Friday, December 31, 2004

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

We took an afternoon last week to go see Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events at the local theater with my older two daughters. We all thought that it was a very good film, well constructed with excellent performances. The children playing Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire were very well cast and equalled that other group of kids at Hogwarts in portraying their characters.

We gave it our highest 4+ stars rating and discuss the film vs. the series of books in our podcast.

Get the direct MP3 download here or subscribe to the podcast.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Welcome

For those of you discovering this podcast as a result of its mention on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, welcome aboard. Of course Adam picked the one review to excerpt that contained only my voice. Rest assured that most of the reviews will be done by a majority of the family.

I did want to clarify that the intent of our reviewers is not to push any religious or moral agenda on our listeners. We do not review films through any hidden filters. We're just trying to give honest opinions on the quality and age appropriateness of the films we review. Everything we review will be rated PG-13 and under. Since the family consists of 4 daughters we may tend to skew toward comedy and drama instead of action films but all genders can appreciate a good animated feature like The Incredibles.

If you're interested in contributing content to the site send email to familyreviews@comcast.net

Monday, December 20, 2004

Ocean's Twelve

My wife and I went to the movies this weekend and decided to see Ocean's Twelve. Bad decision. Normally I read some critical reviews before heading to the theater. I didn't do so in this case and it resulted in a bad movie situation. After the movie finished my wife turned to me and said "I think I missed something". She didn't, this film just didn't hang together. It was extremely disappointing because we were both such big fans 0f the first movie, Ocean's Eleven.

General consensus was 1 star and Steven Soderbergh should thank Matt Damon for that lone star.

Get the direct MP3 download here or subscribe to the podcast.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

The Incredibles

Our 4th review is now available. We went to see The Incredibles a few weeks ago and we've finally gotten around to recording the review. We do things a little different this time. Brian Alkerton submitted a review to Reel Reviews and he's agreed to let us use his review as a basis for ours. We listened to his review and then recorded our feelings on the movie. We even got a few guests involved.

General consensus was 4 to 5 stars.

Get the direct MP3 download here or subscribe to the podcast.

Provide comments if you dare...

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Sponge Bob

Our third review is ready. The kids went to the movies last weekend to see Sponge Bob, The Movie.

We get comments from all of the the kids, Kelly (3), Heidi (age 6), Holly (age 10) and Katie (age 12). Since I didn't go see the movie, I just moderate the conversation for this one. We also switched to a round table format. Overall kids review was 4 stars and adult rating was 1 star.

Get the direct MP3 download here or subscribe to the podcast.

Please send feedback if you like what we're doing.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Elf

Our second review is now in the can. We sat down last weekend and watched Elf, starring Will Ferrell, James Caan, Bob Newhart, Zooey Deschanel (who I always want to call Chloƫ Sevigny, dont ask me why) and Ed Asner as Santa.

We get comments from most of the the kids, Heidi (age 6), Holly (age 10) and Katie (age 12), my wife and myself. There was a definate split between adults and children on the merits of seeing Elf. Overall kids review was 4 stars and adult rating was 2 stars out of 5.

Get the direct MP3 download here or subscribe to the podcast.

Apologies for the lousy quality of the audio for this podcast. I tried recording on my PocketPC device instead of my laptop. After listening to the audio quality I won't make that mistake again.