Movies I Watched This Weekend

In a very strange turn of events, I actually saw 3 movies on DVD this weekend that I had never seen before. And one of them was rated R, which, believe me, NEVER happens, because by the time the children are in bed we're usually too tired to watch a whole movie. But this time, we watched it on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, when the kids were OUTSIDE playing. We even gave them a couple of bucks and sent them down to the dime store to get them out of the way for a while. We only had to stop the movie 8 or 9 times--it was great!

Okay, so in order of rating, here are the new movies I saw (for obvious reasons, I am not even going to bother to comment on The Fox and the Hound 2):

Meet the Robinsons. Rated G. I admit that I wanted to see this because I am in love with Rob Thomas, and he wrote one of the songs for this movie (Little Wonders, which you can find here. I found though, that the themes of choice (are you responsible for your life or is someone else to blame?) and family resonated with me deeply. The main character is an orphan, and gets adopted by the Robinson family (it's a bit more complicated than that, though), but his most desperate wish is to go back in time to meet his birth mother. The director said that the young hero's family-identity journey mirrored his own, as he was also adopted. I am the mother of an adopted son, and I think about these things a lot, so I found the theme very moving.

Dan In Real Life. Rated PG-13. As big of a fan as I am of The Office, this is the kind of thing I like to see Steve Carrell in the most. He just plays it straight and real, no pratfalls or funny voices (well, a few...), and his pain, confusion, fear, and finally, hope and love, are so understated that they are utterly believable. He's a widower with 3 daughters, and the oldest child in a huge family--I couldn't always count, but I think it was 3 brothers and 2 sisters, maybe, at a family vacation with all of them, including their parents, their spouses, and all their children. He meets a woman at a bookstore and falls in love with her pretty quickly, but then discovers that she is his brother's girlfriend. Obviously, he has some things to work out there...the resolution is hard-won and very satisfying.

Sweeney Todd. Rated R. Johnny Depp can totally sing. He's so tortured, so obsessed, so cruel in this that he ruins everything he touches, including the things he came to redeem. I have never been quite sure what I think of this musical, but this cast-crew combo got everything out of it possible. Tim Burton uses his characteristic eye for color to highlight the blood, which is the most ghastly bright red--almost always the only color in a grey world. Alan Rickman is obscene in his role as Judge Turpin; the way he looked at Joanna, his ward, made my skin crawl. And Burton uses few close-ups or long shots, but everything is done in a series of mid-range shots that give it a terrifying matter-of-factness, very effectively drawing out the mundanity of evil. FYI, you want to have a strong stomach for this one.

Kathy