Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Racing Stripes

Heidi, age 6, went to the movies last week with some friends and saw Racing Stripes. She eagerly spent a few minutes discussing it with me tonight. Those of you that have been listening to the other podcasts with Heidi as a contributor will be amazed that she didn't call this the "best movie ever."

Racing stripes stars the voice talents of Frankie Muniz, Mandy Moore, David Spade, Steve Harvey, Dustin Hoffman and a bunch of other big names. Hayden Panettiere is the live actress who rides Stripes.

Heidi gave Racing Stripes a 3 star rating. There just wasn't enough action in it for her but she did think there were a lot of funny parts. Judging from her reaction it's targeted at the 6-11 year old crowd.

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Monday, January 24, 2005

Napoleon Dynamite

We watched Napoleon Dynamite as our latest family movie. As mentioned in the podcast, my oldest daughter really wanted to see it in the theaters but we never got around to it. It's available on DVD now. The cast isn't well known, the biggest "names" are probably Diedrich Bader and Tina Majorino but they do a credible job for a lower budget film that managed to generate $44 million in domestic box office gross revenues.

Looking at other reviews this film generates polar response in most viewers. They either love it or hate it. Our reaction was less drastic with a 2.5 star consensus rating.

This film is rated appropriately at PG. Most children under 10 won't get any parts of the movie. The humor and plot are definitely for older kids. Then again apparently most viewers over 30 don't get "it" either.

Apologies for the audio quality. We had a microphone malfunction and had to record using the internal PC microphone with the expected poor results.

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

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

I, Robot

I watched I, Robot on a flight yesterday. Guest reviewer Mike Houser and I spent some time discussing the film, the Azimov robot series of books, and science fiction as a film genre in general. We're both avid readers and moan about the lack a quality adaptations of new science fiction stories to the big screen.

We gave it a solid 3.5 star rating and were both rather suprised with the quality of the film given its origination (it wasn't written as a screen play from the book) and the big name star (Will Smith).

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Thursday, January 13, 2005

Samantha - An American Girl Movie

My wife, Katie (12) and Heidi (6) watched Samantha - An American Girl. The kids thought that it was good and gave it 4 stars. Betsy rated it pretty low, mostly due to poor casting decisions where the movie actors didn't reflect the characters as they are written in the books.

We all agreed that we really love the concept of the dolls and their backstories. Hopefully they can crank up the production values a little more for the next film and hit a home run.

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