Change Your Image
daha
Reviews
Stuart Little (1999)
for undiscriminating toddlers
My almost-three year old loves this movie and watches it repeatedly. After all, there's a cuddly mouse doing people things, there's cats, and about half the movie consists of chases of one sort or another.
There's also a lot of seamless and convincing animation (except for the "talking" mouths on the cats, which looks goofy).
Any fans of E.B. White's book Stuart Little will be wise to avoid the movie, as they have nothing in common except the existence of a mouse-sized boy. It's as if the Hollywood folks made the movie first, and then decided to put a famous name on it, without any care as to the actual words in the book. It's too bad.
The movie's plot is mostly fine for kids, who haven't learned to watch critically yet or expect self-consistency, coherence, or variation from standard hackneyed scenes and themes. Adults will find fuzzy wuzzy cuteness, mainly, and be massively unsurprised by any of the plot "twists".
If you must view it, Rent - don't buy it. If you have an almost-three year old, be especially careful not to buy it, or you will be forcibly exposed to it time and again. At least rentals have a due date and an excuse to return the tape to the store.
Dick (1999)
The more you remember from the time, the better you'll like it.
This is a mighty funny comedy about Watergate. The more you know about Watergate, and the more you remember from the early 70's, the better you'll like it. Definitely one for the Baby Boomer generation.
Younger folks should have fun too, even if they don't recognize the characters, the references, the music, the clothes, or the drugs.
The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland: Sing and Play Video (1999)
Not the Grouchland movie, but an OK recycled song collection
This is not the Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland movie - it's a piece of side merchandising. Elmo is in Grouchland again, chatting with his grouch friend Grizzie, and trying to get her to sing along. "Remember this?" he asks, and they cut to a song from the Grouchland movie. "Listen to this," he says, and they cut to a musical number from a Sesame Street episode. And so it goes.
After half an hour of this, they wrap it up and roll an episode of Elmo's World from Sesame Street.
Very little original material on this videotape. But my 28 month doesn't care. He makes me play it again and again and again. At least it's not Barney.