as a prisoner. I wasn’t paying attention, so I didn’t hear if he pled guilty for a lesser sentence or if he’s just there for holding while awaiting trial. Either way, that stuff happened F.A.S.T. I mean, according to the show’s timeline, the prisoners escaped just 10 days ago, and here Bellick’s already in jail with the other inmates?
• Sara heard that Michael and Linc got picked up, so she’s ready to do some things on her own. She basically said goodbye to her old identity by cutting her hair and dumping her IDs.
• T-Bag is really getting on my nerves now. I can’t stand the way the actor, Robert Knepper, flicks his tongue around all the damn time. It doesn’t add to his character; it’s just annoying. Oh, yeah — he added to his kill total tonight.
• Sucre was in like two scenes. He parachuted to safety somewhere in the Mexican desert.

The show will be on hiatus until 2007, so we won’t see the resolution of the cliffhanger ending until then.

I subscribed to ESPN GamePlan for the first time this year. This is a package which allows members to view select college football games online, either live or archived. The first week I tuned in (back in September) everything went smoothly and I raved about what a brilliant idea GamePlan was.

But since then, I’ve had nothing but problems. For example, whenever I try to tune into a game, I get an error saying I can’t connect or that the game is not available yet — even though I know it is. This happened to me for the Ohio St. – Michigan game and again for the USC-Notre Dame game. It really sucks to get myself psyched up to watch a game and then not even be able to access it.

I’m not even going to bother complaining to ESPN because it won’t do any good. But I definitely won’t be subscribing again until I hear that they’ve worked out all these issues. From what I understand, this was their first year offering the package online, so some problems were inevitable. Not excusable, but inevitable.

I don’t know why, but I sometimes deliberately watch movies even though they’ve received pretty much nothing but horrendous reviews. Sweet November, the 2001 production starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, is one such movie.

This is a film that deserves all the bad press it has gotten. Keanu Reeves has to be one of the worst actors working in Hollywood today and I simply cannot understand how he continues to get leading roles when there are so many more deserving people out there. Yikes.

The basic story here is that Reeves is a powerful, successful ad exec that doesn’t have time to enjoy life. Theron is a wild, carefree woman who spends her days doing things like running on the beach with dogs. Of course they meet and of course she tries to save him. And of course there’s something wrong with her. Like a terminal illness. Oh, come on! That’s not a spoiler… don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming right from the start.

The acting was awful, the plot was dumb, the characters were unsympathetic. Do yourself a favor and pass this one up.

Check out Roger Ebert’s review of Sweet November right here.

I’m on a quest to view all the Best Picture Oscar winners dating all the way back to when the award was first presented in 1928. Towards that end, I recently watched Rebecca, the 1940 Best Picture winner that was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Rebecca, of course, is based on the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. The story is about a woman named Mrs. de Winter, the second wife of Maxim de Winter, who must constantly fight against the memory of Maxim’s first wife. That first wife was the lovely Rebecca, whom everyone loved (especially the servant Mrs. Danvers) and whose personal effects still clutter up the sprawling family home known as Manderley.

Not much happens in the film at all. Obviously people will call it a “psychological” thriller or whatever, but it didn’t work for me as a movie. I thought the novel was fantastic, but that’s because I don’t mind a slow, leisurely pace in books.

So despite all the big names attached to this movie (Selznick, Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson) and the awards, I wouldn’t recommend Rebecca for today’s audiences. Again, nothing happens!!

There used to be a time when the only shows on TV on Thanksgiving night (after football) were reruns or cheesy specials. Not anymore, though. Most networks now continue showing new episodes of their regular Thursday night lineup, which meant that viewers were treated to the ninth installment of Grey’s Anatomy this season.

It was a very tense and intense episode that I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I’m glad the whole tremoring hand thing is out in the open now. That plotline was starting to wear thin as a secret, so now let’s deal with the fallout and move on.

On the other hand, I’m not quite sure that I liked the way Burke and Cristina were “outed”. George was being such a whiney ass about the whole thing that I just wanted to smack him. Sure, he’s under stress because of his father’s impending surgery, but he could have been much more professional about the whole thing. Then again, I guess the way he “handled” it was pretty much par for the course for such a passive-aggressive person.

Edited to add: get the TWOP recaplet right here.

Since I have close ties to Japan, I’ve wanted to read the novel Shogun by James Clavell for a long time now. I tried a couple of times, but always put the book aside because it was so boring and because the length just made it seem like an impossible obstacle to overcome.

Then I got the bright idea of trying the audiobook version. That way, “reading” the book would require much less effort and I could soak up the story while driving, cooking, cleaning, etc. Unfortunately, listening to the story doesn’t make it any more interesting. Frankly, I really don’t understand why this book has attracted so much attention and has managed to gain legions of fans from around the world. Obviously there must be some merit to it, but it’s beyond me.

Plus, I just have to say that the reader for this version absolutely sucks! I mean, I don’t want to bag on the guy too much, but that was the most god-awful rendering of the Japanese language that I have ever heard — and I’ve heard plenty of people butcher the language in various ways. I’m not saying that a Japanese expert should have read the book, but geez, you’d think the guy (who is a professional reader, by the way) would have done at least a bit of research into how to pronounce the language since there was so much of it sprinkled throughout the text.

Not only that, but the reader didn’t have a very wide range of voices for the different characters. He used the same voice for severl recurring characters, which made it hard to distinguish who was talking to whom (especially for the women). Again, this guy is supposed to be a professional book reader/performer. He should be able to do consistent voices, right?

All in all, the whole thing was crap. From the story to the reading to the god-forsaken length… Sorry Shogun fans, I recommend staying as far away from this book as possible!

I just saw a report that famed director Robert Altman has died from cancer at the age of 81. I’ve seen a lot of his movies, including MASH, Popeye, The Player, and Gosford Park, so I am a bit saddened at his passing. At least he lived a long and full life and was with his family at the end.

Here’s the full AP article and the link to his IMDB.com page